According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the number of charging ports in America more than doubled from 2018 to 2022.
A wide range of companies, including Walmart, Shell, Subway, and Mercedes-Benz, are getting into the market. And Ford recently announced that its cars will be compatible with Tesla’s expansive charging network starting in 2025.
In the next few years, as more new cars become battery-powered, millions of Americans are projected to be driving electric for the first time. They’ll be getting used to a new technology that is inherently different than what they’ve known for decades. Thus far, public EV chargers have largely served early adopters, committed environmentalists, and a small subset of commuters. Now that EVs are becoming practical, high-range family cars, their drivers aren’t going to accept compromises or risks when they’re taking kids to school or trying to get to work on time. They’ll expect the same level of convenience they get now.
Read: EVs make parking even more annoying
In short: Americans will need more public chargers if the goal of drastically reducing carbon emissions from cars is to succeed. Right now, drivers who want to do that may be nervously eyeing the charging networks in their areas or along the way to places they want to travel, wondering if they’ll be able to do everything in these new cars that they’ve always done.
“I think [public charging] is the thing that is, right now, in the way of mass adoption,” Ferro told me. “Five years ago, it was range. Now the infrastructure is deterring those people who are just not gung ho about getting an EV.”
I’ve seen this growth, and its continued challenges, firsthand over a decade of testing and writing about cars. Five years ago, my first experience in the Chevrolet Bolt EV involved spending the better part of a day looking for a way to charge up in New York; now four public plugs are within walking distance of my Brooklyn apartment.
But I still often have to wait for those plugs to open up, or deal with gas-car drivers who park there instead. Driving out of town in any EV besides a Tesla (the company’s proprietary Superchargers are regarded as the most abundant, easiest-to-use plugs out there) still requires planning—and a little luck. I might encounter public charging stations with no open stalls, broken chargers, proprietary payment apps I don’t have, or charging speeds too slow to be useful. On top of that, chargers simply remain too rare.
Help is on the way from the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Over the next few years, the government will dole out $7.5 billion in grants for EV charging, a massive, multibillion-dollar gift to the private sector that comes with strict requirements for reliability, user interaction, and accessibility.
Success will look like a national network of chargers that “work every time” and “are able to be used by any driver, any EV, anywhere,” Gabe Klein, the executive director of the Department of Energy’s Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, told me. That office just announced a coalition of national labs, charging providers, and car companies (including Tesla) to work on making charging more reliable and seamless.