Originally Posted by
Dana Hull
A summer road trip in an electric car, fueled by the convenience store chain that has aggressively moved into the charging market.
The summer travel season has been marked by a resurgent global pandemic, flight delays, staffing shortages, $5-a-gallon gasoline in many parts of the U.S. and extreme weather. Despite all this, my teenage son and I were determined to take an American-history and democracy-focused road trip from Washington, D.C. through Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia that we’ve been trying to do for a few years. Not just any road trip: We would drive nearly 1,000 miles. We decided to rent a Tesla, which would reduce our fuel costs. But the next question, for us and so many American EV drivers, was: Where will we charge up, particularly in more rural parts of the country? For us and other EV travelers in the Mid-Atlantic, we were in luck: Sheetz.
Sheetz, the Pennsylvania-based chain of convenience stores, bills itself as a “mecca for people on the go.” It’s open around the clock, every day of the year, and sells all the fuel you could possibly need for a summer excursion: coffee and soda; Tastykakes and Necco Wafers; hot dogs and cheesy bacon tater bombs; made-to-order smoothies with the option of adding Red Bull. And, of course, gas. Today, 645 Sheetz stations operate across six states: Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia.
But over the last decade, Sheetz has worked to be more than a convenience store that sells gas. Nearly 14% of Sheetz locations offer electric vehicle charging through partnerships with Tesla Inc., Electrify America and EVgo. Tesla sells the most electric vehicles in the US, and Tesla-branded fast chargers known as Superchargers make up the vast majority—over 70%—of the EV chargers located at Sheetz. Similarly, charging sessions by Tesla owners vastly dwarf those by customers driving other electric cars.
“We’ve been very early adopters of EV charging,” says Trevor Walter, the vice president of petroleum supply management for Sheetz, during an interview. “We installed our first EV chargers in Pennsylvania in 2012.”