In the minds of prospective EV buyers, charging looms large. Just over half of those surveyed by AAA last year said that public charging infrastructure was a key concern.
Those concerns aren’t unfounded. EV fast charging has historically been lackluster. In 2023, after a disastrous road trip, I drafted an EV fast-charging “bill of rights,” outlining seven improvements charging networks needed to make to turn things around.
During a recent road trip, I was surprised by how much the situation has improved. With one small exception, my charging experience was flawless, something I couldn’t say about a similar road trip three years ago.
This summer’s road trip to Montreal covered more than 600 miles. We had intended to use our Kia EV9, which will can travel nearly 300 miles on a charge, but the Kia is in the shop because of broken air conditioner. Instead, we drove our Audi e-tron, which has a range of about 220 miles per charge. Despite the disparity, the e-tron handled the trip with aplomb. Rangemaxxing might sound nice, but it isn’t necessary.
To find chargers, I used A Better Route Planner (ABRP), an app optimizes charging stops by accounting for everything from prevailing winds and temperature to vehicle specs 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 entirely surprised.
After my experience at the Lebanon chargers, I can see why the app chose them, regardless of Rivian’s ownership. There were no lines, plenty of food options, a grocery store, and six 300-kilowatt chargers that were all working. I had downloaded the Rivian app in advance, but I needn’t have. The charger accepted my credit card and delivered more than 140 kilowatts, roughly the e-tron’s max. We used the same chargers on the way home and had a similar experience.
After that, we used a Circuit Électrique station just outside Montreal to top up for the week ahead. There, we experienced the trip’s only hitch: 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 session went smoothly. In retrospect, the stop wasn’t entirely necessary. We didn’t drive much during the week, and the hotel charger worked perfectly. But the kids needed a break and my wife needed a coffee, so we probably would have plugged in regardless.
Each session lasted about 20 minutes, and we combined charging with lunch or rest stops. We never once waited on the car. Altogether, the three sessions took about as long as our wait at border control on the way back into the United States.
Three years ago, the trip didn’t go nearly as well. I knew that fast charging could be hit or miss — I’ve driven non-Tesla EVs for more than 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, roughly half the distance of our trip to Montreal. The car could have made it to Maine on one charge, but the hotel didn’t have an EV charger. To ensure we had enough juice for the long weekend and the beginning of the drive home, we planned to charge a little over halfway there.
Before we left, I had also used ABRP to weed out less reliable chargers, but the experience was still miserable. The first charger broke shortly after I plugged in, forcing me to move to another stall. The first charger never ended 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’s app reported two working plugs out of four, but only one actually worked. Altogether, I drove about seven hours and had to call customer service three times.
Imagine if gas stations worked like this?
Thankfully, the EV charging infrastructure looks very different today. My experiences in 2023 and 2026 are anecdotes, of course. But the available data suggests they are representative of a broader trend: fast charging in the U.S. has improved by leaps and bounds.
Back in July 2023, the country had about 32,000 DC fast chargers, according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. At the time, many of those chargers were restricted 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 twice the number of DC fast chargers available in 2023.
My nearly flawless trip last week appears to be the norm, not the exception. Since last year, reliability has improved nearly 10 points, from 85 to the mid-90s, on Paren’s reliability index, which includes metrics such as successful charging sessions and station downtime. Tesla’s network remains dominant, according to Paren, but other networks are growing quickly. That competition has undoubtedly helped improve charging experiences across the board.
Gaps in the network still exist and EV chargers still break. But more chargers are being added every month and the broken ones are being repaired more quickly than in the past.
It’s not perfect, but I’m genuinely surprised by how much better fast charging has become. Someone should tell the holdouts what they’re missing.
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Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.
De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.dechant@techcrunch.com.
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