The Missing Spec in Charging Site Design
For a decade, charging site design has optimized for throughput, dwell time, grid capacity, ADA compliance, and weatherproofing. Physical personal security at a charging stall has rarely appeared on that list.
A recent violent incident at a U.S. charging location has pushed the conversation into EV owner forums, automotive press, and now into CPO planning conversations. What caught people's attention wasn't the incident itself. It was a mechanical fact most drivers had never considered: a vehicle connected to a DC fast charger cannot simply drive away. It remains physically tethered until the session ends or someone manually disconnects it. That is a genuine design gap.
Every Charging Session is a Fixed Target
A gas station fill-up takes two to four minutes, and a driver can abandon the pump and leave at any moment, the nozzle disengages with a tug. A DC fast charging session runs 15 to 45 minutes, often longer, and the connector is mechanically locked to the vehicle for the duration, both to prevent theft-of-charge and to meet safety standards that guard against someone abruptly removing a live high-voltage connector.
That locking mechanism exists for good reason. But it also means every charging stall is, by design, a place where a driver is anchored longer than at almost any other roadside stop they make. Site design hasn't caught up with that reality.
What the Breakaway Connector Doesn't Solve
The most visible response so far is aftermarket breakaway connectors, sometimes marketed as "EVject" devices. The concept is simple: if a driver needs to leave immediately, they pull the connector free instead of waiting for the charger's normal unlock sequence. It's an intuitive fix, which is exactly why it's gaining traction. But CPOs should be clear-eyed about how narrow its scope actually is.
It activates only after the danger is already obvious. A breakaway connector helps in the moment a driver decides they must leave right now. It does nothing before that moment. It doesn't improve lighting, doesn't improve sightlines, and doesn't help a driver notice a threat earlier. It's a last step, not a safeguard.
It introduces an unresolved liability question. These are aftermarket parts, not engineered or tested by the charger manufacturer. Forcing a disconnect the hardware wasn't built for raises real questions: Does it damage the connector? Is there a fire or electrical risk? And if something goes wrong, is the driver liable, the device maker, or the CPO that owns the charger? None of that has been settled legally or technically.
It ignores the larger exposure window. A fast exit solves the last ten seconds of a bad situation. It does nothing for the ten minutes before that the actual charging session, when a driver is sitting still, often on their phone, in a spot chosen for grid access and parking efficiency rather than visibility or proximity to help. That window is where most of the real risk lives, and a breakaway connector never touches it.
Where The Real Leverage Sits: Site Selection and Layout
The connector isn't where CPOs have the most control. Site selection and layout are — decisions already made on every project, long before a charger is installed.
Sightlines and lighting. Stalls are often tucked behind buildings, dumpsters, or landscaping for curb appeal, not safety. That creates blind spots. And most site lighting is specced to answer one question,“can the driver read the screen?”, when the question that actually matters is: “can the driver see someone approaching from 30 feet away?”
Proximity to entrances and staffed areas. A charging bay near a busy retail entrance is a structurally safer location than one tucked into a back corner near a service road. Same hardware, same charger, a materially different exposure profile, based entirely on placement.
Stall orientation. The direction a vehicle faces while charging matters more than most site planners assume. A driver facing an open lot retains visibility of their surroundings. A driver facing a wall does not and that has nothing to do with the charger, only how the stall was laid out.
None of this requires new technology. Retail and hospitality have thought about parking lot safety; CPOs are just newer to thinking about a charging stall the same way: not as a quick stop, but as a place where someone sits still for a while.
Three Questions Every CPO Should Put to Their Vendor
Site design closes most of the gap, but not all of it. There's a legitimate hardware question buried in the charger itself and CPOs shouldn't assume every vendor handles it the same way. Three questions worth putting to every charger vendor:
How long does the manual override actually take? Not the spec sheet number. The real, walk-through-it number, in seconds.
Can a driver release the connector independently without opening an app, entering a PIN, or waiting for the charger to check in with the network? If the "manual" release still depends on a phone or server response, it isn't really manual.
What happens if a car disconnects the wrong way — mid-session, no clean shutdown? Does the connector take damage? Does billing get stuck or double-charge? How a charger handles this edge case reveals a great deal about how it was engineered.
Final Takeaway
Charging site design has spent a decade optimizing for driver convenience while plugged in, and almost no time optimizing for driver safety while stuck there. That gap was always going to surface. It has now.
The CPOs who move first on this; treating sightlines, lighting, and layout as core safety infrastructure rather than aesthetic afterthoughts, and pressing vendors on manual-release performance as a procurement criterion won't just be managing risk. They'll be setting the standard the rest of the industry gets measured against next.