Walmart Is Building An EV Charging Network At An Alarmingly Fast Rate! My First Charge
Walmart isn’t messing around. Something happened in their division where they said, “Boom, charging now.” And they’re just going to blanket the country with DC charging. Got some nice folks came by to check it. Take a look at the Cybert truck. Y’all have made her day. Amazing. Are you ready to see how many are under construction? Look at that. Wow. These are all the ones coming and under construction. For example, here. Getting this over there is much easier. Yeah, that’s simple. Oil changes, EV charging at Walmart. There we go. That is not convenient for an EV drive. My mom or my grandma would never figure this out. Well, we’ll we’ll sum up with our thoughts, but that payment activation trash. Thank you to our sponsors for today’s video. Ayana Infy Power and Eaton. Ayanna, North America’s premier charging network. With unmatched commitment to elevating the customer experience, Ayana is opening America’s roads to all EVs, giving drivers the coverage they need, the reliability they deserve, and the amenities they crave. Also, Infy Power, the largest EV charger module provider with over 3 million power modules running reliably worldwide. Their latest G2 collection features ultra high power density and efficiency for EV charging and energy storage integration. Infy Power, innovation for your power and Eaton. Eaton is a one-stop shop for implementing reliable and innovative EV charging infrastructure at your site across all applications. Eaton’s EV charging infrastructure, hardware, and software gives you the scalability, flexibility, and intelligence you need to charge today and scale up tomorrow. Learn more at eaten.com/evci. Hello and welcome to another outofspec reviews video. You join me and Alyssa in Texas. What’s up, Alyssa? Hey guys. Um, we are at a Walmart DC fast charging location. And news flash, if I really haven’t been following this story that closely, I’ve heard Walmart was going to install some DC charging, but it’s like here and it’s a thing and they’re building sites at an alarming rate, especially here in the Texas and the Dallas Fort Worth area. So, in this video, we’re going to visit a few different Walmart high-owered DC fast charging sites. We’re going to activate the chargers. We’re going to charge on them for the first time, and we’ll also talk about in general what the experience is like and our predictions for what’s to come. So, Alyssa, what’s your impression initially visiting the first Walmart DC fast charging station that we’ve been to? I mean, it looks really nice. They’ve chosen really hardy, good units. So, it looks like it’d be a pretty promising solution and thing that they’re doing, but uh who knows about the backend side of things of actually getting them to work. Yeah, we’ll have to definitely see what the activation is like because I’m instantly noticing there’s no credit card readers on there. Yep. Yep. And I think that’s going to be a pain. So, we’ve got some digging to do. We’re going to go explore this site here in Plano, Texas. Then we’ll go to McKini, which is the first ever Walmart site, and a few others. We’re driving that Cybert truck, so we should be able to pull some big power. So, join us as we charge at the Walmart charging network for the first time. So, Alyssa, um before we even get into the Walmart charging network, Walmarts have charging, or at least many of them do already. Yes. So they’ve had um Electrify America has put a lot of their stations there in the beginning in the early days and uh now Walmart’s popping up with their their own thing which is very very interesting. Yeah. So I mean originally Electrify America was given a mandate to install high power DC fast chargers all around the country to make a network of charging and to be honest they did so at an alarmingly flat fast rate and I think they did the best job they could early on. Now, they had hardware issues, software issues, buggess, problems. We’ve been there. We’ve dealt with that. But I would say in general, things are getting better on the Electrify America side, and the last few years have been fairly reliable, especially the last one year. I would agree. Yeah. So, um, one thing we have noticed on the back end though is many of those Electrify America charging stations at Walmarts haven’t been upgraded to the newest stuff. And we’ve also not seen a lot of new stations at Walmart’s Electrify America stations, right? Yeah, they all seem to be older. They’re not getting revamped. Like our old local one in Lovelin, that one was getting replaced. So, yeah, that was at Target. Yeah, they’re definitely not. It It doesn’t seem to or what we’ve seen that any of the Walmart locations have been getting upgraded from our knowledge. So, we have no information on this. We have, to be totally transparent, not spoken to anyone at EA or Walmart about any of this, but just posing a cynical question here. Electrify America put in those transformers. Not for this particular site, but I’m saying when you go to theirs, they spent all the hard work putting in the utility connections for high power charging. Wouldn’t it make sense for Walmart just not to renew their lease and then to just put Walmart chargers in where EAS once were? Yeah, I I think that’s a huge business case. um you know just to make it all under their one umbrella. And is that the goal though? I’m not sure. Yeah, we’re I mean we have not seen any or heard of any sites being ripped out. So that’s right. Like this is a brand new one. Yeah, this one’s brand new. This one’s not replaced or anything. So it’s Yeah, it’s a tossup. I mean, it’s definitely with could could be a possibility. I don’t see why they wouldn’t. We’ve seen it happen with the Tesla locations over in uh around New York City where they did that. Oh yeah. Mhm. Okay. On the turnpike. Yeah, that’s right. The New Jersey turnpike. They someone bought them, ripped the superchargers out, right? So, this could kind of be the same thing. Yeah, totally. That it’s possible. We’re just posing a question. We’re not sure. Okay, so let’s get into the Walmart network. Let’s ignore the EA thing for a second because this feels way bigger than that in terms of what Walmart’s trying to do. Most high power charging networks up to this point have been largely focused on corridor travel. So getting folks from A to B over long distance. That means installing high power charging off major interstates and also just uh in between major metropolitan areas. We’ve seen though a lot of people buy electric cars who don’t have access to home charging. And this is maybe the worst use case for an electric car. If you have to go somewhere to constantly recharge it, that’s a pain because they don’t fill up as quickly as gas cars. There’s just no way around it. Um, I think Walmart is trying to provide a solution for corridor travel like this site here right off a major highway, Alyssa, but then also for inner city or urban folks who cannot charge at home to have a charging location for maybe their once a week Walmart shopping. Yeah, very much could be because I’ll show everyone the map of expected stations to come and it’s crazy how many Walmart sites are under construction in the Dallas area. It’s got to be 30 or 40 in this one city metropolitan area. Totally insane. So, let’s take a look at what this site is. This site was We just happened to be in the area. We were visiting um an Ayana Rechargery down the street and I looked up on Plug Share. I was like, “What? There’s a Walmart site here? That’s awesome. Let’s go check it out.” And you can see here there are six five normally installed ones. There’s one ADA stall. So, six Alpetronic Hypercharger 400s. And these are 400 kW units that are CCS and NAX. So each unit supports both. Every CPO is doing something a little bit different. And we’ll get into the actual hardware, cable choice, power stuff here in a little bit when we get to the station activation. When we get to the way the site is laid out, I think there’s some good and some bad here. Alyssa, I would agree. So the first thing we should mention is they have a really nice ADA stall closest to the store. And you can see there’s room to maneuver a wheelchair all the way around the station. So you can get over to the screen which is on the left side of these units. And we haven’t shown that yet, but like you can look at any of these stations over here and just see that the the screens over here on this side which is just a design inherent nature of the Alpronics. Maybe the worst part about the Alpronic actually. Yeah, I think that’s the only thing we really don’t like about them. Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s like bad, but it’s a little bit awkward. Especially if you park on this side and then there’s someone here and you got to like maneuver over next to their car. It’s just I think if there’s only one thing to complain about, that’s it. However, Alpetronic has just released their new Hick 1000, which is a split system, which means you put the high power charging cabinet offboard cuz these are allin-one units, and then they’ll have dispensers with a front mounted screen. So, that’ll fix the problem. That’ll be awesome. And maybe uh maybe we’ll start to see Walmart uh put those in. So, let’s start high level here talking about the units. I don’t think every Walmart charging installation is going to be Alpronic. Alyssa, we’ve heard rumors of some other stuff. Yeah, I think they’re maybe dipping their toes in with a bunch of different uh companies to see what really works the best. And I honestly I think that’s a smart decision for them to do. I mean, there’s we know these things are expensive and maybe some are a lot cheaper and just the the cost effective, but I don’t honestly think Walmart really has a budget. I mean, I think they’re spending some good money. Huge budget is what you mean, right? Right. Yeah. They have no limitation. No. Yeah. They seem to just be like, you know, dropping the buckets a billion dollars for Walmart. So, they could just blanket charging everywhere, which is awesome. Um, you know, I don’t think these are as expensive as everyone thinks they are. The Hick 400s. I think they’re pretty reasonable, especially if you buy them in bulk. I have no idea what the pricing would be, but judging by the fact that everyone’s going with them, they can’t be astronomical. No, I mean, yeah, they’re probably decently priced, maybe on the higher end, but still well priced enough to want to buy them in bulk. Yeah, I kind of totally agree. So from Walmart’s perspective, when you’re an electric car driver, you can come here, you charge for 20 minutes to 40 minutes, maybe an hour if you’re doing a 100% charge, and now they have a captive audience, which is a person driving a relatively expensive vehicle. EVs are not the cheapest at the moment, and they can go in and spend money at Walmart. But also, if you have enough throughput, we’ve shown now, you can actually make money with DC fast charging. And so if they have a fairly reliable unit that doesn’t require much service or maintenance cost over the lifetime, they have a relatively good pricing structure for electricity, if they can negotiate that with their utility provider, then it’s possible not only could they make money on the consumer going in to purchase items in the store, but they could also make money on the charging. It’s a win-win for Walmart and it’s a win-win for the customer as long as the charging is easy to activate and the pricing is very reasonable. Walmart’s always been known for very affordable prices on many things. And I think the first thing we have to do, Alyssa, is check the price on the charging. So, a before I look at this price, cuz I genuinely don’t know what they’re charging here, and I don’t know if they do it on a stationbystation basis. We’ll drive around and look. Um, anything over 50 cents per kilowatt hour feels expensive to me and anything under 35 cents per kilowatt hour feels cheap. So, what I’m hoping for is to find something hopefully in that low 30 cent per kilowatt hour rate, maybe mid30s, that would be the goal. But certainly, if it’s over 50 cents per kilowatt hour, that would be ripoff territory. Correct. Would you agree with that? Yeah. I mean like just our experience with like pilot flying Jay’s those are extremely expensive. Those are 60 70 cents per kilowatt hour which is just absolutely insane. I mean there really isn’t no there isn’t a happy medium. I don’t think anybody’s ever agreed on what the pricing should be. But that’s just utilities are different everywhere you go. So it’s kind of hard to for everybody to kind of meet in the middle of what the range is. I mean it’s a pretty wide range right now. I’ll also say that we just came from the Ayana site down the street and they were 37 cents per kilowatt hour. So, you would think Walmart would be a cheaper offering than I. So, let’s take a look. Okay. Oh, here we go. Take a look at this. 400 kW DC max. That’s the Hyper 400. 42 cents per kilowatt hour. Yeah, that’s pretty high. Yeah. I mean, that feels feels in the range. Feels in the range, but not Walmart cheap, right? No. Yeah, you would you would think you would think that they would be on the cheaper side, but uh we’ll have to see the other stations to kind of see the median that they’re they’re going for around here. Yeah, totally agree. So, before we get into the site layout and the actual chargers, what do you say we get the Cybert truck charging? Yeah, let’s in We’re at 10% state of charge. We’ve actually got to get this thing juicing up. So, it’ll be our first time ever charging on the Walmart charging network. So, what we’re going to do is we are going to head over here. I think we have to use a QR code because there’s no credit card reader. Correct. So, join me over here. Let’s get it all set up and get to charging. It says the only way you can activate it is through their application start. So, it says use the operator app or web portal to control the charger. Now, I am not a fan of downloading new apps, even though I understand a use case for this network, especially for folks who don’t have home phone charging, is going to be the weekly Walmart run. They’ll have the Walmart app on their phone. A lot of people do. They’ll be able to come here, tap with a raw mile and charge. I’m going to scan the QR code. And I’m typically not a fan of QR codes on things. I do like that this is a screen because a lot of people can tamper with QR codes that are physically placed and then they can, you know, do whatever they want to do nefarious stuff with their information. However, here that it’s on the screen and it moves, I think that’s trustworthy. You can also, of course, move the screen around so you know that’s not a sticker. Um, oh, this is so funny. Welcome to EV charging at Walmart. Come on over here out of the sun so you can see this. It says scan the QR code we just did. Open now. So these are all the sites that are open now. So there’s 1 2 3 4 5 six sites. They’re all in Texas, one in Arkansas, and one in Oklahoma. And then coming soon will be Plano, Texas. Isn’t that where we are right now? No. Yeah. 600 Central Expressway. Oh, coming soon. Well, it’s online. We’re here hopefully. and then Irvine Center and then EV charging is also available in, you know, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, blah blah blah. So, I just scanned that QR code and it is unable to start charging from the QR code. The only thing it gives me is download the app. So, let’s jump in the Cybertruck Cool. So, we’ve just downloaded the Walmart app. First time I’ve ever done this. And I can load it up right here on my device. Welcome to Walmart. Continue as a guest. I don’t want to sign in. Get notifications. Sure, because I would like to see if I get charging ones. Enter your information for location. Sure. And ask app not to track my info. Okay, so here’s the app. So far, I see a Paw Patrol fire truck and a Miss Rachel spin something. Nothing to do with EV charging. No, which is all I care about at the moment. We got candles on here. That’s dangerous for you, Alyssa. I do like candles. She loves candles. And we’ve got Cheerios. Still not seeing anything charging related. And now I’m annoyed. And I’m going