[cmrdporcupine]

I think the answer is that there needs to be, like gas stations, substantial retail/dining side-quest stuff set up to get revenue. If you don't have working chargers, people won't buy your hamburgers and pop. Or whatever.

Likely though this market is going to need some regulation/standardization.

In the end though, the demand is sporadic. Supercharger use is only for a minority of use cases (road trips) for a small segment of EV users. I've had my Polestar2 for 3 months and have yet to use one. It will never carry the same revenue possibilities as gas stations, esp as battery sizes go up.

[nkrebs13]

Agree with your thoughts. To add - I've taken my Model Y on many roadtrips and have been to many superchargers. A solid number _are_ at restaurants/shops/etc. Some aren't -- but there are so many chargers that usually you can alter the planned route to include a longer charge wherever you want.

Not only will batteries get bigger, but chargers will get faster. Most of my stops now are 10-15min so often there's not really a need for any side-questing. Tesla recently added a supercharger-specific leaderboard for their in-car Mario Kart clone, which is super cool. I think we'll see some growth there for that kind of thing, but the market is obviously much lower than gas stations/etc

[vel0city]

I've liked that 7-Eleven started putting DCFC's at some of their nicer locations in the US. The last time I did a fast-charging session was for a few-minute stop after a weekend spent away from home. The 7-Eleven was a pretty new location, easily right off the highway, and had a decent taco restaurant along with the usual snacks and pizza and roller grill items. Having a quick taco, grab some drinks, and a quick pee break for the kids gave us more than enough charge to get back home.

And the charger had a traditional credit card terminal on it. I didn't need any special app. Plug in, tap my payment, and it was charging.

I was doing a road trip through Ontario and stumbled upon a set of rest stops called onRoutes. These were pretty neat. A food court with a quick convenience store with a gas station and nice restrooms, right off the highway. They had a number of DCFC's which usually seemed in good working order, but this road trip was with an ICE so I can't speak to actual uptime. I did see a lot of cars charging, on my trip, so they seemed good.

https://www.onroute.ca/

More stops need to be like that for the 250kW+ stops on major highways. They were so easy and nice to go though.

For more highway-adjacent sit-down restaurants and areas (think Cracker Barrel kind of stops and those highway exits with lots of sit-down restaurants) I think it makes more sense to have those ~50kW chargers be the norm, maybe a few higher power ones. Have a dozen or so ~50kW chargers that'll have your car to 80-90% in an hour or so, four+ 250kW+ chargers for those quickly getting through, and a bunch of 9.6kW AC chargers for those stopping for a few hours.

[cmrdporcupine]

I live in Ontario and haven't had a chance to use the ONroute chargers yet but I haven't heard good things. They're run by Ivy who has a bad reputation for reliability and rates.

As much as I dislike Musk personally, I will probably buy the NACS adapter and just use Tesla stations.