Electric Car Charge Stations: The Next Third Space?

Nissan is going to start selling its Leaf electric car in the United States next year. As part of that plan, the cities where the Leaf will be available are getting some government funding to establish the infrastructure needed to power up the cars. Details are slim on the technology, but it’s probably safe to assume that this infrastructure will mean fast-charging stations, which will be able to recharge a Leaf battery much more quickly than by plugging it into a household socket, which can take hours. Fast-charge times could be as swift as 15 minutes.

But still, 15 minutes is a while to wait if you’re used to filling up at a gas station in less than five. My colleague and occasional debate partner, Jim Motavalli, along with some other mobility pundits, has suggested that companies like Starbucks and Wal-Mart should get into the fast-charging game, creating charge stations in their parking lots so that people can charge up and buy … 40 pounds of frozen chicken, or settle in with a nonfat vanilla latte while electrons are transferred at high speed from the grid to their Leaf.

There are some obvious complications. Most gas stations have anywhere from four to eight pumps, so there’s usually little or no waiting. The speed with which gas can be pumped into a car also means that vehicles don’t linger at the pumps. Gas stations also have enough lot space to accommodate a lot of cars. Most Starbucks, on the other hand, are situated in strip malls, shopping mall parking lots, urban environments, and so on—their locations aren’t optimized for getting people on and off a charge station as quickly as possible.

Wal-Mart and other “big box” retailers have the lot space, but it isn’t hard to imagine “charge lines” forming, or the need to employ service personal to act almost as valets, if people are going to try to shop while charging. It’s also unclear whether fast-charge stations would need to be carefully attended during the charging process, to prevent vehicles from staying hooked up to the chargers once they’re fully re-juiced.

Obviously, the opportunity exists for somebody to enter the fast-charging business, or partner with a fast-charging provider. But what kind of important service would you offer that could take anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour or more, depending on demand? This would be a new “third space”—not home and not work—that would be weirdly time-constrained: keeping you around a bit longer than ducking into Starbucks, but not as long as you might spend shopping at Wal-Mart, Target, Costco etc. It’s important to remember that people don’t actually have to go to that many places anymore, since Internet has eliminated visits to the bank, the library, government offices, and in many cases retail establishments.

What about fast-charging at gas stations? The infrastructure is there. However, highly combustible fuel and high-voltage in close proximity isn’t typically regarded as a good idea. And if EVs make up only 10 percent of the market by 2020, as Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn suggests, most gas stations that can evade the threat of explosion might put in only one or two charge stations—meaning longer waits to charge up. This is a tricky problem, not insurmountable, and one that needs to be considered, if we want EVs to at some point achieve enough scale in the marketplace to begin solving some of our oil and climate problems.