All around the world, aspiring businesses are building EV charging stations. They hope to become the new gas station of the 21st century, and they often even design chargers that look like gas stations. They make a lot of mistakes because of too much “gasoline thinking,” but perhaps the biggest mistake is on the way by missing something important from the gasoline era, the reverse of the shift that happened from full-serve to self-serve.

Today, all charging is self-serve, for obvious reasons. It’s very easy to plug and unplug your own car, after all. And you have to drive it to the charger. But a huge change is coming before the 2030s: Most EVs will be able to drive themselves to the charger, but they can’t yet plug themselves in . This changes a great deal about the process.

Tesla, of course, regularly promises their cars will soon be able to safely drive owners and robotaxi passengers anywhere with no supervision. They haven’t pulled that off yet (not even with the small number of cars in Texas they are calling unsupervised) and may not for some time. It’s a much simpler problem to manage driving around at low speed in parking lots, down back streets or at night, in a limited set of locations. That’s something it’s very likely they will pull off soon. And it will be released to even the old cars, already on the road. Since Tesla has sold more EVs than everybody else, this means soon, and suddenly, the majority of EVs will be able to drive themselves to charging. Other vendors will have to follow suit, even if only in their new cars. This won’t be a slowly deployed future feature, it will happen for most of the existing EV fleet.

You can bet that once Tesla has it, they will push it--who wouldn’t want a car where you never worry about charging--so other OEMs will be forced to follow suit.

Of course, it’s ideal if there is some sort of robotic plug-in at the station. That can include robotic arm at the stalls, or a single robot arm on a rail over the stalls that zips back and forth handling the plug. Some day, the charge port will move to the back, and the car--being a robot already--will back itself it precisely to insert the plug, making the cost of station upgrade minimal for the new cars.

But there’s a simpler solution that comes to us from gas stations: Full Serve. A full serve gasoline fill-up costs about $2 to $4 more than a self-serve one. Humans working at full serve EV charging stations might make the same, though their job is even easier. And they don’t have to check the oil, though they might clean the windshield.

The New Charging Experience

This completely upends the charging experience by making it no experience at all . If your car knows you won’t use it for a short while, and it needs a charge, it will just wander off and get a charge. You won’t even know how it happens. Your car will just be always full, like magic. You will barely have to think about it. You can’t make a better experience, other than by lowering the price, which will happen when the robot plug-in arrives.

This could apply to people who can’t put charging at their home or office. As long a there’s a full-serve station within a mile or two, in the middle of the night, your car will wander off down deserted streets at low speed, and fill up. No need to pay $1,500 to install charging in your house if you don’t want to (though you will get a much better price on electricity there, so it’s probably worth it.) The typical car needs about 60 charges per year, so at $3/charge, full-serve would cost only $180 extra for the service, but they also tend to jack up the price of the energy at public charge stations.

If the driver does need to think about charging, they can act as though every single parking space within range of a full-serve charger is a charging stall. Park where they want for enough time and the car will charge itself.

The night charging need not be expensive high-speed charging. A corporation parking lot 1/2 mile from my house has 70 level 2 stalls that sit idle all night which might be converted to this purpose, and they could serve much of the area.

Charger Placement and Economics

People installing charging today debate what “amenities” they should put at the station for the people who are waiting. That’s a mistake, since self-serve chargers should not have amenities , they should be amenities for nearby destinations. With full-serve, you just need to make sure that there are destinations, not amenities, within a short and easy drive. All sorts of destinations: Restaurants, malls, retail, movies etc. When drivers go to visit these in the course of their lives, their cars will trundle over to the nearby full-serve or robot-serve. It will be in an otherwise deserted and unpopular place , because drivers never visit it personally. Put it where the land is cheapest, or free, or where it’s easiest to get the high-power electrical service.

Many cars will even be picky about when and where they charge. They’ll go on the internet and look for stations offering a great discount, and of course they will reserve a space before they go. They’ll wait if need be (where they were parked.) Every day in summer, cars will wait for the call, “Big solar surplus! Come get energy for 5 cents/kWh!” Most solar panels can’t use all their noon power, and the grid has too much solar at a summer noon; they want rid of it. People will also put stations next to transformers or generators where the power is cheap (Today, the cost of distribution fees on the energy are often higher than the generation costs.) It could be worth your car going a few miles to avoid distribution costs if it has the time. It also means the cars put no load on the grid.

Should V2G exist, where cars loan their batteries to the grid during peak demand, full-serve stations would also save the day, as cars would get an alert that V2G is needed, and drive to a V2G station to get plugged in and sell their energy.

Human-staffed full-serve stations won’t be full-serve all the time. Only when they can keep the employee (there is probably only one) fully occupied. Other times they will switch to self-serve. During the full-serve period they can get 99% utilization by advertising rates low enough to keep the cars coming. That includes the night shift, where most stations today sit idle. Plug jockey jobs won’t last long, though, since robots will arrive soon enough. A lot of stations would rather get higher utilization than sit idle at higher prices.

Full serve stations can offer other things, like car-wash services, vehicle inspections and more. Like gas station used to do, ironically. Your car is just always clean, and you only know how because you get a bill. The full serve staff could also put convenience store items like drinks and snacks in your car if you order them.

Of course, your car does have to know when you don’t need it for a while. But it already knows that when you sleep or work, and it won’t be hard to tell it. If it’s not sure, it will beep your phone to confirm. If it wanders off by accident, you can call it back with perhaps a 5 minute delay unless it went to a remote station for a great price.

It’s interesting to see all the problems solved by this, particularly in the robotic form:

  1. All the issues of getting charging for people who can’t install it in their own parking space, or who park on the curb.
  2. All the complexity and learning curves of charging.
  3. The cost of installing charging in your own home.
  4. Load balancing the use of the grid by EVs.
  5. Making use of the surplus renewable power when it comes.
  6. Eliminating the land costs of charging stations, and the difficulty of getting high power electrical service to them.
  7. Solving what else to put at a charging station--either nothing, or services for the car, not the driver.
  8. Reducing the demand for expensive super-fast charging, since drivers aren’t aware of the time taken in most cases (or even that charging is happening) and only a few drivers need that. If you’re barely aware of charging, you don’t care how fast it is.
  9. Assuring high utilization rates for all stalls. If there’s a car around which needs charge, and an empty stall, invite the car over, possibly even waiving the plug-in fee rather than going idle.
  10. Charging of robotaxis is an obvious application.
  11. Full-serve stations may be popular with people who don’t have a drive-to-charge car, particularly the disabled, or those who like having an attendant watching. Those will need to be walking distance to destinations, though, or have “amenities.” This won’t work for vehicles with trailers.

Driver-based Plugging Service

There is also an interesting opportunity at mixed full-serve/self-serve stations to reward self-serve customers for doing the plugging, so an attendant is not needed. If there is regular flow of self-serve customers to the station, they can be rewarded for plugging and unplugging full-serve cars. Rewards could be monetary (including charging credit) or priority access to stations or other things. Indeed, many drivers would be happy to do a favor for another EV owner and resent payment, since it’s a pretty easy thing to do when arriving or leaving. Of course, service from drivers might involve some delay, but Tesla strongly encourages drivers to navigate to charging, so it knows their arrival times in advance, and also their charge completion times. As such, drive-to-charging cars can time their arrivals. There is a tiny risk a car might wait for an unplug, but not at a busy time.

For some cars, they will only be able to drive-to-charging within a parking lot, not on city streets. That’s still useful as you might find malls, airports and other large parking lots featuring a full-serve station. Drivers would park their car in the regular large parking lot, and while shopping, working or otherwise occupied, their car would move through the lot to get a charge.