New York's First Lamppost EV Charger: A Real-World Test in Brooklyn

New York City drivers face a peculiar charging dilemma. With EV and plug-in hybrid registrations surpassing 81,000 in September alone, the demand for accessible charging is surging. Yet for the thousands of residents who live in apartments and rely on street parking, the convenience of a home garage charger simply doesn’t exist. Fast chargers are appearing across the boroughs, but dense streets, steep real estate costs, and slow permitting make them difficult to deploy at scale. The real gap, it turns out, may be Level 2 charging—the slower, cheaper option that can top up a battery in six to eight hours while a car sits idle.

Voltpost, a New York-based startup, believes the answer is already hovering above the sidewalk. The company’s Voltpost Air unit mounts directly onto existing streetlight poles, converting lampposts into EV charging points without digging up infrastructure. I put the city’s first such installation—located at Bush Terminal Park in South Brooklyn—through a hands-on test. The charger sits about ten feet up the pole, high enough to avoid vandalism and flooding, with a 25-foot cable that reached the charge port of a Mercedes-Benz CLA 350 Electric even though gas cars were parked on either side.

Starting a session was straightforward: scanning a QR code triggered the cable to lower automatically, and a button on the handle extended it to the car. Within about an hour, the CLA gained over 30 miles of indicated range—enough to cover a round trip from the apartment and leave roughly 20 miles to spare, which effectively handled the day’s driving needs. At $0.39 per kilowatt-hour, the cost undercut local fast chargers, which can exceed $0.60 per kWh, though it was roughly in line with other public Level 2 options in the city. The cable retracts on its own when finished. One quirk: releasing the handle too abruptly can send the cable swinging against the pole during retraction.

The larger advantage isn’t the charging speed—it’s the installation. According to Voltpost COO and co-founder Luke Mairo, using pole-mounted infrastructure eliminates construction and trenching work. “Less permitting, significant reductions in the cost to install, and less disruption to the communities,” he explained. Rather than splitting power from the streetlight itself, the Brooklyn unit draws electricity from a nearby building, tapping spare grid capacity that opened up as streetlights converted to LEDs. This approach can trim project costs by up to 70% and allow a charger to go live in hours. The hardware supports both J1772 and Tesla-style J3400 connectors and delivers up to 9.6 kilowatts at 240 volts and 40 amps.

Voltpost launched its first lamppost charger in Chicago last year, followed by installations in Detroit and New York. Another 26 units are headed to New York State through a NYSERDA-funded program, and roughly 500 chargers have been awarded across nine U.S. states. The retraction mechanism raises a fair question about durability in freezing winters and scorching summers, but Mairo pointed to UL certification and thousands of test cycles across varied climates. For city dwellers who simply need to plug in while walking the dog or grabbing groceries, a lamppost might quietly become the most sensible charger of all.