• Revel opened its first EV charging station in California on Monday. 
• The hub is located in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood and offers 12 320-kilowatt plugs. 
• The New York-based startup plans to open 125 more chargers in the San Francisco Bay Area in the next 12 months, plus expand in its home market.

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Brooklyn-based electric mobility startup Revel has big plans to expand its EV charging infrastructure outside of its home city. That started in earnest on Monday with the opening of the firm’s first charging hub in California. 

Located in San Francisco’s Mission district, the new station features 12 EV chargers rated to dispense a healthy 320 kilowatts each. Half of the units have the Tesla-style plugs that the auto industry is slowly adopting, while the other half use Combined Charging System (CCS) hardware that’s used by just about every non-Tesla EV on the road today. 

“At Revel, our goal is to build urban fast charging that all EV drivers can rely on,” Revel cofounder and COO Paul Suhey said at a ribbon-cutting event on Monday. “Why is that important? Well, without widespread access to fast charging, EV adoption will stop. It will slow. Rideshare electrification will stop. It will slow.”

Photo by: Tim Levin/InsideEVs

Revel is unique in the charging space in that it’s focused on building out stations in America’s densest cities. In San Francisco, where there are tons of EVs and many fast-charging stations already, Revel wants to reliably set its locations apart, Suhey told InsideEVs. It’s an admirable goal in an industry perennially plagued by glitchy or outright broken plugs. 

“You need to have the confidence that when you show up, you will have access to a charger, you’ll be able to seamlessly initiate a session, you’ll charge as fast as your EV will allow and you’ll get in and out quickly,” he said. 

In part, that means focusing on bigger stations with many chargers. That will help reassure drivers that a plug will probably be available when they need it. 

Photo by: Tim Levin/InsideEVs

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie speaks at Revel’s ribbon-cutting on Monday. 

“A primary focus of our sites is building sites with more chargers, sites that have eight, 12, 24, 30 chargers,” Suhey said. “So really, charging-dedicated gas stations of the future. Not just charging that happens to be at an amenity, where you have two chargers in a parking lot that’s sort of an afterthought.”

Revel operates 88 chargers across five locations in New York City, including the recent addition of a 24-stall hub by John F. Kennedy Airport. In New York, Revel also runs an electric rideshare service that helps guarantee the utilization of its chargers. It won’t bring its bright-blue Teslas and Kias to the San Francisco Bay Area, since the region is already home to plenty of EV drivers, Revel CEO Frank Reig told InsideEVs in February. 

Indeed, at Monday’s event, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said that over the past two years electric cars have made up one-third of the city’s vehicle sales. 

Photo by: Tim Levin/InsideEVs

Within the next 12 months, Revel plans to open seven more stations in the Bay Area for a total of 125 additional charging plugs. That includes two more in San Francisco, two in Oakland, two by San Francisco’s airport and one in downtown San Jose. With more charging hubs planned in New York, including a massive 60-stall location in Queens, Revel aims to operate 300 chargers in the city by the end of 2025. 

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