to go look for another charging provider. That’s just how I think. Just let me get in, charge, and leave. Yeah. But all right. Search Walmart charging. I’m going to type this in. Not charging. Charging station. Away we go. Oh no. I found MagSafe wireless charging. So, I think you got to go scan that QR code again. Really? What about services? Walmart pay, auto services, financial services, pickup and delivery, gift cards. Nope. So, right now we are figuring this out in real time. I’m going to go auto services and virtual garage oil changes. EV charging at Walmart. There we go. That is not convenient for an EV drive. My mom or my grandma would never figure this out. Just put a credit card reader on the damn terminal on the device. I have to say get going. Put a put a one, you know, put a kiosk there. Mhm. Like a And then you just have one terminal that you have to manage and then you select I’m at, you know, station 4. Tap and then go. All right. So now I’ve got to confirm my connector, pay in the Walmart app, then plug in. Yeah. So, you’re going to have to put in all your credit card information into Walmart app. So, here we are. Select your connector. It knows we’re at the Plano Super Center. It’s 400 kW 42 cents per kilowatt hour. And it says a $35 temporary hold will be be placed until the session starts. And a temporary hold is authorized. Your bank should remove the hold within 10 business days. Dang, that sucks. So, imagine you go to plug in, it doesn’t work. $35. You go to plug in again, you’ve got a car issue, charger issue. No, the $35. Doesn’t Ayanna do that, too? Ayana does it, too. And then it takes forever to remove the hole. Mhm. And that’s unfair, I think, to the general. I mean, gas works the same way. Yeah. And especially if you’re driving a diesel. Yeah. Diesel could be like sometimes I’ve gotten $1,000 hold on my car. Yeah. That’s crazy. At the tanker pump. Yeah. It’s crazy. All right. So, it says scan the QR code on the charger screen or choose the connector. And here we have out of the 12 connectors that we’re at. Let’s scan the QR code. I’d like to try this. Let’s pop outside. We’ll leave climate on in the Cyber Truck. Yeah, this is already annoying. Am I being too hard on Walmart for making them force us to use their app? No, I don’t like apps. And we’re millennials and we don’t like to have apps. Yeah. Or at least give me those little mini pop-up apps that iPhone used to support. I don’t think they do. No. Oh no, I lost our screen on here. So, now just try. Now, I’m just going to scan it in the app. Okay. Camera access required. God dang. Get out of here. Okay. Here we go. It’s not a barcode. Oh, is it scanned? Let’s get started. Okay, so now it wants to know if I want CCS or Knax. Well, I’m going to choose Knack. Sign in to start charging. Ah, I got to create an account to charge. sucks. While I’ve had to give them my first and last name, my phone number, and create a password, I then have to uncheck the thing that says send me emails about new arrivals, hot items, daily savings, and more. Not interested in the slightest. Just want to charge my car. Yep. Oh, now I got to send uh get go to my email, get the verification code. Now, now that sent me a verification code to my text messages on my other device, but I should be able to get it here. Oh, this is so annoying. 804646 is on this one. Verify and create account. So, two separate verifications. Would you like to save this password? Yes. Add a pass key. Sure. Add a new payment method. And I cannot Apple Pay. Of course, I’ve got to manually type in a card number. This is quite the process. This is no way to do charging. They They should stop building stations immediately if this is how they’re going to do it. You are passionate. No, it’s just not fair to the general EV driver, which honestly is an older crowd because they’re expensive cars. Good. Mhm. Well, now I’ve got it all set up. I’ve got my account. I’ve got my card and I’ve got the continue with this card. Payment authorization in progress. Keep your app open. All right. Well, now that I’ve got my account all set up, which was a pain in the butt. Um, I’ve actually logged in on Alyssa’s phone cuz we’re filming on on this one. Doesn’t totally matter. Same account. I’m going to come over here and scan the QR code. So, here we go. QR code is scanned. And it says, “Let’s get started.” And it says, “Chargers 12 of 12 available.” It’s showing me only 9 and 10, which if we look at these stickers, should be matched up. Nine and 10. So, we’re going to want to charge on number 10. So, let’s go here and then let’s continue with this card. Payment authorization in progress. Keep your app open. It says get real time updates. Oh, now it’s taking us to settings. Let’s come back to this. Keep your app. I love how it’s like keep your app open. Now, it says authenticating. And we’ve got to plug in our connection. Nice. So, we’ll pull this around. I’ve got a real issue with this cable management. Yeah, this this honestly kind of sucks. Yeah, we’ll come all the way out and around. I agree. Do the dosey do. What? Dosey do. Doy do. I’m just pulling up. Get up over on that side, Alyssa, and pull it wide for me. There we go. Yeah. Here we go. Holy smokes. That is I probably could have come around the back side. Yeah. So now we’re plugging in first time on the network. Preparing charging session. Initializing. Ready. Preparing power delivery. I guess these are the the sections that they go through. Very similar alpronic style. And here’s clicking. That payment authorization was the biggest pain in the butt ever, was it not? Yeah. I mean it just I mean here we are charging. Here we go. Does it give you the good detail? Yeah. Yeah, they so they give us voltage and amperage, which is wonderful. We’re up to 280 kW right there. Wow. Nice. And it should spin up even a little bit more than that. Yeah. Battery pack wasn’t preconditioned in the Cybert truck. Well, it’s warm. Yeah, it’s warm out, but it may have chosen the grade. There might be a gradient temp or something. We didn’t precondition, but you know, 290 kW, not bad. No, not at all. And that was relatively a quick um what do you call it? Process. communication, handshake. Yeah, there we go. Handshake. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, same as all normal ALP stuff. It didn’t seem like Walmart was slowing it down or speeding it up, right? Felt felt about the same. Here we are. Over 300 kW now. 306 as the Cybertruck asks for some more juice. Here you can see 420 amps, 730 volts. Wonder if that’s intentional, right? Yeah. No, it should want more than this, but that’s okay. It’s just not preconditioned. Um, yeah. One thing I don’t know if we mentioned, but it does put a $35 hold on your card. Yeah, we did. Charge. Okay, we did mention that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s I feel like that’s just kind of being normal now. Yeah. All looks good. Well, getting charging started was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had. Alyssa, that was terrible. That was terrible to say the least. I think Walmart’s really got to change that. I’m sure there’s plenty of people that have the Walmart app on their phone and you You don’t I would not agree. Uh-uh. I think there’s plenty of American shoppers that have the Walmart app and it’ll work seamlessly for them. It’s just not conveniently located. And I can’t for the life of me understand why they wouldn’t just put payment terminals on these things. Yeah. Just make it simple and easy for everybody to use. Don’t try to require somebody to use another app. We have so many apps for all these charging stations and infrastructure and it’s just let’s just keep it simple, right? And it’s not even a charging specific app. It’s an app for the entire Walmart within a sub app for charging, right? It just doesn’t work. Um, the other thing that they could do, Alyssa, is actually put in a payment terminal situation right here, you know, or in the middle of the station somewhere. So, if you truly don’t want to use the Walmart app, you can plug in, hit your payment terminal, then start charging. That would make a lot of sense if they don’t