You pull into a charging station off I-80 in Nevada.
One is occupied by a Ford F-150 Lightning whose owner has been sitting there for 40 minutes past a full charge.
The fourth works, but only if you tap the app, not the card reader.
It's a pattern, and the people who study it say the map itself is lying to you.
Federal data counts roughly 200,000 public charging ports across the country.
That number gets repeated in press releases and state grant applications.
What it doesn't tell you is how many actually work on any given Tuesday.
Independent surveys have found reliability rates hovering in the low 80s for DC fast chargers, which sounds fine until you realize that means one in five could strand you in rural Kansas at 11 p.m.
Older stations built during the first wave of Volkswagen Dieselgate settlement money are aging out faster than anyone budgeted for.
Payment terminals lose their network connection.
And the sites most likely to be neglected sit in low-traffic corridors where the economics never worked in the first place.
Every network wants its own account, its own RFID card, its own pricing scheme.
Electrify America, ChargePoint, EVgo, Blink, and a dozen regional players each built a walled garden.
Tesla's Supercharger network spent a decade as the exception, and its recent opening to other brands is exposing just how rough the rest of the experience is by comparison.
The North American Charging Standard, now adopted by nearly every major brand, should eventually let drivers use one connector and one payment flow.
But the hardware retrofit is slow, and the software layer is slower.
In the meantime, drivers are doing what Americans always do when institutions fail: they're building their own workarounds.
PlugShare reviews have become a kind of crowdsourced truth serum.
Users post photos of cracked screens, downed cables, and lots that turn into mud pits after rain.
A station can look pristine on Google Maps and be a graveyard on PlugShare.
The savvy move in 2025 is to check the last three check-ins before you trust any charger, and to have a backup plan roughly 30 miles out.
Norway went through it and came out the other side with a network that mostly works.
But Norway had a smaller map and a government willing to fund maintenance, not just construction.
The American approach has been to subsidize the build-out and hope someone else figures out the upkeep.
A charging station isn't infrastructure the way a road is infrastructure.
It's a machine, with coolant, firmware, and a payment processor.
If nobody's contract says who fixes them, nobody fixes them.
The real test isn't how many stalls get announced this year.
It's how many still work three years from now, on a cold night, in a place where the nearest tow truck is an hour away.
Watch that number, not the ribbon cuttings.
The uncomfortable truth is that America built a charging network optimized for press conferences, not for the 2 a.m. road trip.
Until maintenance contracts get the same attention as construction grants, drivers will keep doing the diagnostic work themselves, one PlugShare review at a time.
Final Thoughts
It's a follow-through problem, and we've seen how that movie ends before.