Is better EV charging coming to SoCal?

Charging an electric vehicle in Southern California often involves conditions that are less than ideal — like sitting in your hot (or cold) car in an empty parking lot. Now some companies are trying to reimagine the experience.

The company Rove recently opened a charging station off the 5 Freeway in Santa Ana that includes a 24-hour indoor lounge with bathrooms, a car wash, and a Gelson’s mini market. Kristi Ochoa, the company’s vice president of marketing, said the idea was borne out of company leaders’ own public charging woes.

“And then we just kept problem solving,” she said. “What were the challenges people were having where they were finding chargers that didn't work well? How do we fix that? And how do we make it easy to pay and how do we make them as fast as possible and how do we reduce the line?”

Rove’s Santa Ana station has 40 fast chargers, and attendants who can help newbie EV drivers figure out how to charge and address problems onsite rather than via telephone, like at most other charging stations.

And they have smaller amenities that are gas station norms but usually absent from charging stations, like squeegees to clean your windshield. “They’re kind of an underrated piece,” Ochoa said.

This reporter’s charging woes

My family entered the brave new world of electric vehicle ownership when we bought a used Nissan Leaf in 2018. We were lucky — our landlord split the bill with us to install a Level 2 charger (a typical home or work charger that takes 4-10 hours to fully charge a vehicle) in the garage of our apartment.

It was mostly great. We could charge up overnight, get to work, where I could usually find an available charger nearby, and get home to charge again. We felt like we were saving money by not buying gas and doing our part to try and usher in a cleaner energy future.

But then we moved to a place where we couldn’t charge at home and our EV journey got significantly more complicated. Charging in the wild — aka, on the streets of Southern California, outside of home and/or work — could be exasperating. There were only a few charging stations within several miles of our home. The closest one, just a block away, only had one charger that we could use for our particular vehicle and it was almost always busy.

Sometimes, I’d check the charging company’s app (charging in the wild required us to have multiple apps for different companies, and a third app to find nearby charging stations), see that the charger was open, and rush over there only to find that someone had beat me to it.

Other times, chargers would be out of service — just when I desperately needed one. I once took my 9-year-old daughter to a movie on a rainy night, planning to charge at the parking garage adjacent to the theater while we watched the film. One of the garage’s two chargers was out of service and the other was busy.

The competition for a charge can be fierce.

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Justin Sullivan

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Getty Images

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After the movie, I found a charger at a nearby shopping center only to find that it was also out of service. It was now pouring and we wouldn’t make it home without charging. We finally begged a car dealership to let us use their only available Level 1 charger (the slowest) for enough time to get us home. I sat in the fogged-up car for 20 minutes trying to stay awake while my daughter dozed in the back.

We eventually gave up and sold our EV. I hope to try again when we can buy a car that gets more miles to the charge and when the public charging infrastructure for EVs, other than Tesla, is better developed. (The Tesla Supercharger network is already robust.)

More full service stations coming

The Rove-style station — if there were enough of them — seems like an answer to some of the problems we faced.

On a recent afternoon, Nick O’Malley and Caleb Ostgaard were lounging at an outdoor table at the Santa Ana station, waiting for O’Malley’s car to finish charging before heading back to L.A. O’Malley said he’d like to see more stations like Rove’s, “where it's less of just a random parking lot in the middle of nowhere.”

Tico Brown stopped at the Santa Ana station to charge up his new Tesla. “This is nice that I can grab something to eat real quick and then get back on the road,” he said.

Rove's EV charging station in Santa Ana has an indoor lounge, Gelson's mini market, and outdoor seating.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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Rove plans to open 10 similar stations in Southern California by 2026, including in Costa Mesa, Torrance, Long Beach, and Corona.

Other companies are also trying to improve EV owners’ experience with public charging. Electrify America opened its first indoor charging station with a lounge in San Francisco in February.

“I think that and the Rove model are a reflection of charging stations realizing we need to provide a better experience when it comes to charging,” said Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the state Energy Commission.

Not to be outdone, Tesla is currently building a charging station in Hollywood that will include a diner and drive-in theater. And a new Tesla Super Charger station — with 112 fast chargers, a 7-Eleven, and a lounge — is expected to open in late 2025 near the Grapevine section of the I-5.

California’s big EV plans

The state has 10 years to reach its goal of having zero emission vehicles make up 100% of all new vehicles sold. The outgoing Biden administration approved California’s mandate to phase out gas-powered cars via a waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But the incoming Trump administration is likely to challenge the waiver in court.

Currently, about one in four new vehicles sold in California are zero emission.

The state also recently began tracking the number and distribution of EV charging stations. Currently, there are more than 152,000 public and shared private chargers, according to the state Energy Commission. Shared private chargers are located at workplaces or in parking garages that charge a fee to park while charging.

The state’s goal is to have 250,000 chargers installed by the end of 2026. Buckley, the agency spokesperson, said California is on track to reach that goal “in the next couple of years.”

Buckley said the state is also “laser focused on reliability” — the Energy Commission is in the process of developing standards to make sure chargers are working 97% of the time. Those standards will apply to chargers that get some amount of public funding, which Buckley said applies to about half of the state’s installed chargers.

In December, the Energy Commission announced plans to invest $1.4 billion over the next four years on new infrastructure for refueling electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles. Buckley said the bulk of that investment will be directed toward communities where chargers are even more scarce than I experienced during my years of EV ownership.

“We’re giving a little more love to rural areas and low-income areas,” Buckley said, “going where the market is not going.”