Tim De Chant, a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch, decided to test whether EV charging had gotten any better. He drove more than 600 miles from his home in the U.S. to Montreal in a Kia EV9 - or at least that was the plan.
The Kia had a broken air conditioner, so he swapped it for an Audi e-tron. That Audi can travel about 220 miles on a full charge, compared with the Kia's roughly 300-mile range. The route required multiple stops, and each charging session lasted about 20 minutes.
At a Rivian station in Lebanon, New Hampshire, the six chargers each could deliver 300 kilowatts. The Audi pulled in more than 140 kilowatts, which is near its maximum charging speed. That kind of speed - and the fact that every charger worked - was a big change from three years earlier.
Back then, De Chant drove a 350-mile round trip to Maine. That trip took about seven hours and required three calls to customer service because chargers were broken or glitchy. This time, the only hiccup came in Montreal, where he had to load 20 Canadian dollars onto the Circuit Électrique app because the card reader wouldn't work. That is a minor annoyance, not a trip killer.
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The big reason is simple: more chargers and better maintenance. In July 2023, a federal agency tracking transportation and energy tallied about 32,000 DC fast chargers in the U.S. That number has more than doubled since then. When you build that many new stations, competition among charging networks heats up, and each company tries harder to keep its equipment working.
Reliability scores confirm the improvement. The company Paren produces a reliability index for EV chargers. Last year the score sat at 85%. Now it is in the mid-90s, a jump of nearly 10 percentage points.
What changed? Tesla opened its charging network to non-Tesla drivers. That alone added thousands of reliable chargers that anyone can use.
Other companies have raced to catch up, expanding their own networks and fixing broken machines faster. The combination of more chargers and better upkeep makes the experience a lot less frustrating.
Gaps still exist. Not every highway rest area has a charger. Machines can still break. But the trajectory is clear: charging infrastructure is no longer the horror story it used to be.
AAA surveyed prospective EV buyers, and charging concerns always top the list of reasons people hesitate. When the network works, that hesitation fades.
New chargers appear on the grid with each passing month. Broken ones are getting fixed faster. The trend points toward a future where road trips in an EV feel normal, not like a gamble.
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