A 600-mile road trip (and data) proves that EV charging isn’t so bad anymore

In the minds of potential electric vehicle buyers, charging looms large. Just over half of these Polled by AAA He said last year that public charging infrastructure was a major concern.

These fears are unfounded. Fast charging for electric vehicles has historically been lackluster. In 2023, after a disastrous road trip, I formulated a plan EV Fast Charging Bill of Rights Identify seven improvements needed for charging networks to turn things around.

What a difference a few years can make.

During a recent road trip, I was surprised by how much better it was. With one small exception, my charging experience was flawless, something I can’t say about a similar road trip three years ago.

An almost flawless experience

This summer’s road trip to Montreal covered more than 600 miles. We intended to use a Kia EV9, which can travel about 300 miles on a charge, but the Kia is sitting in the shop with a broken air conditioner. Instead, we drove the Audi e-tron, which has a range of about 220 miles per charge. Despite this discrepancy, the e-tron handled the ride with confidence. Rangemaxxing may sound nice, but it’s not necessary.

To find chargers, I used Better route planner (ABRP), an app that optimizes charging downtime by taking into account everything from prevailing winds and temperature to vehicle specifications and battery degradation. You can use a BluetoothOBD reader to feed live data from the vehicle to the ABRP, but I found the app to be very accurate without a reader. 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 with Lebanon’s 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 that were all working. I’ve already downloaded the Rivian app, but I don’t need to. The charger accepted my credit card and delivered over 140 kilowatts, which is almost the max the e-tron offers. We used the same chargers on our way home and had a similar experience.

And then we used A Electrical circuit A stop just outside Montreal to top up for the next week. There, we encountered the only hitch of the trip: the card reader didn’t work, so I had to download the Circuit Électrique app and charge $20 CAD. After that, the session passed peacefully. In the past, stopping was not 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 coffee, so we probably would have kept working regardless.

Each session lasted about 20 minutes, and we combined charging with lunch or rest periods. We never waited for the car. In all, the three sessions took up as long as we waited at border control on our way back to the United States.

What it was like before

Three years ago, the trip wasn’t going well. I knew fast charging could be hit or miss — I’ve driven non-Tesla electric cars for more than a decade — but I was still 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 have made it to Maine on a single charge, but the hotel did not have an EV charger. To make sure we had enough juice for the long weekend and the start of the drive home, we planned to charge a little more than halfway there.

Before we left, I had also used ABRP to get rid of less reliable chargers, but the experience was still miserable. The first charger broke shortly after I plugged it in, forcing me to move to another kiosk. The first charger never finished my car’s session, which means the second charger won’t start without calling customer service. At another station, the charging network app reported two out of four working plugs, but only one actually worked. In total, I drove seven hours and had to call customer service three times.

Imagine if gas stations worked like this?

The data reveals significant improvements

Fortunately, electric vehicle charging infrastructure looks very different today. My experiences in 2023 and 2026 are anecdotal, of course. But available data suggests it represents a broader trend: fast charging in the United States has improved by leaps and bounds.

Back in July 2023, the country had about 32,000 DC fast chargers, according to Joint Office of Energy and Transport. 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 number to more than double the number of DC fast chargers available in 2023.

Moreover, it is more reliable.

My flawless ride last week seemed to be the norm, not the exception. Since last year, reliability has improved by about 10 points, from 85 to the mid-90s Baren reliability indexwhich includes metrics such as successful charging sessions and station downtime. Tesla’s network is still dominant, according to Barin, but other networks are growing quickly. This competition has undoubtedly helped improve shipping experiences across the board.

There are still gaps in the grid and electric vehicle chargers are still not working. But more chargers are being added each month and broken devices are being fixed more quickly than in the past.

It’s not perfect, but I’m really surprised at how much fast charging has improved. Someone has to tell the naysayers what they’re missing.