What Voltpost Air is
The dispenser sits roughly 10 feet up the pole, high enough to stay clear of floodwater and casual vandalism. Its cable is 25 feet long and retracts into the housing when a session ends. The unit supports both J1772 and Tesla-style J3400 connectors and delivers up to 9.6 kW at 240 V and 40 A, according to Voltpost's spec sheet.
One detail matters more than the hardware. The Brooklyn charger does not draw power from the lamp circuit. It takes power from a nearby building, and Voltpost says the LED conversion of street lighting has left spare capacity at distribution level. No trenching, no new conduit, less permitting. That is where the claimed 70% cost reduction comes from.
An hour on the charger
InsideEVs' Suvrat Kothari plugged in a Mercedes-Benz CLA 350 Electric. Two petrol cars were parked on either side of the pole, and the long cable still reached the charge port. He scanned a QR code, confirmed, and the cable lowered itself. An hour later the car showed about 30 miles (48 km) more range.
That indicated figure deserves a check. The charger tops out at 9.6 kW, so a full hour at maximum output is 9.6 kWh. For 30 miles that works out to roughly 3.1 miles per kWh, or about 20 kWh/100 km. A CLA 350 is more efficient than that in normal driving, so either the charger did not hold peak output for the whole hour or the range estimate was conservative. A car's remaining-range display is an estimate, not a measurement.
Cost per 100 km
Using the 20 kWh/100 km implied by the test, the lamppost price of $0.39/kWh comes to $7.80 per 100 km, around €6.70 at current exchange rates. The DC fast chargers in the area charging more than $0.60/kWh would cost just over $12 per 100 km, about 54% more for the same distance. A petrol car at 6.5 l/100 km and €1.50 per litre lands near €9.75 per 100 km.
Home charging sits in a different bracket. On a household EV tariff in the Czech Republic, roughly 4 to 6 CZK per kWh (€0.16 to €0.24), the same 20 kWh/100 km costs €3.20 to €4.80. Drivers without a driveway pay the curbside price for most of their kilometres, and that is the figure to plan around. Our charging cost calculator takes consumption, tariff and annual mileage and returns the yearly bill.
The retracting cable
A motorised cable adds a failure point to a piece of street furniture. Voltpost points to UL certification, thousands of test cycles, and an operating range from -22 °F to 122 °F (about -30 °C to 50 °C). It monitors chargers remotely and dispatches local maintenance when a physical repair is needed. InsideEVs notes that drivers in the city are not gentle with public equipment, which is the part a one-hour test cannot answer.
Curbside charging in Europe
London already has more than 27,000 curbside charge points, many of them lamppost retrofits, according to the figures InsideEVs cites. Pole-mounted AC charging from Ubitricity, now part of Shell, has been on Berlin and UK streets for years, so the concept is not new here. What differs is payment. The EU's AFIR rules require ad-hoc card payment at publicly accessible charge points above 50 kW, with a later deadline for slow AC points and exemptions available to member states. A network that works only through a QR code and an app, the part of the session its reviewer liked least, would need a card reader or a valid exemption to operate here.
Scale is the other gap. New York State has funding for 26 more lamppost chargers under a $3 million NYSERDA programme, and about 500 chargers have been awarded across nine US states. Meanwhile the city's EV and plug-in hybrid registrations have passed 81,000. Charging is also the practical side of the EU's 2035 target, which France and Germany want lowered to an 80% cut; their proposal is due on 15 October.
What to do with this
If you park on the street, budget your running costs at public AC prices rather than home tariffs, and check what a slow session actually delivers in winter before you commit. Battery swap remains the other answer for drivers with no driveway. Nio's latest weekly tally was 1,192,221 swaps in seven days, about 6% more per station than in May. For longer routes, our supercharger database covers 483 European locations with prices, and the cheapest sites page shows the spread in a single view.
The Brooklyn installation added about 30 indicated miles in an hour at $0.39/kWh, with two petrol cars parked beside it and a cable that reaches. The rollout numbers are 26 more funded in New York State and roughly 500 awarded in nine states, against London's 27,000 curbside points.
Source: https://insideevs.com/news/811388/voltpost-air-lamppost-ev-charger-review-insideevs/