Josh Max is a writer based in Los Angeles.
The first time I got stranded in an electric vehicle was in New Jersey in 2012. I was test-driving a Nissan Leaf whose range meter said I had 80 miles of charge left.
My mother’s place was 50 miles away, so I figured I was safe and headed home to Manhattan at 7 p.m.
I wasn’t safe. I watched my available electricity plunge to 6 percent and got home four hours later. First I had to find a charger, which I did, under a dim, deserted factory. Then I had to sit in the car for almost three hours until it obtained enough power to get home.
Since then, I’ve test-driven about 30 EVs all over the United States — in New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver and Dallas. Those are not enough places to make a blanket statement about the state of public charging everywhere. But it’s enough to say this: The great obstacle to mass EV adoption isn’t the vehicles themselves. It’s the inconsistent, sometimes-maddening public charging experience.
If public charging were as simple as a gas station — pull up, swipe, fill, leave — the transition away from gas-powered vehicles would move a lot faster. There are more than 230,000 public EV chargers nationwide. But that number obscures a more complex reality. To get a charge, drivers often must navigate an obstacle course of apps, dead chargers, confusing pricing and small inconveniences or time-wasters that pile up into aggravation and induce the thought: “I’ll stick with my Ram.”
Last month in Los Angeles, for example, I used the ChargePoint app to find a fast charger at dawn, when there would be fewer people looking to charge. With rapid chargers, you can get your vehicle up to 80 or 90 percent charged in about 20 minutes, and you don’t get a demoralizing readout like, “Time to complete charge: 11 hours.”
But the first place ChargePoint sent me was behind a locked gate. The second place was at a car dealership — but it was a slow charger. I finally located a fast charger operated by the company EVgo. It was my first time using one, and I had trouble paying with my credit card. I didn’t discover this through a helpful message on the waist-high screen, but because my card just didn’t work. And I had places to be.
I finally called customer service. A friendly agent walked me through getting the charger to function. That took about 10 minutes. Then came a $60 hold on my credit card and a “session fee.”
Their nickel-and-diming reminded me of “Fargo,” where Jerry Lundegaard, the car dealer, tries to tack on unnecessary sealant to an already irate customer’s new car. The customer growls: “It’s always the same! It’s always more!” Still, I got my charge.
If you talk about public charging problems, someone inevitably responds: “I charge at home. It’s great.” I don’t doubt them. Home charging is the EV dream: quiet, convenient and usually cheaper. It’s also why many EV owners report being very pleased with their rides. Surveys consistently show home chargingis a major driver of satisfaction with EV ownership.
Public charging continues to improve too. In January 2025, the U.S. had about 23 percent more public charging ports than in 2023 and roughly 16percent more station locations, according to a congressional report.
Tesla has the best track record of working stations and charging ports. The company’s nationwide network of about 35,000 charging ports has a self-reported 99.95 percent uptime. They also recently opened their ports to non-Tesla drivers. That’s a great start.
The auto industry has also responded to the many complaints. Ionna, a joint venture formed by several major auto companies, is billed as a public charging service designed to support what the car companies hope will be millions of future EVs. It aims to build a network of at least 30,000 “DC fast” chargers. There are other initiatives on the way.
But there’s still the current reality. A 2024 Harvard Business School analysisfound public chargers to be about 78 percent reliable — meaning roughly one out of every five attempts involves a broken or unusable unit. That’s not acceptable, especially when your daughter or grandma is low on charge, it’s late, and they’re just trying to get home. A lot of chargers are in deserted areas.
Gas stations aren’t perfect, but they have a baseline standard. In 2026, you can roll up and be on your way in as little as five minutes, just like you could in 1980.
With EV chargers, I’ve personally experienced non-working units, chargers that require an app instead of letting you pay with a card and chargers that don’t stay active when you walk away. You can also find charging stations with lines of cars stretching out of the lot because the other chargers nearby are down, or apps that take you miles out of your way to a charger that says “available” on the map and turns out to be dead in real life, spider webs included.
If the companies selling us an electric future want that future to keep selling, public charging must get to the point of “pull in, swipe or tap, charge and leave.” One hundred percent of the time.
We’re not there yet.
The post Charging an EV? Prepare for frustration. appeared first on Washington Post.