want to put a payment terminal on every single dispenser. Yeah, there definitely are some options out there. And, you know, maybe they’re going to take some feedback of all this stuff. Hopefully they will. Um but yeah, they’ve that was just not good. Yeah, not good. And then we also had issues with, you know, I think Knack being on the right side and CCS being on the left side. So, let’s just run through the station. Yeah, we’ll start where the customer starts, which is you you pull into a charging stall like we did here. Um we’ll go to one that we’re not charging on. So, if you look at this Alpetronic station, um first of all, there’s a few things that instantly stand out to me as like big red flags that I’m already annoyed with. The first is no trash cans. Yep. And you see there’s trash there. I mean, it’s they just Yeah, need trash cans. Yeah, trash cans are needed. Windshield washers a plus, but that’s not really a Walmart thing. I think it’s okay if they don’t have those. Trash can be absolutely needed. The second thing is they added ballards so you can’t pull through. Now, if you’re a typical, I don’t know, parking lot designer, that makes a lot of sense, I guess, because you would just think you pull in an electric car and charge. But Alyssa, we tow with electric cars very often. Yes, that is that has been a huge conversation, especially because I mean really these chargers should be used more on a road trip basis. Um that might change in the future. Yeah. And I think Walmart’s going to change that with their station roll out and we’ll get to that in a little bit as well. Right. But you know, the accessibility of being able to not have to unhitch is great, but this overall design, I mean, they’ve got you can’t you just can’t pull through. Not with these metal posts here. And so if they had just removed these ballards and somehow put another sign maybe coming off the charger or off of this ballard here. Oh yeah. A lot of places just put signage here which maybe they’re still getting to that on the ground. Yeah. There there’s still opportunities for that but that is Yeah, that’s an interesting choice. Yeah. So, I think they need to remove these. And I think, you know, people can understand lines and where you’re supposed to go, but very often Walmart parking lots, especially in the evening time, are just empty, right? And so, it would be so nice just to be able to pull through and plug in and charge rather than having this post in the way. So, that’s the second thing that that irks me a little bit. And the third thing that is causing a question mark is the placement of the CCS and the Knack cables. Now, we’ll get into the cables here in a second, but um for example, Tesla owners or Tesla cars are still the most popular vehicles with knacks on the road, and most Tesla owners, you know, back into a charging station. Alyssa. Yep. That is what they’re inherently taught to do. So, you you you know, the charging ports on the driver left side for Knack. So, you have to back in over here and then this won’t be able to reach around. No. Or it’s going to crawl over. It’s going to touch your paint. If you’re a paint nerd or whatever that might be, you might not want it on. Then then you think, let me back in on this side like we just did with the Cybert truck. Yeah. Right. And these are air cooled cables. These are thick, crazy cables. These are not the new oil cooled ones. And it’s almost impossible to get this cable over here to the charging point that you need to. I mean, Alyssa had to help me get this first of all, pull the cable management out, which is lovely cable management. Yeah, it really is. and you’d have to kind of swing around over here to get it plugged in. Now, I just walked through where a car normally would be in order to keep this extended. Uh, and so then you resort to, well, maybe they’re designed to be pulled in and you would insert the charging cable here if you just nose in, but then every time you open the door, this cable’s in the way, right? which is an issue we have at our office charger cuz I also had a similar idea to build our office charger in Fort Collins with the knacks on this side with the intention of pulling in. It just doesn’t work. It’s a pain and it’s something I would change if we were to do it again. So, I think they need to reverse the side that Knax is on and CCS is on, which Yeah. but also to be fair, CCS will have the same problem because with those cars especially, the ports are everywhere in the vehicle. Yeah. There’s there’s no one spot for these ports yet. It’s not really a perfect solution, but I do think if I had to choose, you know, were able to nitpick, I would swap those locations for that reason. The other thing that makes this especially hard to interface with vehicles are um Walmart decided to choose sort of the base level alpronic chargers from what I can tell. It means that these are non liquid cooled cables. These are air cooled cables that boost up. So, for example, let’s take a look. This is an amp ampl cable 1000vt rated. You can see it doesn’t have the the shielding that the the low voltage cables would have. These are 1000vt chargers. And you can see the cable maximum is 300 amps. Oh, just keep the phone in the shade there for me, Alyssa. Thanks. Yeah, 300 amp cable. I thought one of them was 400 amps over there. Could be 380. It’s a little bit broken out there. Oh, also pretty dirty. Yeah. Um, but 380 amp cable, but these still should be able to boost to 600 amps. For example, the Cybertruck was doing well over 400 amps. So, they’ll go to a a maximum temperature and then derate down. But, these are generally pretty thick and can handle most electric cars charging curves in boost. It’s just they that Alpronic offers an a oil immersion cooled option that’s 600 amp continuous. And that’s awesome. That’s what we’re specing for our Alpronic. For those of you who don’t know, the outofsp spec Alpetronic Hick 400 just exited the factory production line and is ready pretty soon for installation at the track. Woohoo. Pretty excited for that. I spec it I spec it in a dark gray with an orange surround so it’ll match our colors which will be really nice. On the CCS side, uh they’ve gone with amphanol 400 amp cables that again can boost higher but air cooled very heavy in the winter time. these things are not going to want to bend. Mhm. And that’s going to be, I think, an interesting solution. Um, I think it probably makes sense costwise. I don’t know what the cost difference is, but I really wish they went with the thinner, easier to manage oil immersion cooled cables. So, that has to do with the site layout and the station they’re picking. The other thing we should mention is these currently are all in one chargers. So the actual AC to DC conversion is happening in board here. There’s four power stacks with um technically each one has two 50 kilowatt power modules on them. So there’s eight power modules that get up to 400 kW in total conversion power and um they are unlin so you can’t really split power between them. Alpetronic is soon launching what’s called the Hick 1000. And the Hick 1000 is a um a split charging system. So you’ll have a DC cabinet offboard which then feeds a bunch of dispensers. And it can be configured with huge power and a bunch of dispensers or medium power and just a couple of dispensers. Totally up to whoever installs it. But I wonder if Alpronic or excuse me, I wonder if Walmart will start to install that version because something like that would make a lot of sense for a site like this. I think I agree. Yeah. Speaking of, let’s go look at the power coming in. Yeah. So, uh, if we head over this way, I guess one of the limitations of going with an all-in-one site like this is you pretty much, well, you you have a lot of unused charging capacity at the site, which means every single stack here has 400 kW of available AC to DC rectification power. If you had a split system, you can install much less charging capacity from a peak standpoint, but then also if there’s a bulk charging there, it takes up a little bit. If a, you know, ID4 is there, it might take a little bit more. And then if