OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill. -- If I win the lottery, one of the first things I would do is buy a Tesla Model S.
As a writer covering fuels for CSP magazine for the past 12 years, I appreciate the business case for gasoline. But as a consumer fascinated by Tesla, its visionary co-founder Elon Musk and the potential of electric vehicles (EV), I just really want a Model S.
But before I bought a Tesla, I’d have to buy a new house, one with a garage I can actually charge an electric vehicle in. That’s because while there are a lot of gas stations around my house, none of them have an EV charging station. And for many c-store retailers, the idea of installing one is dead on arrival.
Lost in Space
There are a few issues to work through:
- For one, EV charging station providers sometimes want a dedicated parking space for the charger—that’s a big ask for a space-constrained retailer.
- Also, low gas prices have created headwinds for EV sales, so demand is not exactly gangbusters (at least until I buy my Tesla). And most EV owners like to charge up overnight at home anyway.
But say demand was there and the EV charger earned its space at the local c-store. There remains a bigger, more complicated problem: Most convenience-store retailers simply can’t keep a customer occupied for 30 minutes, which is about the time required to get a battery close to a full charge with the fastest system out there—the DC fast charger.
The c-store model is built on a quick in-and-out visit. According to a 2015 study by VideoMining, 76% of c-store shopping trips took 4 minutes or less. So how do you keep them entertained for the next 26?
One Retailer’s Experience
Scott Minton at OnCue Express can tell you a little about this very dilemma. Stillwater, Okla.-based OnCue is best known for its compressed natural gas (CNG) business, but is open to other alternative fuels, including electric. Oklahoma is about midway between a Chicago-to-Dallas road trip, so there could be opportunity. But with Minton spoke with an EV charging station provider to find out what might be involved, the news was a little discouraging.
For one, Oklahoma just isn’t dirty enough to get a lot of attention from the EV industry. States with high traffic congestion and a lot of air pollution, like Southern California, New York and really, much of the Northeast, see most of it.
“You don’t have the focus from [car] manufacturers, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) on Oklahoma like you will have in other parts of the nation,” Scott told me recently. “We have vehicles available at dealerships, but not the same incentives or advertisements. So the market is going to be a little bit different.”
Beyond this lack of OEM support, there remains that question: How do you provide a 30-minute experience at a store built for a 3-minute one?
“For c-stores it’s a difficult proposition,” Minton said. “You need 30 minutes to charge a vehicle—so what does the person do but go in my store? They’re either talking to an employee or mulling around for 30 minutes. We don’t have a good place for people to go in our c-stores for 30 minutes.”
OnCue Express, like many c-store retailers, is looking to grow its foodservice offer, and is considering putting WiFi in parking lots to give folks a reason to linger. Until then, it seems the EV-c-store window has not yet lined up, needing either a technological advancement for faster charging, and/or a retail advancement for a longer shopping occasion.
“It’s an attractive opportunity for us, but we’re not there today,” Minton said. “Grocery stores, malls, outlet centers, offer a more attractive market for an EV driver than a c-store does.”
In the meantime, OnCue might test a charging station to see if Minton’s suspicions are correct—maybe at an interstate location, … and to be prepared for when the windows do line up.
“If numbers hold true, they are saying a 20% to 30% displacement [of current cars on the road by EVs] in the next 10 to 20 years,” said Minton, “that’s a significant market to attack.”
According to Tesla’s Musk, we should see an EV battery that delivers 500 miles of charge—about the range of a full tank of gas—within 10 years. And who knows—maybe an advancement in charging technology can shave off some of those 30 minutes of charging time.
Then the question is: Can the c-store industry develop an offer worth sticking around for? My guess is yes, and it’s going to be really exciting to see what it looks like.
Samantha Oller, author of the Fuels Forward blog, is senior editor/special projects coordinator, CSP/Winsight. Email her at soller@winsightmedia.com.
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