Yahoo Autos Rove Opens First EV Charging Plaza in California, More Coming Soon
Rove’s combination of 40 covered EV charge stations consists of 28 Tesla V4 NACS and 12 ABB SAE CCS and CHAdeMO, and each is checked daily by on-site staff.
A Gelson’s ReCharge is co-located on-site, a version of the high-end market that has been resized to fit in with the needs of EV owners.
There are a number of amenities that charging stations now lack, such as 24/7 security, a secure indoor workspace, bathrooms, and Wi-Fi.
Startup company Rove previewed its first recharge station in Santa Ana, California, today, the first of 11 in the short-term they have planned. Future plans include branching out into other EV strongholds across the country. Rove is a new independent player in the EV charging space, and this first station is set for an October 15 opening.
Chairman and CEO Bill Reid is an EV owner himself, and he’s got the same complaints about EV charging that you have. He’s been at broken chargers, languished in his car because there’s nowhere to go, and had to find a bathroom somewhere. And he’s struggled with uncertain Wi-Fi and simple things like a lack of trash cans and windshield washing squeegees.
It Starts with Charging
The chargers are the star here, and there is a mix of Tesla NACS, ABB CCS, and CHAdeMO here, each under a large canopy. The 28 Tesla chargers are the newest V4 superchargers, and they operate in the usual way. The other 12 are SAE CCS made by ABB, and they are billed through the Rove app. Two of them have a combination of CHAdeMO and CCS plugs, while the rest are pure CCS. Of the 12, two are 350-kW units and the rest are 184-kW units.
No charger is set up to split power with another car, and all are placed so that any port will be reachable by a cord without overlapping. We can’t tell you how frustrating it is when some person has no choice but to use the “wrong” charger, for good reason, because the site was laid out incorrectly, and then someone else comes along and can’t use the open space. Also, on-site staff check each charger at the start of their shift and are trained to run diagnostics and change common parts. The staff is also trained to guide people with, say, a Chevy Bolt away from the 350-kW station they can’t benefit from.
The Rove Recipe
To make this work, Rove needed an anchor. That turned out to be Gelson’s, a high-end supermarket chain that all your friends in L.A. know well. Think Whole Foods, but they’ll still have Pepsi and Coke products there. But a full-size Gelson’s would be a little large, so they came up with Gelson’s ReCharge, a smaller version of a supermarket that’s more than a mini-mart. You can buy a few groceries, along with packaged meals and a drink.
You don’t need an EV to shop here, as the market is open to anyone. When the store is closed, there still is 24-hour security and an enclosed space with Wi-Fi, power for several laptops, and bathrooms. Outside, there are squeegees and trash cans, and it is all brightly lit. There’s also a drive-thru car wash, and vacuums.
More Coming Soon
We can already see this is a huge step up from the usual charging experience, with on-site staff set to ensure things run smoothly. They’ll be able to help newbies with charging, make sure all the equipment is up and running, and do that basic stuff like empty the trash cans.
Rove went all the way from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting with this one location, but the pace will pick up quickly as they put the learnings from this project to good use. If the result is anything to judge by, the Rove recipe looks set to redefine how charging works.
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