you roll up with a Cyber Truck, you can give it all the 500 kW it wants, for example. So, I like split systems for situations like this, but I also see the appeal of going with an Alpetronic all-in-one as that’s what’s on the market today. So, let’s start at where the power comes from the grid at this particular site, and we’ll look at some other Walmart sites as well. This one’s a 2500 KVA transformer, ABB transformer. Very nice. And, uh, it looks like it’s got, uh, 25,000 volts on the primary side and 483phase on the secondary side. Of course, that’s what you would expect. And what’s interesting about that is they were able to get a big enough transformer to run all of these stations flat out 400 kW with enough conversion powering. at power here on site and they’re not even overclocking the transformer. So, that’s really good. Yeah, I agree. It seems like they’re kind of uh futurep proofing it a little bit, which is nice to see. Yeah, I mean they have 100 kows of headroom here and there’s some power factor stuff that happens. So, I think it’s perfectly speced, but I would say if they were going to add more stations, they could always put a sight level load controller on Alyssa and then just say, “Hey, the whole site can’t go over, you know, 2.5 megawatts of power plus or minus.” Right. Uh, and it’s very unusual to have every car pulling full power, maxing every station at the same time. But you mentioned future proofing. I noticed this as we were walking up. Uh, extra conduit here, which is great. Yeah, that’s awesome. I love to see that cuz, you know, hopefully this industry is just going to keep growing and growing and they’re anticipating that with um, just how they’ve built this out. Yeah. And you’ll also notice here on the uh switch gear that they have, they have basically their 483phase running into the switchboard panel. And then this is what feeds each individual high-owered DC charger to give it its power. And they are sending again 483phase out to these units because these do the AC/toDC rectification on each dispenser. It’s actually an incredible product because they’re dead silent. They’re the size of some dispensers and they’re actually 400 kW all-in-one chargers. They’re amazing and incredibly reliable. Yeah, we we love these units. I mean, I roll up to one of these and I feel confident in my charging session. Yeah, for sure. Totally. And that should be the case. Like, having to worry about if you’re going to get a charge or not just seems so 2019, but somehow it’s carried through all the way to 2025. Yeah, it definitely has. It’s getting better hopefully. So, um, in terms of this first site, they have 12 charging spots, which seems more than adequate as we’ve been here for a little while and haven’t seen one other car charging. Yeah, we’ve been here for quite some time. We checked it out yesterday as well, and there hasn’t been anybody charging but us. Hasn’t even been a scent of a different another electric car here. So, um, maybe they just don’t know about it yet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a brand new site. Went live about 3 4 weeks ago, something like that. So, it’s still pretty new. And I don’t think many people know Walmart charging is coming online so quickly. So, what I’d like to do is I’d like to jump in the Cybert truck and I’d like to uh show everyone the sites that are under construction cuz it’s insane. And then we’ll go around and look at a few different sites. Sounds good. So, I wanted to show y’all what it looks like when I just opened up the app here and the information that it is giving me, which is honestly pretty great. I mean, I wouldn’t complain about that. Just maybe that price there, but um Well, does it show you how fast you’re charging? Uh, no, it does not. So, that seems like a problem. And then when I go back, I lose everything. So, how do you get back to it in the Walmart app? You got to go to auto services and then EV charging at Walmart and then it pops up. Doesn’t show you how fast you’re charging. No. So yeah, that is that’s a problem. That is a problem. But at least shows you how many kilowatt hours have been delivered and how much it’s costing you. And there’s also little applets that pop up. For example, the reason I’m not using this phone is it completely bricked. Yep. The app bicked and so it still thinks that I’m connecting to the charger. Yeah. So, it Yeah, it And I’ve been trying to clear this and it just keeps popping up. So, I’ve got to delete the Walmart app. Yep. Just give me a damn credit card reader. Walmart gosh. And they keep spamming me with stuff. Look, I’ve got a I’ve got a Walmart notification and another one here spamming me of stuff. I just want to charge my car. I don’t want to do anything else. Yeah, that side of things. I mean, I see it’s not good. But from the end user, it’s not good, but I see why they’re doing it. No, it’s wrong because they’re trying to make money. Yeah, I guess so. About the money. All right. Well, let me sign into Plug Share here and uh then I’ll show everyone these sites because this will blow everyone’s mind. All right. I’ve loaded up the Walmart or Walmart app. I’ve loaded up the Plug Share app and I’m going to go over here to toggle networks and turn Walmart EV charging on. I’m also going to come here and go to include coming soon. You ready for this? Mhm. This will blow everyone’s mind. Actually, let me hide. Coming soon. Right now in Walmart, these are the stations that are available for high power charging. I don’t know what this green one is, but actually that looks like it’s probably open as well. No chargers exist. No. So, that one’s not open yet. Someone messed that one up. But you’ve got 1 2 3 4 five Walmarts in the Dallas Fort Worth area that are already online and operational. That’s pretty good. We should also mention that this was an area that was super underserved with DC charging only a few years ago. I remember having to go to like the back of a I don’t even remember where we were, some dealership to charge or something like that just to get on the road coming through a road trip here. It was brutal. All right, take a look at this. There’s another one up here in Oklahoma and that’s it as far as or maybe there’s one in Arkansas which is near Walmart’s HQ, but it doesn’t look like it. So that’s what’s today. These are all pretty much brand new sites. And the one that we’re going to next up here in in Mckini was their first one. Are you ready to see how many are under construction? Oh yeah. Or permitted. Uh-huh. Look at that. Wow. These are all the ones coming and under construction. And you can click on some of them and they’ll even be pictures. I don’t know if this is one of them of like sites coming. So like some of them have the chargers already installed. Like they’re they’re already installed. They’re just not turned on yet. Wow. Isn’t that crazy? That’s a lot of That’s a lot. They have just gone insane on flipping the switch on putting charging in in the Dallas Fort Worth area. Yeah, that is that’s a lot. It’s crazy. So, I think that’s the one thing that we really need to take into consideration here is that Walmart isn’t messing around. Something happened in their division where they said, “Boom, charging now.” And they’re just going to blanket the country with DC charging. That’s what it feels like to me. You’ve got some under construction here in Oklahoma. You’ve got Missouri under construction. Iowa. Colorado’s got some. Utah. Wow. Tons in the Phoenix area. Look at this. Oh, wow. California has a bunch, especially up in Seattle. Boise, Idaho, up near Glacier in Callispel has some going. Wow. Just awesome. Any East Coast? Yeah, Florida. hardcore in Tampa. Shout out Walmart in Tampa. Love it. Anybody else in North Carolina? Does not appear. Charlotte’s got some maybe. Yeah. And Northeast is still at a severe lack of charging, but hopefully they’ll put some in up there. So, that is crazy. Those are the sites that are permitted or under construction or about to go live right now. So, that’s all 400 kowatt charging all across the country. And aside from their really crappy activation method, it’s reasonably priced at