There's a special kind of modern betrayal that happens when you roll into a charging station at 11 p.m. with 6 percent battery and find that three of the four plugs are dead, one is occupied by a guy napping in a Rivian, and the last one has a screen frozen on a Windows XP-era error message.
Welcome to the American EV charging experience, where the infrastructure is apparently held together by vibes and a prayer.
Studies keep finding that a meaningful chunk of public charging ports are out of service at any given moment, and unlike a gas pump, there's no bored attendant inside to yell at.
You just stand there in the dark, holding a heavy cable like an idiot, while your car silently judges your life choices.
Here's the part that stings: Tesla figured this out years ago.
The Supercharger network became the gold standard because it was built and maintained by one company with a single obsession, and it mostly just works.
Everyone else played the "let's bolt a charger to a random parking lot and hope for the best" game, and now we're all paying for it.
The software is somehow worse than the hardware.
You download an app, create an account, verify your email, add a credit card, and then the app crashes.
Or the RFID card reader doesn't recognize your card.
Or the station's network is "down" but the charger is physically fine, which is a fun philosophical puzzle at midnight in a Wawa parking lot.
Automakers keep promising that the plug-and-charge future is right around the corner, and to be fair, it is getting better.
More cars now just talk to the network automatically, no app required.
But "getting better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when a road trip still requires three backup plans and the patience of a monk.
The real tell is what drivers actually do.
Experienced EV owners treat public charging like a survival situation.
They charge to 90 percent at home before leaving, they map out every stop with two alternatives, and they quietly accept that the network is a suggestion rather than a guarantee.
That's a group project where half the team ghosted.
Meanwhile, gas stations are still winning on the one metric that matters: you pull up, you pump, you leave in four minutes.
No app, no account, no existential dread.
There's a reason range anxiety keeps showing up in surveys even as batteries get bigger, and it's not the cars.
The good news is that money is finally flowing in.
Federal dollars, private buildouts, and a genuine arms race to make charging boring again.
Nobody wants a magical charging experience.
They want to plug in, walk away, and come back to a car that's ready.
So the next time you see a lonely charger in a Target parking lot with a cracked screen and a taped-over connector, don't feel bad for it.
Feel bad for the driver who's about to discover it's been broken since March.
The EV revolution is real, but it's currently running on a 30 percent uptime and a lot of hope.
My take: the cars outran the infrastructure, and now the infrastructure has to sprint to catch up.
Until charging is as thoughtless as pumping gas, the network will keep being the punchline instead of the pitch.
Final Thoughts
Buy the EV if you can charge at home, but bring a book for the road.