Makes a lot of sense from my amateur perspective. It takes a bit of time to charge a car, and you might as well use it to buy your groceries. Plus I'm sure WM can get a sensible bulk discount on electricity.
Add to that, you can make people use your app and show them targeted adverts. You can get them to buy any bulk goods for pickup when they are charging the car.
Only trouble is, the cars charge too fast now days! An 800V vehicle like the Ioniq 5 can often be topped up in under 15 minutes, barely enough time to buy a coffee and use the restroom, let alone do any grocery shopping!
And some charging networks apply idle fees if you don’t move your car quickly when charging completes.
Of course, a car can only charge as fast as the charger, so maybe it makes sense (and certainly saves money) to install slightly slower ones at locations where customers are likely to want to spend longer times.
Fast charging degrades the battery. Obviously you will choose a slower charger if you know you will be gone for 45 minutes.
Walmart is also unlikely to have these charges, since they obviously do not want people to rush through their stores. (Obviously charges after a couple of hours might be there.)
True, but in practical terms this is not worth worrying about for most of us. Saw a recent article where a Korean driver had done over 600,000km (~ 375,000 miles) in his Ioniq 5 on the original battery. He'd only ever used DC fast chargers, typically charging to 100%!
His battery did fail around the 600,000km mark, but most vehicles never get anywhere close to that sort of mileage. And apparently it still retained 87% of original capacity up until that point.
And despite being far out of warrantly, Hyundai replaced his battery as a goodwill (good publicity!) gesture.
The State of Charge YouTube video that covered the announcement and visited a site in McKinney, TX indicated it did need the Walmart app[0].
Sigh. Plug and pay charging is so much better. It’s not like this is a Tesla only feature. Ford has thousands of chargers beyond SuperChargers that just work for plug and pay.
My guess is that this will be less of a problem for Walmart than it is for other EV charging networks because with the other networks all their app is good for is EV charging at their network.
With Walmart the EV charging is just going to be another thing managed from the Walmart app. I'd guess that a significant majority of people who will be wanting to charge there already use Walmart for other things and have the app.
Add to that, you can make people use your app and show them targeted adverts. You can get them to buy any bulk goods for pickup when they are charging the car.