this location and it works perfectly fine. They’re brand new Alpetronic chargers. They’re going to work. Yeah, it’s I mean it really is it’s just mindblowing to how much they’re expanding their network and I mean they’ve just kind of done it very low-key. There’s really not been any like launches or anything. They’re just doing it because they want to do it. Yeah. And you know, we have to give a huge shout out to our friend Tom Malagny at State of Charge. He was the one a few months ago that really broke the story that Walmart was putting in charging. And then since then there’s been a few community members. I know this guy Spencer I follow on Twitter and a few others. There’s a guy with a red blazer. I’m forgetting his name, but he was in one of the photos there that have been tracking the progress. And I’ve seen little blips and stuff of Walmarts popping up with charging. I had no idea they were going this hardcore. And the thing that I really like about this, Alyssa, is they’re doing it for inner city charging. Yeah, it’s I mean it really is. It’s just astonishing to see that that mini. Yeah, it’s all about you can’t charge at home. You do your once a week Walmart shop. You charge your car, right? It makes sense. It works. It does really work. I mean, we’ve always harked on like, you know, higher power charging is just for road tripping. But maybe because we just have so much apartment dwelling in these big cities that this is this is kind of what maybe everybody’s turning to. Or maybe Walmart’s kind of got the right idea. house rentals, condos, there’s a million reasons why someone couldn’t have home charging, right? And there’s a million reasons why people shop at Walmart. Yeah. So, there’s got to be a lot of crossover there. I think they’ve recognized that. And uh this is super exciting. So, what I’d like to do is I’d like to head to Mckini. I’d like to see if I can get my app to unbrick itself to see if I can charge up there. And that will be the first ever Walmart site. So, we’ve got to go try that out. Go to the first site and then maybe we’ll hit a couple others today as well. Sounds good. So, we are ready to stop charging. And one thing I wanted to see was what the default screen looks like here. It’s very similar to a normal Alpetronic screen. They’ve put their own things on there, their own display. So I can come here to active sessions and I can see here, boom, charging 65% 93 kW. That’s all the Cybert truck wants. And there’s our charging curve. Typical Tesla charging curve there. Um, but uh, hey, 313 kW, not bad. And the Cybertruck can now do 500 kW on V4 superchargers. And I was just helping some of their engineering team figure out why they couldn’t do 400 on Alpronics. I think we got it figured out. Yeah. So, I actually just just noticed one thing. Another flaw of having just this one screen is, you know, say somebody comes over here, they click the wrong one to stop the session or whatever, and they can stop your session while you’re in Walmart and there’s nothing you can do to restart it. So, that’s another little flaw with the one screen thing, right? So, I think that is the nature of how chargers are activated. if you used an RFID or if you use something sometimes they require an RFID in order to stop. No one uses RFID cards in the US. It’s more of a Euro thing. Yeah. Um but I agree. That’s just the nature of of charging with screens, I think. So, so definitely don’t go around and just shut everyone’s charging off. Oh, no. You just put that idea. Oh, no. I I thought it was more of an accident to accidentally do that. That’s what I was looking at. But I honestly Yeah, you could just go around and hit stop charging. So, please don’t do that. Gosh darn it. Anyway, um we put in 72 kwatt hours in 25 minutes. Pretty good. So, let’s stop charging. Are you sure you want to stop charging? Yes. Okay. By the way, these are not touchscreen. I’ve seen a lot of people think they were. You have to use these buttons to control the screen. Just helps with reliability. gives us all the information here, but it does not give us pricing yet. Let’s see when I unplug the connector, which There we go. It did in the app. Charging detail. No, it’s just our curve. Yeah, in the app. We’ll definitely take a look at what the app receipt looks like. So, now I can put the cable away. Boom. Right there. I think they need to pull these ballards out just a little bit. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, you can see like a lot of them are just getting caught. Yeah, they’re getting caught around there. And these things are not well. Yeah, I don’t know why they just put a plastic cover on it, but yeah. So, yeah, it doesn’t doesn’t show any pricing or anything on this side. So, I’m not sure that’s the best integration I’ve ever seen, but um there we go. We’ll hit exit and we’re back to the home screen. So, let’s go to another site and uh see what Mckin is all about. The first one. And here we are rolling up into Walmart. Uh, shout out to Tesla for driving us here. By the way, Cybertruck FSD still sucks compared to normal FSD, doesn’t it, Melissa? Yep, sure does. Rando straight over a curb earlier today. It’s like, what are you doing? All right, let’s look around the parking lot for Alpetronics. You start peeking around. My guess is in the back there. That would be my guess, too. But I don’t see him back there. Do you? No. Oh, Cybertruck’s going this way. Oh, I don’t see them. Um, do we see any around this side, Alyssa? I don’t think they’re here. H, maybe we’ve gone to the wrong Walmart. Can we find them in the Walmart app? Oh, let’s try that. So, let me load up this. Welcome to EV charging at Walmart. Map view. Oh, wrong one. What the heck? Here we go. Map view. We want to go to this McKenna Walmart. Seven of eight available. Somebody’s using it. 12 of 12 available. Coming soon. Eight of eight available. Wow. So, they do show you the coming soon ones, which are cool, but not the ones over here in Fort Worth. Just the ones close by, I guess. What is this? That’s a Denton supercharger. Third party. Oh, so they even show third party DC fast chargers. So, they must not be removing chargers. So, I guess if it’s got the little Walmart badge on the bubble, then it’s one of theirs. And if it doesn’t, like this one, then it’s a third party charger. Oh, like this one’s the Denton Supercharger. This one is where we want to go. Seven of eight available. Location details. Let’s see. Tells us number seven CCS is in use. And we want to go here to Mckini on Redbud Boulevard and let’s see if we can find the dang Alpetronics. Or maybe they have different chargers installed here. I heard rumors they were doing charge point system. Yeah. So, who knows? Yeah, I’ve heard the the charge point rumor. Oh, I see them in the back corner over there. Nice. I know. Yeah, they’re just back over this way. Oh, this is a weird looking Walmart, isn’t it? Oh, yeah. Are there Audies? Yeah. Never seen this style. Modernized. There’s a Dodge Charger EV and a Bolt. Oh Lord, that is quite the combo. And now a triangle. And now Cybertruck. It’s America pulling up. Oh yeah. Yeah. All right. So I guess each one is CCS and Knack like before with the wrong cable side on each one. But of course, you know, you can’t please everyone. If you change them, then the other cars like the bolt wouldn’t actually line up. So, let’s back on into this one skirt. And actually, the way this cable’s laid out, I think is better, this station layout, than the other ones. Why? Well, let’s just find out. Okay. Mhm. So, what I think’s better about this, Alyssa, is because you’re not backed in next to the station, you can actually use like for example here, getting this over there is much easier. Yeah, that’s simple. Yeah. So, that that actually works just fine. Now, uh I’m going to see if I can use my device to activate the station. It’s still stuck in the app. I can’t get that little app outlet to go away, but they made this nice little path for me to walk around this way. 42 cents per kilowatt hour. Different display, isn’t it? Yes. Oh, it says plug in to get started. So, this is a different set of instructions than we saw