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As EVgo prepares to break ground on its most powerful public chargers ever deployed by a third-party network — Tesla V4 Superchargers capable of delivering up to 500 kW and 200 miles of range in 15 minutes — the company's construction playbook reveals where those chargers will land first: the parking lots of America's grocery stores. The deployment, which is scheduled to begin this fall, gives concrete urgency to a partnership the company announced with Meijer in November 2024: up to 480 new DC fast-charging stalls at 60 Meijer locations across Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.

For EV drivers in a six-state Midwest footprint — and for anyone weighing an EV purchase decision — those stalls are no longer a distant promise. They are now tied to the most significant hardware upgrade in third-party public charging history.

Independent research published in June 2026 confirms why pairing the most powerful chargers with grocery sites makes engineering and business sense. The Transportation Energy Institute's 2026 State of Retail-First EV Charging report, which analyzed more than 4,000 DC fast-charging stations across networks including EVgo, Electrify America, and ChargePoint using Q4 2025 session data, found that stations near a grocery store average 42 sessions per day — nearly five times the dataset median of nine sessions per day. Only 6.7% of stations in the dataset sit near a grocery store, meaning the utilization gap is large and the supply gap is larger. John Eichberger, executive director of TEI, noted in the TEI report release that EV drivers are increasingly charging where they already live, shop, work, and spend time — a trend reshaping how the industry thinks about deployment.

EVgo's Grocery Strategy Is the Infrastructure the V4 Supercharger Needs

EVgo announced on August 5, 2026 that it will deploy "EVgo Superchargers" — branded and owned units using Tesla's V4 hardware — across its metropolitan network, with construction scheduled to begin this autumn. The V4 hardware represents a generational leap over the V3 units that powered the first wave of high-speed public DC fast charging: the V4 cabinet raises the per-site voltage ceiling from 500 volts to 1,000 volts, doubles the peak output from 250 kW to 500 kW per post, and powers eight stalls from a single cabinet rather than four.

The timing matters for grocery-anchored sites specifically. Each new EVgo Supercharger location is expected to feature up to 20 stalls. A grocery parking lot — where EVgo's Meijer deal, its January 2026 Kroger expansion, and its August 2026 Brixmor agreement have already established a deployment pipeline — is precisely the type of high-dwell-time location that EVgo and Tesla identified as the target for the first Supercharger for Business rollout.

What a V4 Supercharger Does That a V3 Cannot

For a technically literate driver evaluating whether to buy an EV, the difference between a V3 and a V4 Supercharger is not cosmetic. DC fast charging works by having the charging station's power electronics convert alternating current from the grid into direct current and deliver it straight to the vehicle battery, bypassing the car's own onboard charger. The station's hardware sets the ceiling.

The V3 Supercharger cabinet's 500-volt output ceiling has been a documented constraint for a growing class of 800-volt vehicles — including the Hyundai IONIQ 5, Kia EV6, Porsche Taycan, and BMW iX — that are architecturally capable of far higher charge rates but were physically limited to what the station could deliver. The V4 cabinet eliminates that constraint. Its 180–1,000 volt range fully unlocks 800-volt vehicle architectures, and at full 500 kW output, the hardware is capable of adding approximately 200 miles of range in 15 minutes to a compatible vehicle, according to the August 5 EVgo announcement.

Beyond raw power, the V4 introduces two interoperability advances relevant to every EV driver who is not already a Tesla owner. The integrated Magic Dock connector handles both NACS (the North American Charging Standard, now formally designated SAE J3400) and CCS vehicles natively, without the external adapters required at many existing stations, according to EVwire's announcement coverage. The cable is also 3 meters (9.8 feet) in length — longer than the V3 cable — specifically to accommodate the varied charging-port locations on non-Tesla vehicles that can make pulling in to a standard stall awkward, per Tesla Supercharger for Business specifications. NACS has been adopted by virtually every major automaker selling EVs in North America, with more than 35 NACS-equipped models expected by end of 2026. As of Q2 2026, EVgo's own network carries more than 3 million Tesla vehicles in the US as potential users, and the company has targeted more than 500 NACS connectors installed across its network by the end of this year.

What EVgo and Meijer Have Already Built — and What Is Still Coming

The Meijer partnership was announced in November 2024 as an expansion of a relationship that began in March 2021. To date, EVgo has opened 24 public fast-charging stalls at six Meijer stores in Michigan and Ohio. The expanded deal is structured in two tranches: up to 30 new stations by the end of 2026, and another 30 by the end of 2027, for a total of up to 60 new locations — translating to as many as 480 additional stalls across Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.

Meijer currently offers EV charging at more than 35% of its 500-plus store locations. When the full EVgo expansion is complete, the proportion will rise considerably. The retailer's Director of Environmental Compliance and Sustainability, Erik Petrovskis, described EV charging access as an essential pillar of Meijer's broader sustainability goals, and framed the EVgo partnership as part of the company's ongoing environmental stewardship. Meijer previously reduced its corporate-wide carbon emissions by 50% ahead of its internal deadline, according to the company, citing the EVgo-Meijer expanded partnership.

How Does EVgo Charge while You Shop?

EVgo's business model at grocery locations relies on a straightforward time-activity alignment: the average grocery trip in the US lasts between 30 and 60 minutes, which, at 100 kW or more of effective charging rate, is enough to add meaningful range — typically 50 to more than 100 miles — to most mainstream electric vehicles. Consumer Reports has documented that roughly half of drivers who stop at a fast-charging site visit a nearby store or restaurant during the session, according to data cited by EVgo in its Kroger expansion announcement. When the charging station is already in the grocery parking lot, that overlap requires no extra planning.

