Where EV Drivers Charge: What 4,105 Stations Reveal About Retail Location and Performance
This spring, Electric Era asked a question we hadn't directly addressed in our quarterly reports: does what's around a charging station predict how much it gets used?
We partnered with them and the Transportation Energy Institute to find out. Paren provided the underlying datasets — station characteristics, utilization, our reliability scores, and nearby amenity data — across 4,105 DC fast charging stations (100 kW or higher) active in Q4 2025. Electric Era led the analysis. The result is the 2026 State of Retail-First EV Charging.
Here's what stood out.
The dataset
The report covers open-network DC fast charging stations from Electrify America, EVgo, ChargePoint, Ford, IONNA, Applegreen, Red-E, Shell Recharge, FLO, Blink, and Electric Era. Tesla Supercharger session data is available through Paren but was outside the scope of this report.
For each station, we mapped every business within 0.1 miles to one of 17 amenity types — from quick-serve restaurants and grocery stores to pharmacies, malls, and lodging. The primary performance metric is sessions per day (SPD). The dataset median is 9 SPD.
Takeaway 1: Amenity density drives EV charging utilization
Stations with no amenities within 0.1 miles see a median of 3 sessions per day. Stations with at least one nearby amenity see 9 — a 3× gap just from having something next door.
The effect scales with density. Stations with 11 or more amenities within 0.1 miles see a median of 28 sessions per day, more than 7× the isolated baseline. A standalone Walmart performs well. A Walmart in a power center with a pharmacy, coffee shop, and bank does materially better.
Drivers aren't just looking for somewhere to be. They're looking for options — and the data reflects that clearly.
Takeaway 2: EV charging site selection — grocery is the biggest opportunity
Of the 17 amenity types in the dataset, grocery is the top performer at 42 median sessions per day — nearly 5× the dataset baseline. The dwell-time match is close to perfect: a typical grocery run takes 25–40 minutes, which lines up almost exactly with how long a 100 kW+ charge takes.
What makes this more significant is the penetration number. Only 6.7% of stations in the dataset sit near a grocery store. The highest-performing amenity type is one of the least represented in today's network.
Shopping malls follow at 35 median SPD, with station penetration of just 3.7%. Pharmacies come in at 37 median SPD. Health, fashion retail, and other destination categories round out the top performers — all at under 25% station penetration.
This is a straightforward site-selection signal: the amenity types that correlate most strongly with ev charging station utilization are the ones that have attracted the least charging infrastructure so far.
Takeaway 3: EV charging reliability overrides location
This is the finding we think deserves the most attention.
Stations with a Paren reliability score of 90 or above see a median of 17 sessions per day. Stations below 90 see a median of 3. That's a 6× gap driven entirely by charger health, independent of what's nearby.
The report includes a case study that illustrates the failure mode directly. A station in Philadelphia sits at the center of a dense urban neighborhood — 21 amenities within 0.1 miles, including a grocery store, restaurants, and specialty retail. On paper, it's one of the best-located stations in the dataset. It sees 5.7 sessions per day. Its reliability score is 69.8.
The mechanism is well understood. Unreliable stations get deprioritized or removed from routing apps. Drivers who encounter a failure don't retry — they remember. A great location with a broken charger is effectively invisible.
Paren's reliability score accounts for successful sessions with and without retries, failed charge attempts, and station downtime over a rolling period. It's the same metric we use in our monthly CPO leaderboard and in our quarterly state-of-industry reports, and it's the one that shows up most consistently in utilization outcomes.
What the data says, plainly
Retail context drives utilization. The effect is consistent across geographies, operator types, and amenity categories. It's not a coastal phenomenon. It shows up wherever drivers have options nearby.
The highest-performing site types — grocery, malls, pharmacies — are under-represented relative to their performance signal. These aren't saturated markets. They're deployment gaps.
And reliable hardware is not a differentiator. It's the floor. A well-located station with poor reliability will underperform a mediocre-location station with excellent uptime. The data doesn't reward one without the other.
For more on how reliability and utilization are trending across the US network, see our Q1 2026 State of the Industry Report.
Join us on June 30
Electric Era, Paren, and the Transportation Energy Institute are hosting a live webinar on June 30 to walk through the report findings and take questions.
Access the underlying data
The findings in this report are drawn from Paren's station-level dataset covering utilization, reliability, network performance, and nearby amenity context across the US fast charging network. If you're a CPO, infrastructure investor, retailer, or automaker and want to work with this data directly — through our API, our reports, or a custom analysis — explore the Paren platform or get in touch.
The 2026 State of Retail-First EV Charging report is published by Electric Era in partnership with Paren and the Transportation Energy Institute. The analysis covers 4,105 DC fast charging stations (100 kW+) active in Q4 2025 across the open US charging network.