at the last one. Uh-oh. Leaf rolling up, but there’s no chat. Oh. Uh-oh. Unless she’s got her Chattamoto CCS adapter, which there’s there’s a ton out there. I don’t think there is. Yes, there are. They’re $1,000. No, no, there’s another company. They’re like 300. Terrible. For CCS to chat. Uh-huh. Really? Yeah. With the communication in board. Mhm. It looks a lot like the HZ one. Really? And it’s cheaper. Uh-huh. We got play around with that. I know. They’re on their way. Oh, you got some coming? Yes. Oh, nice. Good. Good. That’s why I know about it. Okay. Well, this has no barcode on it. All it says is plug in to get started. So, I like that. Let’s plug in. All right. Let’s plug in. Sounds like a good plan. Thank you. Let’s just check the cable on this one. Same 380 amp. That’s what they are. Yeah. In. Now, let’s see what it says. You got to run around with me unless you want to do gymnastics. Yeah, I was going to. All right. So, now it says plugged in. Scan and pay in the Walmart app. And you can see the timeout comes. So imagine if this is your first time here. You’ve got to download the app. You got to go through that whole BS process and then get moving. I’m just going to scan right here in the app. Boom. EV charging at Walmart. We’re at number four. Knack charge with this card payment authorization. Now, what happened with mine, and I’ve seen a lot of other people comment this as well. It kept declining cards. Yeah. And I put in two different cards that I know work just fine. But mine works, so I get to pay for it. So Alyssa’s worked fine. And actually, it said payment declined, so it doesn’t like my Visa or my MX for some reason. Okay, I’ll go grab mine. Yeah, I got to get your app. Also, while we’re going, uh, I just spoke to the Leaf driver, asked her if she needed to emergency charge. She didn’t realize there was no Chattamo here. So, she seemed very sad. She seemed like she was having the worst day. And I was like, if you’re really low, I can charge you off the truck cuz the truck has a Nema 1450 outlet. But she said she was fine. Do we even have the cables? Um, no. Okay. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking the whole time. But I figured there’ there’d be a way to make it happen. We’d make sure she wasn’t stranded. We better hurry up. We got It tells us how many seconds once it gets away from the seconds. Okay. Yeah, that’s bad text right there. Yeah. Okay. Hold on. Let me load this up real quick. Yeah, we’re This is our uh No, it’s 113 seconds. This was our receipt from before, right? Mhm. So, just so everyone can see. It looks like a Walmart receipt. How cool is that? Yeah, that’s great. Especially for like business purposes. So, it shows our max power at 317 kW, 316.992 kilwatt hours, price, all that stuff. So, that works pretty well. Great. All right, let’s plug in here. Okay, I’m going to come up to the shop, hit the barcode, just pops up with all this BS. This is the biggest problem with this whole network. And also, I can’t understand why my cards wouldn’t work here. and others have had issues as well according to Plug Share. So, next 42 cents per kilowatt hour. Continue. Get real time updates again. It makes you leave the app and we’re going to keep it open. Hey there. Yeah, we’re just filming. Sorry. That’s okay. Yeah. Would you be messing up? Yeah. Sorry about that. We’re just in the middle of filming. And your session needs to be restarted. Restart charging session. I’m not really sure. Um, so unplug and replplug in. I just heard the Dodge Charger EV start up and make some noise. How about that? So, we’ve got to unplug and replplug. Alyssa, no explanation as to why. Yeah, it went blank here, too. Oh, hell. Well, that that kind of stinks, doesn’t it? Yeah. Try again. What the heck? I guess we’ll try again. Got some nice folks came by to check it. Take a look at the Cybert truck. You You never seen in one? I’ve never seen in one. Oh, have a seat in there. I’ll get your picture. Oh, wait a minute. Let me get y’all have made her day. Wait a minute. Okay, here you go. Camera. Yep. Wait, no, you’ll see it. I I’ll figure it out. Oh my goodness. Hi. Let me roll this down and I’ll I’ll close you in here. Then I can get your picture in here. I’m not a good water type person, but Yeah. Three, two, one. Boom. And I’ll get one more this way here. Great. There you go. Thank you. Yeah, of course. This is so All right. Thanks a lot. Yeah, no problem. Y’all have fun. Have a good day. Um, so here’s another problem, Melissa. I can’t get this to go. No, the this button doesn’t send the signal to unlock like it should. So, I’ve got to go into the truck and hit unlock charge port because we’re filming on the phone that has app access. Ah, another thing that someone wouldn’t figure out inherently, right? But I can come over here to this and I can go to charge port unlock. And now it should be unlocked. Nice. Boom. Okay. Also very weird, isn’t it? Okay. So, it’s possible the truck timed out because we took so long to scan it. Yeah. And the charger didn’t I would I would think that that was way too long for the cars. I’m also gonna while we’re here not doing I’m going to look up the nearest Chatamo station to help this Leaf owner out. Okay. Well, I’ll see if I can Can I my phone? Yeah. Here you go. Yeah. You see if you get this thing going. This is so dumb. Let’s get her Let’s get her rocking and rolling here. It’s so hard to do with one arm. Okay. Okay. She’s in crawling over. We’ll get the app out. Let’s see. We are here next and go. Let’s do it. There we go. So, it worked on my end. Sorry to bite you. I found the closest Chado station for you. All right. Well, I just helped the Leaf owner find the only option for Cado. This one’s broken here. This one’s broken at the Nissan dealer. And so, it’s literally this Subaru dealer. She has 9 miles of range. How far away is it? This is 6 miles away. So, she’s hoping. It says it’s for Subaru only, but it’s her only option. Yeah. And a Leaf owner said they were able to charge there. So, she’s heading to the Subaru dealer, and I was like, just email us if you can’t make it and we’ll rescue you. But she’s plastic. Okay. So, that’s the world of charging as well. It might make sense to still install one chatamo cuz you can add an extra cable on these, you know, like right here. Mhm. It would be cool to put a chat in. I don’t know if Alvetronic will ever support Cado, but I think they must because in Europe, Chattamo is a thing, too. Uh, yeah. I mean, there’s definitely an option, but I I just think it’s just dying out. I think if anything Nissan should either one like send out a blast email saying get a Chatamo adapter or whatever it might be or just give them to their give them to them. Yeah, but Nissan’s already running out of money so that’s not going to happen. So anyway, we’re charging and um so you got it going just fine then, Alyssa? Yeah, I had no problems at all. How about that? I know. I just used those cards for lunch too in between stations. Yes, they work. And I got no fraud message. It just doesn’t work in my app. So, that’s also kind of a noise. Uh, let’s look at this site installation. So, we’ve got a 2 megawatt 2000 KVA with a medium lower voltage 12,400 volts at this site rather than 25,000 or was it 30,000 at the last one? 30. We’ve got the same switch gear that they’ve gone with, which is um I don’t know who makes this maximum available fault current on there. This says Unity. manufacturing. Okay. Yeah. Looks like a nice enclosure. Mhm. And so this does the switch gear 480 out to these chargers here. We’re very familiar with the Alpetronic Hyper 400’s. And this is a weirdish installation in the sense that there’s a I guess every spot does have charging, but look at how narrow they get up here. Like are you even able to fit a Cybert truck in this parking space? You just fit it in this. Yeah, I don’t know. You have to put it in that one cuz it goes around this bend radius. Yeah. But I do kind of like the location of it at that it’s literally in the back so less likely to get iced by somebody. Also nice advertising cuz you have a big crossroads here as well. Mhm. Yeah. I mean I I think I think