Man Takes His Ev To Charge At Walmart. Then He Notices A Major Design Flaw: ‘Why Can’t We Build Chargers?’

A Twitch streamer pulled into a Walmart parking lot to charge his electric car and posted a 12-second clip asking a question many EV owners have asked while standing in the rain: Why don’t EV chargers have canopies the way gas pumps do? 

The answer has to do with history, safety, and the looming arrival of a new generation of charging stations that will have all the features he asks for and more.

The clip was posted by KvX_Ghost (@kvx_ghost), a Twitch gamer whose channel on TikTok is mostly stream clips. It has drawn more than 9,600 views. 

In the video, KvX_Ghost speaks to camera from his car while parked at a Walmart charger. 

“You know, owning an electric car is nice, but why can’t we build chargers with covers like a gas station?” he says.

Why Most EV Chargers Don’t Have Canopies

Kirby Brooks56 answered, “Because most of them are add-ons to existing businesses. They simply converted parking spots to charging stations.”

It’s true that so far in the U.S., most public chargers are add-ons inside the existing footprint of a host business or rest area, without major new structures added. The Department of Energy’s (DoE’s) Alternative Fuels Data Center sets out the model for what it calls Level 1 and Level 2 chargers, which make up the bulk of public stations, which “should typically be located where vehicle owners are highly concentrated and parked for long periods of time, such as shopping centers, airports, hotels, government offices, and other businesses.”

Counterintuitively, a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory technical brief for the DoE found that retrofit installs are “substantially” more expensive per port than building EV infrastructure into new construction. What retrofits do is save land, permitting, and time, and hosts of retrofitted chargers already likely have parking, a grid connection, and foot traffic.

A commenter, ThatCrasian, argued that gas stations have canopies because a driver is at the pump with a flammable-liquid hose, while EV charging doesn’t pose the same risk.

It sounds intuitively right, but the regulatory record doesn’t quite back it up. The California Fire Code’s chapter on gas stations, for example, describes pump canopies as “providing weather protection for the fuel islands” without requiring that they be built, and the fire-resistance rules only apply to canopies once they are installed. EV chargers don’t emit the flammable materials that gas pumps do, but a canopy at the pumps isn’t really a fire-safety feature in the first place.

EV Canopies: The Industry Is Already Building Them

The big-picture answer to KvX_Ghost’s question is that the EV-charging build-out is moving toward covered stations as it matures.

Operators doing new plazas from scratch rather than retrofits already include canopies in their design. The clearest example is Ionna, the joint venture among a collection of auto giants that is building a North American high-power charging network from scratch.

Ionna’s announcement describes stations “offering canopies wherever possible and amenities such as restrooms, food service and retail operations either nearby or within the same complex.” Its flagship “Rechargery” sites and shorter-stop “Rechargery Relay” sites are both described as covered and lit. The Truth About Cars reports the joint venture is targeting 30,000 sites by 2030.

Tesla has been moving in the same direction at its largest sites. The recent Lost Hills, California, “Oasis” Supercharger runs more than 160 V4 stalls under a combination of solar canopies and ground-mounted panels, with ten Megapacks of on-site battery storage that, per Tesla, let the station operate off-grid. Several commenters on the clip flagged that Tesla Supercharger sites in California have had solar canopies for a while. 

Several commenters answered KvX_Ghost’s “why” with the cost or retrofit answer. A handful pointed at Ionna or Tesla’s Supercharger canopies as proof that it is already being done. “Original gas stations didn’t have covers either,” one said. “Give it time.”

A larger cluster picked up his idea and ran with it. “Solar panels above too to less impact the grid!” wrote Cosmo. “Putting a cover over it with solar panels would be better,” added another 

KvX_Ghost defended his own line in the replies. He said he would still charge in the rain when he needed to but, as he put it, “would rather not.” He also pushed back on the argument that a canopy would be wasteful: “How is putting a cover over them not more efficient?”

Motor1 reached out to KvX_Ghost via TikTok direct message and to Walmart via contact form for additional comment. We’ll be sure to update this if either responds.