Remember when road trips meant dodging a guy named Dale who was air-drying his hands for nine minutes?
Now we get to stand in a Walmart parking lot at 11 p.m. watching a screen that says "Connecting..." while a stray shopping cart slowly circles us like a vulture.
The EV charging network, our brave new frontier, is having a moment.
And by "moment," I mean a nationwide group project where nobody did the reading.
There are roughly 200,000 public charging ports in the US now, which sounds impressive until you realize about 40 percent of them are either broken, throttled, or occupied by a guy named Brent who charged to 100 percent and then went inside to buy a rotisserie chicken.
Gas stations have spent a century perfecting the art of "you will get gas and leave." Charging networks are still in their awkward middle school phase, where an app from 2019 asks you to create an account, verify your email, add a card, and then informs you the charger is offline.
Automakers keep promising the fix is coming.
Tesla opened up its Supercharger network to other brands, which was supposed to be the great unifier.
In practice, it means a Chevy Bolt now gets to experience the joy of a 45-minute wait behind a Cybertruck that's parked sideways because the owner is "just grabbing a coffee." Fellowship!
Some networks charge by the minute, some by the kilowatt-hour, some by a mysterious "session fee" that appears on your statement like a ghost.
You can drive 20 miles and pay wildly different rates because one state regulates it and the other one shrugs.
It's like buying airline tickets, except the plane is a Nissan Leaf and the destination is a Panera.
The federal government threw billions at the problem through the NEVI program, which is a fancy way of saying "here's money, please build things that work." Progress is real but slow, and a lot of new stations are popping up in places that make zero sense.
A 350-kilowatt fast charger behind a Dollar General in rural Kansas is technically infrastructure.
Home charging still wins for most people.
If you have a garage, you wake up full every day and the public network becomes a road-trip curiosity rather than a daily nightmare.
The people suffering most are apartment dwellers and anyone who thought a used EV was a personality.
They're the ones doing real-time charger roulette at 7 a.m.
So the network is improving, slowly, the way all American infrastructure improves: badly, expensively, and with at least one app that crashes on launch.
The gas station bathroom has competition now.
The bottom line is that EV charging is a lot like early cell service — genuinely useful, occasionally infuriating, and improving faster than the complainers admit.
If you can charge at home, the network is a bonus.
Final Thoughts
If you can't, do your homework before you buy, because "Connecting..." is not a lifestyle.