In the near future, EV drivers taking a road trip down Interstate-5, which runs from the top of Washington all the way through Southern California, will be able to charge up their vehicles while they stop at a Starbucks. The coffee chain is partnering with Mercedes-Benz to install its fast chargers at 100 Starbucks stores across the country, beginning along I-5, one of the busiest corridors in the country.
This isn’t Starbucks’s first foray into EV charging. There are 50 fast chargers at 15 Starbucks locations on the route between Seattle and Denver, as part of a partnership with Volvo and Chargepoint. Now, the collaboration with Mercedes-Benz expands the coffee chain’s aim to become the gas station of the future for EVs—and helps the car company with its own plans to build out its High-Power Charging network.
The Mercedes-Benz EV chargers are all 400 kW, which can get certain vehicles from a 10% to 80% charge in less than 20 minutes. (The speed at which an EV can charge varies based on its hardware, environmental factors like temperature, and more.) Currently, there are 13 Mercedes-Benz charging locations with 100 charging ports across the southeast, as part of a partnership with Buc-ee’s; it expects to have charging hubs at 30 Buc-ee’s locations by the end of 2024. The car company aims to have more than 2,500 of its high-powered chargers in 400 hubs by 2027.
Working with Starbucks will be an “important piece” of that portfolio, says Mercedes-Benz CEO Andrew Cornelia. It also helps address the experience of charging: Instead of just sitting around waiting for your EV to charge, you can stop in to Starbucks and get a coffee. “It’s about, how does charging fade into our everyday life seamlessly, elegantly, and delightfully? How do we focus more on what you do while you charge, and actually reframe the experience around charging?” he adds. “That’s what this partnership does.”
The companies are starting along I-5 because of how busy the corridor is, and because it cuts through California, which leads the country in terms of EV drivers. (It’s not clear yet how many of the 100 Starbucks stores to get Mercedes-Benz chargers will be along that route; the companies are still working to identify the best stores). The chargers will be positioned, Cornelia says, so that “if you were to drive from the Canadian border down to San Diego on a market average EV, you would not have any range anxiety.” The stations will have between four and 10 EV charging ports, depending on the need of each location.
The Mercedes-Benz EV chargers are open to any type of EV, and accept multiple payment methods, including an app (which can also access more than 85,000 charging stations across all major public EV charging networks), tap-to-pay, and credit card readers. The car company itself has four electric models. In 2023, Mercedes-Benz sold more than 220,000 fully electric vehicles—a 73% increase from the year prior, and equivalent to 11% of its overall sales.
As more drivers continue to turn to EVs, building up the charging network—and ensuring it’s reliable—is crucial. By 2030, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that we’ll need more than 28 million EV charger ports, for the more than 33 million EVs that could be on the road. Currently, the U.S. has about 188,000 public and private EV charging ports.
Mercedes-Benz will begin building its EV chargers at Starbucks locations on I-5 in the first half of 2025. From there, the companies will look for other heavily-trafficked corridors to figure out where it makes sense to put chargers—whether on the East Coast or other areas with charging deserts. “We’re not just looking to deploy chargers and put equipment in the ground,” Cornelia says. “We’re really looking to reimagine what EV charging is for the driver . . . a future where charging is as easy as ordering your favorite cup of coffee.”