Dealership EV Charging Challenges: Knocking Down Barriers

If you want your auto dealership to achieve maximum benefit from your EV charging operation with minimal hassle during installation, you need a partner with next-level know-how in planning and problem solving.

Our experts answer your questions about how to knock down the common dealership EV charging challenges and how we address your unique needs with flexible, customized solutions.

The biggest challenge commonly faced for many auto dealerships is matching their electrical availability to their OEM’s requirements.

The dealership may be prepared to meet those mandates, but the site from an electrical standpoint doesn’t allow them to do that. These are commonly referred to as “site constraints.”

Let’s say the OEM tells a dealership that they must be able to charge cars at 180 kW. To do this “direct to grid,” there’s a good chance the dealership will have to upgrade the site’s power capacity.

This could kickstart a lengthy process with the local utility, which may need to bring in new transformer equipment.

The more remote the site is, the higher that cost could be.

Because Hypercharge has a wide range of hardware solutions, we can get creative when we take on site constraints and do it in the most cost-effective way possible.

For example, we can sometimes avoid upgrades by using battery-integrated solutions. With these EV chargers, you can achieve that 180 kW output, but don’t need the same amount of pull from the grid.

This lets a dealership satisfy the OEM’s mandates while saving money on installation and with less site disruption, as well.

It depends on the particular circumstances, but here’s a real-world example to illustrate:

We recently partnered with a dealership whose OEM required a lot of EV charging equipment.

Many dealerships don’t need more than about 600 amps on site, but this one was facing an upgrade to 1600 amps to support the EV chargers plus everything else that draws power.

Our solution: swap multiple Level 2 chargers for one DC fast charger, and traditional grid-tied chargers for battery-integrated solutions.

We cut their electrical ask from 1600 amps to less than 1000 amps, and they received full approval from their OEM!

Let’s say you want an EV charger output of up to 200 kW, which would normally require a lot of power from the grid.

When someone plugs into a battery-integrated DC fast charger, they’re going to receive that power very fast—up to the full 200 kW—but the charger might only pull 30 kW from the grid.

It’s constantly filling the battery at 30 kW so the power is available when someone needs it.

Think of it like a fuel tank that’s connected directly to the grid: it fills slowly and dispenses quickly. You can add another battery pack later and to have even more capacity.

This lets dealerships work around their time-of-use rates by charging batteries off peak, which can reduce demand charges.

In addition to our customized charging strategies, we encourage dealers to get the most out of their charging software, especially those operating EV charging stations at scale.

For example, when someone on your service team plugs into a charger, where does your accounting team want that data go?

How will you track it and assign it to an account internally?

How will you recover the cost if you plan to do that—on the service bill?

We can help you work through those questions and integrate the charging software with dealer management systems.

Even if you don’t plan to turn EV charging into a source of revenue, you can use our software to get helpful information and fit EV charging into your business.