You pull into a charging station off I-80 with 12 percent battery and a kid asleep in the back seat.
The fourth is occupied by a Chevy Bolt whose owner vanished forty minutes ago.
For a growing number of American drivers, it is just Tuesday.
The numbers tell a story the industry would rather you skip.
Studies of major charging networks have repeatedly found that a sizable share of public stations are out of service at any given moment, and that's before you count the ones that technically work but deliver a fraction of their rated speed.
A charger that takes 90 minutes to do what it promised in 20 isn't broken in the official logs.
Here's the part that should infuriate you: we built the cars first and the filling stations second.
Tesla spent a decade treating its Supercharger network as a product, with uptime targets and real accountability.
Most everyone else treated charging as a compliance checkbox, a press release, a subsidy to collect.
Electrify America, born from Volkswagen's dieselgate settlement, became the default road-trip network for non-Tesla drivers largely by accident.
The result is a patchwork where your ability to get home depends on which app you happened to download.
Then came the plug standard war, and with it, a fresh round of chaos.
Ford, GM, Rivian, and nearly every major automaker announced they were switching to Tesla's NACS connector.
In the meantime, millions of cars on the road carry the old CCS port, and the adapter situation has been a mess of backorders, compatibility quirks, and dealerships that shrug when you ask.
Drivers are caught mid-migration, holding hardware for a standard that's being retired in real time.
The human cost shows up in small humiliations.
Idling fees that punish you for charging slowly on equipment that charges slowly.
Apps that demand you preload funds, then fail to start the session anyway.
Entire Walmart parking lots where the only working stall is the one a guy in a Nissan Leaf has been camping in since breakfast.
Stacked together, week after week, it teaches people a simple lesson: don't rely on this.
Surveys keep showing that charging anxiety, not range, is what stops would-be buyers.
The infrastructure has not kept pace, and the gap is now a cultural problem, not just an engineering one.
When a family decides to keep the gas minivan because they can't trust a road trip, that's not a personal failure.
There's a fixable version of this future.
Payment that just works, like every gas pump built since 1985.
Some networks are finally moving that direction, and Tesla's opening of Superchargers to other brands helps more than it hurts.
But "eventually better" is a hard sell to someone stranded in the rain.
We electrified the driveway and forgot the highway.
Until charging a car is as boring and reliable as pumping gas, the EV transition will keep stalling out in parking lots, one dead stall at a time.
Final Thoughts
The technology isn't the problem anymore.