Walmart's Plan To Blanket The US With The Walmart EV Charging Network

 

We are so screwed on our energy grid. We are often bumping up against maximum electricity supply. AI data centers are slated to double the demand in a couple of years. California has bordered on brownouts already, forcing Gavin N. to issue no charge alerts for any electric vehicles. Yet by 2035, he wants all vehicles to be EV.
Unless there is a rabbit that can be pulled out of a magician’s hat, A charging infrastructure is a pipe dream.

 

Gavin plans to pick the Energizer Bunny as his running mate.

 

Call me an eternal optimist but somehow, someway the electric grid problem will be solved in the next few years.

I love this video.

 

Good for walmart.
Gotta kill time while it charges so come on in WALLy WORLD and buy stuff

 

While I have not understood the hand wringing about ev charging for years as charging problems have been a non issue for me, this is a game changer for access and public confidence. Assuming they follow through, which I actually think they will, charging anxiety would evaporate. And for all the people who don't want an ev because charging takes forever....my wife made a trip from Des Moines to the Chicago suburbs yesterday. She charged for eight minutes on her entire trip.

 

That sounds convenient. Where did she stop to charge? We make the trip from the Chicago suburbs to Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

 

She stopped in Williamsburg on the outbound trip. On the way home, she drove straight through with no stop...arrived home w/ 11% power.

 

We make a round trip from Des Moines to Akron, OH once or twice a year. In late December, we charge at Geneseo, IL, Joliet, and once on I-80 in OH. On the way back we make the same stops in reverse order. If we make the trip in the summer we only need to make one stop or two at the most.

I get over 400 miles of range in the summer and depending on how cold it is, 280-325 miles in the winter. This is on an 2022 EQS 580. It will be interesting to see how much range improvement I will get on a brand new 2025 EQS 580 starting around May 13.

 

nath_h, your view on EV charging is always welcome, especially your own reports that it's been a "non-issue" for you. An eight-minute charge on a Des Moines to Chicago trip? That’s impressive and truly shows what’s possible when the car, route, and charger all line up perfectly.

And I get your current ease with it, probably more than most realize. Before I fully jumped into EV ownership and became an advocate, I admit I had many of the usual worries – common range anxiety, the "what ifs" about finding working chargers, all those narratives that can cloud your thinking, often fueled by hyped-up public opinions. It wasn't until I stepped back from all that noise and took a hard, honest look at my actual daily driving and real-world needs, compared to those often-exaggerated public narratives, that things became much clearer.

For me, two main things became obvious: first, most of my charging would easily happen at home, overnight. Second, public chargers would really only be for those less frequent long-distance road trips. My first major trip in the EQS, I'll grant you, began with some nervousness. But that experience quickly got rid of most of those fears, showing them to be largely baseless worries I’d built up in my own head, amplified by all the public chatter.

However, this is where personal success stories, like yours and mine, can differ from the bigger, system-wide problems that still cause much of the "hand wringing" for other people. While your wife's quick charge is great news, and big charger rollouts are positive steps, getting rid of charging anxiety for everyone, in every situation, still faces some big challenges. These concerns aren't just about a shortage of chargers, but often about issues like:

1. Reliability and Actual Delivered Power: It's a common frustration to arrive at a public charger only to find it out of order, occupied, or, quite frequently, delivering power at a rate significantly below its advertised maximum. I've experienced this myself consistently; even at some dedicated fast-charging stations, including Mercedes-Benz chargers that might proclaim a potential of, say, 400kW, the actual speeds achieved often fall well short of that peak. While the charging speeds I do get are generally quite good and perfectly usable for my needs, this persistent gap between the claimed capability and the on-the-ground reality is a valid concern for many EV drivers and certainly contributes to the "hand wringing."
2. Geographic Disparity: Sure, some routes and city areas are getting better service, but vast parts of the country, especially rural ones, are still significant charging deserts. For charging anxiety to truly disappear, access needs to be fairer and more widespread.
3. Peak Demand and Queuing: As more EVs hit the road, that quick eight-minute charge becomes a very different experience if you’re fourth in line waiting for a charger during a busy holiday weekend.
4. The Grid Itself: As MB2timer correctly pointed out earlier, we can't ignore serious concerns about the overall grid's capacity. With growing demands from things like AI data centers, on top of ambitious goals for EV adoption, our grid needs to be able to supply all that extra power reliably.

So, while your personal success stories and new infrastructure projects are definitely good signs of progress, the larger task of making EV charging universally easy, dependable, and worry-free for everyone, everywhere, is a complex undertaking. Your experience shows what the ideal can look like. The broader challenge is making that ideal the consistent, everyday reality for all. Until that happens, some of that "hand wringing," unfortunately, is likely still justified.

 

My wife and I had a 30-month run where we averaged 2,000 miles per month. During that period we made three cross-country trips from Philadelphia to LA and back. Two trips were in an EQS SUV and a third in an E53 Hybrid. We charged at DC chargers hundreds of times and EA stations at Walmart were our least favorite stops, especially late at night. While we were never completely stranded in the EQS we came close and had plenty of stressful charging stops. It seems that Walmart will be taking steps to address many of the issues that we encountered.

The cross country trip in the E53 Hybrid was much less stressful from a charging perspective since broken chargers and long queues did not slow down our travel pace. The E53 also allowed us to take shorter routes which frequently had fewer or no charging stations. More recently our monthly mileage has been around 500 and 100% of the charging occurs at home. I can see how EV owners who drive less than 1000 miles per month can't understand why so many high mileage EV owners complain about the charging infrastructure in the USA.

 

Teething problems. Gas and ICE engines deveoped at the same time yet it took 50 years, till the construction of the interstate system, till you could basically drive and gas up anywhere. As of tiday I can basically drive my 580 anywhere in the country with minimal to planning (thanks Tesla! though you were forced!)