it’s I like this. I prefer this one over but there’s also we’ll go ahead and mention um yeah the towing side of things. This would not be a fun site to get to. No. But I think towing with electric vehicles, like there’s going to be towing specific sites at places. Yeah. And um this is more for urban charging. Um but this is really cool. So I believe this was the first ever Walmart location. Okay. And that might be why the screens look different. They may not have updated them to the newer ones yet. Should be able to do that remotely. Um but I can’t imagine this would be the new way to activate a charger. This was bad. Yeah, it was. The fact that you have to plug in to then get the QR code to pop up and then set up your account, put in your email, put in your credit card info. There’s no way you could do that in enough time. No, you time out. I mean, we timed out regardless and we didn’t really actually run out of time on the charger end. We ran out of time on the on the truck end, but maybe not. Yeah, I don’t. It just faulted. Don’t know. So, that’s that. Always more stories when you get to charging stations. I feel like we need to go to one more Walmart. Okay. just to get a sense. Yeah, you got to have three and you take the median and the pricing was the same here, right? Yeah. 42 cents. Yeah. Here is the same. Um, and I really think they Well, we’ll we’ll sum up with our thoughts, but that payment activation trash. Welcome to our third and final Walmart location. We’ve gone to all of them in like the northeast area of Dallas. We’re at another one. Don’t know the city, but amazing how concentrated they are. This is amazing. an eight stall location with four Alpronic Hyper 400s. But Alyssa, they must have watched our video. They were so quick to respond to your complaints. It’s amazing. Yeah, they’ve put the Knacks on the correct side. Yeah. How about that? Yeah. Nice. So now, problem solved. Problem solved. Well, I I guess I don’t know if this is how they started or if this is a newer site or an older site, I guess what I’m trying to say. I don’t know cuz they’re all new. All right. All right. Well, let’s let’s get this thing this party started here cuz we got to top this up. We got to drive to Austin and we’re going to stop at a few other stations, not Walmart ones. But in we go with the Amphanol. Let’s just check the cable type again. Yeah, same cables. Uh we went by Amphanol’s building here, which was cool. And also SK Signit’s building. So, we felt the signate surge. Felt it. My uh app doesn’t work still. Putting a lot of $35 charges on your card. I know. I’m surprised it’s not gotten angry. Yeah. A lot of times you’ll get like fraud if you do a bunch of charging. I’ve had that happen on like some of our I90 surges. Yeah. All the the switch gear up here go. Yep. Lots of clicking. Lots of clicking. Okay. So, also in the back of a Walmart parking lot, no opportunity for pullthroughs here. So, I think that’s it’s not like they took away any pullthrough opportunity for towing stuff. Uh, looks like charging is working just fine, but they really need to put credit card readers on. In case you haven’t watched any bit of this video yet, everything’s looking nice. Ramping up 130 kW. That’s about all the Cybertruck wants at 60% state of charge or so. It’s just traffic getting over here. It sucked. Yeah, it was I took a little nap. That was good. Yeah, I had uh autopilot take us over here and almost crashed three or four times, but FSD Yeah, FSD did not crash. So we are good. All right. So let’s take a look at the electrical situation. Same switch gear and what kind of So another ABB transformer 2 megawatt transformer. So they have plenty of headroom at this site. Can we see any extra conduits around here? I don’t think there would be room for another switch gear box unless maybe on the other side. Cadillac L here not charging. They probably didn’t want to download the Walmart app probably or they had issues. Why am I so annoyed with that? Or they work here or they just didn’t need to charge. They just maybe just need didn’t need to charge. Yeah, but they wanted to support the charging end of the Maybe they charge at home. Maybe that’s what they do. Yep. Okay, so I think that pretty much sums it up. Um Walmart’s going hardcore. So imagine this at every Walmart or at least the majority of Walmarts. That’d be pretty awesome. Yeah, I mean they really are. I mean, they’ve they’ve chosen great chargers so far. Uh we’re still not sure whether they’re going to if if they’re going to stick with these or if they’re going to go with other companies, but I’m happy with the Alpies. Yeah, me too. And so far so good. I mean, I mean, I think they could go with the split system or all-in- ones and be just fine regardless, right? Um I really think they have to work on their activation method. And I think because this is more of an urban charging location, I would say less corridor like especially for this site, doing the non-liquid cooled cables, probably more reliable and probably less expensive, right? And they still boost to give you the big power and they match most cars charging curve. That might be an okay solution. Yeah. Yeah. I I think our only biggest gripe is just um having to use the app. It’s like I’m sure if you went over and got gas over at the Walmart gas station, you don’t need to download an app in order to pay. Oh, that’s a good question. Yeah, I doubt it. I would highly doubt it. But, um, it’s not it’s not good. It’s not used. It’s not a completely user friendly. So, then let’s imagine they do put credit card readers on them cuz I heard they might. Okay. Then what’s the review of the Walmart charging network? Great. Really good. I mean, yeah, this has been pretty pretty seamless overall once we got everything working within the app. I mean, it it didn’t not I mean, it always worked with my phone at least. So, it was and it was pretty quick handshake times and recharging. So, if you think about like where we were um earlier this year, let let’s say one year ago, we had zero 400 kW chargers in the US. Yeah. Now Walmart’s putting in 400 kW big boy chargers everywhere. Wally world for the win. Holy smokes. It’s like night and day. Uh infrastructure is just skyrocketing, which is going to make owning an electric car more appealing. And hopefully one day you won’t need a tax credit to convince you to buy one. I certainly don’t. And uh I think it is the correct choice for so many people. Especially this is going to help a lot of folks who don’t have access to home charging. I’d like to see the pricing come down. Walmart’s known for having inexpensive pricing. I would say the pricing’s on the high end of being Walmart reasonable. Would you agree? Right. Yeah. It’s just a little bit high. It’s not tremendously too bad. I mean, if it was Mercedes or Ayana, we’d be happy with it, but Walmart, you think cheaper pricing. You would think that either match or be cheaper. Yeah. Yeah. And uh got to be competitive. I I think 35 cents per kilowatt hour. if Walmart can hit that. All right, people are coming here nonstop. So, with that said, we’re going to leave you guys now from the Walmart charging locations. Let us know what you think about hitting other ones. Let us know if you have issues or you have great experiences. Um, I really think they can’t add payment terminals quickly enough. And after that, I mean, man, they are they’re doing this right and they’re going fast and they’re going big. They’re doing the Walmart thing. So, also shout out to our buddy Tom at State of Charge who has a contact at Walmart. They’ve never reached out to us, but if they want to, feel free. We’d love to meet those people and make a video with them and figure out what the heck happened to spark up this EV charging program as quickly as it seems to be going. Um, I think this is this is like a a B situation. Like out of a ABC D, I give it a B. Once there’s credit card readers, A. Yeah. Thanks for watching. See you in another one again soon. Bye-bye.
Kyle and Alyssa are in the DFW area of Texas exploring the new Walmart EV charging network. Enjoy!
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