In the minds of prospective EV buyers, charging looms large. Just over half of them research by AAA last year he said public charging infrastructure was a key concern.
These concerns are not unfounded. EV fast charging has historically been lacking. In 2023, after a disastrous road trip, I drafted an electric vehicle fast-charging “rights address,” outlining seven improvements to charging networks that needed to be made to turn things around.
What a difference a few years can make.
During a recent road trip, I was surprised by how much the situation improved. With one small exception, my charging experience was flawless.
A near perfect experience
This summer’s road trip to Montreal covered more than 600 miles. We had intended to use our Kia EV9, which will get almost 300 miles on a charge, but the Kia is in the shop due to a broken air conditioner. Instead, we drove our Audi e-tron, which has a range of about 220 miles per charge. Despite the unevenness, the e-tron handled the journey with determination. Rangemaxxing might sound cool, but it’s not necessary.
To find chargers, I used A better route planner (ABRP), an app that optimizes charging stops by taking into account everything from prevailing winds and temperature to vehicle specifications and battery degradation. You can use a Bluetooth OBD reader to feed live data from the car to ABRP, but I found the app to be pretty accurate without one. ABRP said our first stop should be a Rivian charger near Lebanon, New Hampshire. The app is now owned by Rivian, so I wasn’t totally surprised.
After my experience with Lebanon chargers, I can see why the app chose them, regardless of Rivian ownership. There were no lines, plenty of food options, a grocery store, and six 300 kilowatt chargers all working. I had downloaded the Rivian app beforehand, but no need. The charger accepted my credit card and delivered more than 140 kilowatts, about the e-tron’s maximum. We used the same chargers on the way home and had a similar experience.
After that, we used one Circuit Electrique station just outside Montreal to fill in for next week. There, we experienced the only problem of the trip: The card reader didn’t work, so I had to download Circuit Électrique’s app and load it with 20 Canadian dollars. After that, the meeting went smoothly. In hindsight, the stop wasn’t entirely necessary. We didn’t drive much during the week and the hotel charger worked great. But the kids needed a break and my wife needed a coffee, so we probably would have connected regardless.
Each session lasted about 20 minutes and we combined charging with lunch or rest stops. We never waited in the car. In total, the three sessions lasted about as long as our wait at border control on the way back to the United States.
How it used to be
Three years ago, the trip didn’t go so well. I knew fast charging can be hit or miss—I’ve been driving non-Tesla EVs for over a decade—but I still came away disappointed.
That summer, we drove the same Audi e-tron to Maine, a round trip of about 350 miles, about half the distance of our trip to Montreal. The car could make it to Maine on a single charge, but the hotel didn’t have an EV charger. To ensure we had enough juice for the long weekend and the start of the drive home, we planned to charge a little more than halfway.
Before we left, I had also used ABRP to remove less reliable chargers, but the experience was still miserable. The first charger broke shortly after plugging in, forcing me to move to another stall. The first charger never finished the session with my car, which meant the second one wouldn’t start without a call to customer service. At another stop, the charging network app reported two working plugs out of four, but only one was actually working. In total, I drove about seven hours and had to call customer service three times.
Imagine if gas stations worked like this?
The data reveals great improvements
Fortunately, the EV charging infrastructure looks very different today. My experiences in 2023 and 2026 are anecdotal, of course. However, the available data suggests it’s representative of a broader trend: fast charging in the US has improved by leaps and bounds.
As of July 2023, the country had about 32,000 DC chargers, according to Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. At the time, many of these chargers were limited to Tesla drivers. (Tesla announced plans to open its network in 2023, but it took more than a year for widespread access.) Today, EV drivers can use most of Tesla’s network. Continued expansion by Tesla and other companies has helped push the total to more than double the number of DC chargers available in 2023.
In addition, they are more reliable.
My nearly flawless trip last week seems to be the rule, not the exception. Since last year, reliability has improved nearly 10 points, from 85 to the mid-90s; Paren Reliability Indexwhich includes metrics such as successful charge periods and station downtime. Tesla’s network remains dominant, according to Paren, but other networks are growing rapidly. This competition has undoubtedly helped improve the charging experience across the board.
Grid gaps still exist and EV chargers still break. But more chargers are being added every month and broken ones are being repaired faster than in the past.
It’s not perfect, but I’m really surprised by how much better fast charging has gotten. Someone needs to tell the prisoners what they are missing.
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