Hyundai Dealer's $418 EV Charge Exposes Public Charger Loophole

Michigan resident Stanley Kpenkann was driving home in a rented Chevy Bolt, running low on battery, and pulled into a Hyundai dealership to use its EVgo fast charger. Forty-four minutes later, he owed $418. The station was listed as public in the EVgo app. The rate was not a glitch.

The Math Behind a $418 Forty-Four-Minute Charge

Elder Hyundai was charging customers $5 per kWh, plus another $5 for every minute connected, both meters running simultaneously. On a 44-minute session, the time fee alone lands at roughly $220 before a single electron gets priced, and the $418 total follows from there.

Tesla Superchargers in Canada run $0.30–$0.45 per kWh; a typical Canadian DC fast-charge session lands at $25–$40. The Elder Hyundai session cleared that ceiling by more than ten times. The dealer's stated rationale, passed through the local ABC affiliate's report, was that the rates were meant to deter non-customers, not to generate revenue. A pricing scheme designed as a repellent is still a pricing scheme when it hits your credit card.

Dealers are private businesses, the EVgo listing was a courtesy, and $5/kWh is the price of not being a customer, that argument collapses on contact with the app. The moment a station carries a "public" tag in a network directory, the driver's expectation is set by the network, not the landowner, and EVgo, not the dealer, is the brand on the sign. If Elder Hyundai wanted to repel non-customers, the working tool is a padlock, not a $220 time meter dressed up as a rate card. When the app says public and the receipt says $418, the label is doing work the landowner never intended.

Dealer Chargers Were Never Really Public Infrastructure

Roughly 16,800 US public DC fast ports exist as of mid-2026, and a meaningful slice sit on dealer lots gated by store hours and operator discretion. Dealership chargers are almost all Level 2, which isn't exactly helpful, no one is going to leave a car at a dealership for hours. The EVgo unit at Elder Hyundai was the exception, a DC fast charger, publicly listed, gated only by whatever rate the dealer felt like typing in.

Thousands of dealership chargers appear in EVgo, ChargePoint, and PlugShare with a "public" tag and none of the pricing discipline the label implies. Store hours limit access. Security gates limit access. Dealer discretion sets the price. Neither the US nor Canada requires rate disclosure on the charger's screen before a session starts, the disclosure lives in app fine print, if it lives anywhere. That is a Wild West by omission, not design, but the outcome is the same for the driver holding the receipt.

Contrast this with the Tesla Supercharger network, which built its scale by bypassing dealers entirely and running one operator with one posted rate. Whatever else one thinks of Tesla, a Supercharger stall in Windsor and one in Winnipeg charge the same way, on the same app, at a rate the driver knows before the handle clicks. The dealer-EVgo model inverts every one of those defaults, different operators, different rates, different disclosure, same "public" pin on the map.

The comparison points make the gouging vivid rather than debatable. A Canadian public DC fast-charge session runs $25–$40. Toronto's city-operated Level 2 lots charge $1.50 per hour. The deeper cost breakdown lives in the province-by-province charging-cost guide. Elder Hyundai's session was priced roughly what a driver in Ontario would spend on ten fast-charges, for one.

The lasting damage is the first-time EV driver who reads this, decides public charging is a scam, and never plugs in outside their garage again. For condo and apartment dwellers without a home port, the shared-charging economics still favour electric by a wide margin at any realistic rate, the $5/kWh figure Electrek flagged is an outlier stapled to a national headline, not the median experience.

The Fix That Isn't Coming

EVgo was contacted to report the error, and the charge was refunded after WXYZ Detroit ran the story. Media pressure worked once. That is the exception, not the mechanism.

No US or Canadian regulator currently mandates rate transparency on the charger screen before a session begins at dealer-operated EVSE. Until one does, the practical position for any EV driver is unglamorous: treat dealership chargers as last-resort emergency infrastructure, and never authorise a session without reading the rate line first. The dealer-lot fringe is a small slice of Ontario's broader charging infrastructure, but it is the slice that produces headlines.

The policy ask is small and specific: mandatory rate disclosure on the physical unit at session start, in dollars per kWh and dollars per minute, before the plug locks. Not in the app. On the screen. The checkpoint to watch is Transport Canada's ZEV consultation cycle, if the next round closes without on-unit rate-disclosure language for third-party-hosted EVSE, the loophole is confirmed policy, not oversight. Until that shows up in a rulebook, the next $418 receipt is already being printed somewhere.