You pull into a charging station off I-80 with 12 percent battery left.
Two are occupied by cars that finished charging an hour ago.
One has a cracked screen and a dead connector.
The fourth works, but only at half speed.
This is the reality of America's EV charging network in 2025, and it's not really an infrastructure problem.
It's a software problem wearing an infrastructure costume.
Here's what the industry doesn't advertise.
The US now has over 200,000 public charging ports, according to Department of Energy counts.
In practice, drivers consistently report that a huge share of those ports are broken, throttled, or occupied by vehicles that have no business being there.
The culprits are idle fees and their absence.
Charging networks like Electrify America, EVgo, and ChargePoint each run their own apps, their own payment systems, and their own rules about when a car needs to move.
A driver gaming the system learns fast which stations let them park for free.
Tesla's Supercharger network opened to other brands starting in 2023, but the experience for a Ford or Rivian owner isn't the seamless one Tesla drivers get.
It often requires an adapter, an app, and a prayer.
Reviews of third-party adapters have flagged overheating issues, and some automakers have issued warnings about which ones are safe to use.
The deeper issue is that nobody owns the whole problem.
Charging is split across utilities, private networks, automakers, and federal subsidy programs that handed out billions without strict uptime requirements.
The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program finally added reliability standards, but enforcement is slow and the map keeps growing faster than the maintenance crews can keep up.
Tesla's network remains the gold standard for uptime, and its opening to other brands is genuinely useful despite the adapter headache.
Apps like PlugShare and A Better Route Planner let drivers crowdsource which stalls actually work, which is damning but effective.
And newer stations from companies like Ionna, the joint venture backed by eight automakers, are being built with reliability as the headline feature rather than an afterthought.
For anyone shopping for an EV right now, the honest advice is this: your charging experience will depend less on your car and more on where you live and drive.
If you can charge at home, most of this drama disappears.
If you can't, you're renting access to a network that's still figuring itself out.
The closing thought here is uncomfortable but fair.
America built a charging network backward, chasing port counts instead of working ports, and drivers are paying the price at the plug.
Final Thoughts
It's accountability for the ones already standing.