FAZT pegs EV driving at 5.4 US cents a kilometer at its new Guadalajara station

Twelve charging points, 120 kW each, open around the clock in the parking lot of a Guadalajara supermarket. FAZT opened its Río Nilo station at Soriana Híper Río Nilo this week, a site MEXICONOW's Sofía Ortiz reported carries a US$500,000 investment. FAZT's rate is US$0.45 per kWh, VAT included, and it charges that price at every station it runs.

The price is the useful part for a fleet manager in Jalisco. Most public charging announcements give a stall count and a power rating. This one came with FAZT's own cost-per-kilometer math, and that makes it possible to test whether the economics hold for a given vehicle on a given route.

FAZT CEO Javier Cuartas and Manuel Jesús Herrera Vega, Jalisco's Secretary of Sustainable Energy Development, cut the ribbon and watched a live charging demonstration. Cuartas called Jalisco a strategic market for electric mobility. Herrera Vega said the shift needs both infrastructure and cooperation between the public and private sectors, and that each new station in the state helps create better conditions for promoting electric vehicles. With this opening, FAZT has four stations in Jalisco.

The math behind 5.4 cents a kilometer

FAZT's comparison has two sides, and each depends on a stated assumption. The electric side assumes a vehicle that uses 12 kWh per 100 km. The gasoline side assumes a car that gets 15 km per liter, with fuel at US$1.27 per liter.

MEXICONOW traces both figures to a company press release, and Mexico Business News describes the gasoline number as resting on standard fuel efficiency and prevailing pump prices. The math holds up when you rerun it. Twelve kWh at US$0.45 is exactly 5.4 cents per kilometer, and US$1.27 spread over 15 km is about 8.5 cents, so FAZT's 8.4 slightly understates the gasoline side rather than inflating it.

On those assumptions, the gap is about 3 US cents per kilometer, which comes to roughly US$3,000 for every 100,000 kilometers driven. That is our arithmetic on FAZT's figures, not a number the company published. The electric side scales with consumption: double the kWh per 100 km and the per-kilometer cost doubles too.

Working backward from the same figures gives a threshold. At US$0.45 per kWh, public fast charging beats the 15 km/L gasoline benchmark only while the vehicle uses less than about 19 kWh per 100 km. Above that, the fast-charging price alone wipes out the savings in this comparison. A compact passenger EV can stay well under the line. A loaded delivery van may not.

That comparison does not mean electric vans lose, though. A van that uses more electricity per kilometer also burns more gasoline than a 15 km/L car, so the fair comparison is a vehicle against its own combustion equivalent, not against FAZT's reference sedan. The figures also cover public fast charging at FAZT's rate only. A fleet that charges some of its vehicles at a depot is running a different calculation.

Three plug types, 1.44 MW of capacity

Each of the 12 stalls supports GB/T, CCS1 and NACS connectors. For a mixed fleet, that means vehicles don't have to be sent to different sites based on which port they have. If all 12 stalls ran at full output at once, the site would draw 1.44 MW, which is 12 times 120 kW, our arithmetic. That load is why the grid matters to this story.

The investment figure also translates into hardware terms. Spread across 12 stalls, US$500,000 works out to roughly US$41,700 per charging point, or about US$350 per kilowatt of installed capacity, our arithmetic. For a fleet weighing whether to build its own chargers, that is a rough reference for what one operator spent on a 12-stall, 1.44 MW public site.

Mexico Business News points to medium-voltage grid capacity and uneven regional distribution as the main limits on how far networks like this can scale. Energy analysts it cited say high-output DC chargers have to be coordinated with local utilities to avoid voltage instability at peak hours. They also say growth that outpaces grid reinforcement and load management could run into capacity bottlenecks.

The same piece cites industry analysis arguing that transit electrification depends on physical, energy and digital integration, not hardware alone. Río Nilo shows two of those layers on the surface: three plug standards on the physical side and an app-managed session on the digital side. The energy layer, the utility connection behind that 1.44 MW, is the one a driver never sees and the one that decides how many sites like this a city can absorb.

The publication also describes a split in where chargers are. Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara have the densest networks, while secondary highways and industrial parks are much harder to reach. It frames Río Nilo as part of a national race to clear infrastructure bottlenecks that have historically held back both private and commercial EV adoption on secondary and tertiary corridors.

For a fleet whose routes stay inside one of those three metros, public fast charging is getting easier to rely on. For a fleet that runs between a city warehouse and a plant in an outlying industrial park, the gaps between stations are what decide whether the plan works.

Checks before routing vehicles through FAZT sites

1. Redo the per-kilometer math with each vehicle's measured kWh per 100 km, and compare it against the fuel economy of the combustion vehicle it replaces, not the 15 km/L benchmark.
2. Match each vehicle's charging port against the GB/T, CCS1 and NACS support at the sites on its route.
3. Map current station locations against actual routes, especially any that run outside Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara.
4. Ask how sessions started by many drivers in the FAZT app are reported back for fleet expense tracking.

The flat rate makes the first check simple. With one published price at every FAZT station, a fleet controller can model a route with a single number for public charging.

From four Jalisco sites toward 1,000

FAZT's stated plan is to open 200 ultra-fast stations a year and reach 1,000 by 2030. Mexico Business News puts its current count at 35 to 50 active stations as of late 2026 and links the target to long-term partnership goals. Río Nilo's location inside a Soriana Híper fits that pattern of placing chargers at large retail sites.

The retailer connection runs deeper than one parking lot. Earlier coverage listed alongside the Río Nilo story carries the headlines "Soriana, FAZT Launch Fast EV Chargers in Monterrey" and "Soriana, FAZT to Launch 1,000 Ultra-Fast EV Stations by 2030," which suggests Soriana is the partner behind both the site pattern and the national target.

MEXICONOW describes the US$500,000 as the investment per station, so 200 stations a year would mean about US$100 million in annual capital spending, our arithmetic. The pace matters too. If 200 openings a year run from 2027 through 2030, a base of 35 to 50 stations would reach roughly 835 to 850, so hitting 1,000 by 2030 would take something closer to 240 a year at some point.

Fleet operators should watch where the next openings go. Openings in Guadalajara, Monterrey and Mexico City would mostly add depth to the metro network. Sites on secondary highways and near industrial parks would expand where commercial fleets can actually run on public fast charging.