Consumer demand on EVgo's network has grown by more than 700% over the last three years, according to the company's Q2 2026 earnings release, which recorded 5,380 stalls in operation as of June 30, 2026 — a 24% year-over-year increase — and charging network revenue of $61 million for the quarter, the company's 18th consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year charging revenue growth.

Grocery-Retail Buildout as a Three-Partner Network

The Meijer deal is part of a coordinated retail-charging expansion that gives EVgo one of the densest grocery-anchored footprints of any public charging network in the country.

In January 2026, the company announced an expansion of its Kroger partnership, committing to deploy at least 150 DC fast-charging stalls per year through 2035 at Kroger Family of Stores locations — a banner that includes Kroger, Fred Meyer, Harris Teeter, King Soopers, Smith's Food and Drug, and others. The first site under the expanded program is already operational in Salt Lake City, Utah. Additional locations are targeted for Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Washington, and other states, with each location receiving up to 16 high-power stalls.

In August 2026, EVgo and Brixmor Property Group — a real estate investment trust operating more than 360 open-air shopping centers, most of them grocery-anchored — announced an expansion that will add more than 500 new EVgo stalls across at least 90 Brixmor centers in Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The first expanded-partnership site is expected at Barn Plaza near Philadelphia. When complete, more than 25% of Brixmor's portfolio will host EVgo chargers.

Across all three programs, the combined potential is well over 1,000 new fast-charging stalls anchored to everyday retail — before accounting for concurrent agreements with automakers and rideshare operators.

Federal Backing and a Corrected Figure

Underpinning the entire expansion is a $1.25 billion guaranteed loan from the U.S. Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, closed in December 2024 under the Title 17 Clean Energy Financing Program. The facility consists of $1.05 billion in principal and up to $193 million in capitalized interest, per the DOE project summary. EVgo received its first drawdown of $75 million in January 2025 and has an amended version of the facility currently in place. The loan is intended to support the construction of approximately 7,500 new DC fast-charging stalls by 2029, bringing EVgo's total owned-and-operated network to at least 10,000 stalls and enabling the company to more than triple its network footprint. EVgo's longer-range target is 15,000 stalls energized nationwide by the end of 2029, per Q2 2026 results.

Why the Midwest, and Why Now?

The Meijer deal's geographic focus — Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and the rest of the six-state Midwest footprint — reflects a deliberate pivot toward markets that public charging investment has historically underserved. While coastal states and Sun Belt corridors have drawn the majority of EV infrastructure spending, EV adoption in Midwestern states is accelerating, and the charging infrastructure has lagged behind vehicle sales. Grocery-based deployment addresses this by meeting drivers where existing behavioral patterns already concentrate foot traffic.

EVgo President Dennis Kish put it plainly in the original Meijer announcement: fast charging should be an effortless part of drivers' daily routines, and nothing is more routine than a grocery store trip. With V4 Supercharger hardware entering the build queue this fall, that routine errand is about to become meaningfully more powerful.

Will the Reliability Gap Narrow?

The industry's broader challenge — and EVgo's specific challenge — remains charger reliability. Consumer Reports has documented that roughly one in five public charging sessions encounters a problem, and EVgo launched its ReNew program in 2023 specifically to address aging infrastructure. The company says it has cut average station repair time in half since Q1 2023. Deploying V4 Supercharger hardware — built on Tesla's manufacturing infrastructure with an efficiency rating above 96% — at high-utilization grocery sites represents both a reliability and a throughput upgrade. Whether it closes the gap meaningfully will become visible in utilization data over the next 12 months.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I charge my electric car while grocery shopping in the Midwest?

Meijer stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Kentucky already host EVgo fast-charging stalls at a growing number of locations — 24 stalls across six stores today, with 30 more stations expected by the end of 2026 and another 30 by end-2027. The EVgo charger locator shows real-time availability at Meijer and other retail sites.

How fast is a V4 Supercharger compared to what most public chargers offer today?

Most public DC fast chargers currently deliver between 50 kW and 350 kW. Tesla's V4 Supercharger hardware, which EVgo is deploying this fall, is rated at up to 500 kW per stall and supports 1,000-volt vehicle architectures. At full output, it can add approximately 200 miles of range in about 15 minutes to a compatible vehicle — roughly twice as fast as the V3 generation. Actual charge rates depend on the vehicle's own battery management system and state of charge.

Do I need a Tesla to use an EVgo Supercharger?

No. EVgo Superchargers will be equipped with Tesla's Magic Dock technology, which allows both NACS-native vehicles (including Teslas, and new models from Ford, GM, Rivian, Honda, and most other major automakers) and vehicles with the older CCS connector to charge at the same stall without an external adapter, per the August 5 Supercharger announcement. More than 35 NACS-equipped non-Tesla models are expected to be on North American roads by end of 2026, according to EVgo Q2 results.

Why do grocery-store charging stations see so much higher usage than other public chargers?

A 2026 report from the Transportation Energy Institute, which analyzed more than 4,000 DC fast-charging stations using Q4 2025 session data, found that stations near a grocery store average 42 sessions per day — nearly five times the dataset median of nine. Researchers attribute this to dwell-time alignment: a grocery trip typically lasts 30 to 60 minutes, which is precisely the window in which a DC fast charger can deliver meaningful range. The fact that the errand itself provides something useful to do while charging removes the idling friction that reduces utilization at standalone charging stations.