There's a special kind of modern horror reserved for pulling into a charging station at 11% battery, only to find every stall occupied by a guy who's been at 96% for forty minutes watching YouTube in his climate-controlled cocoon.
It's basically the DMV, but with more smugness and a $60,000 car payment.
The charging network was supposed to be the easy part.
Instead, we've built a nationwide game of musical chairs where losing means calling your boss to explain why you're "working from a Waffle House parking lot" again.
Meanwhile, the guy next to you is treating a public fast charger like his personal living room, sipping an oat milk latte while his car sips electrons at the speed of continental drift.
Here's the part nobody warned us about: charging isn't like pumping gas.
It's more like waiting for a toddler to finish a meal.
The last 20% takes forever on purpose, because battery chemistry is a petty little science that punishes impatience.
So you've got two types of people at every station — the ones who understand this and the ones who plug in, walk away for an hour, and come back to find a queue of six cars silently judging them like a group text that just went read-only.
Every network has its own app, its own account, its own QR code, and its own unique way of failing at the exact moment you need it.
You'll tap your phone, get a spinning wheel, restart the app, and then discover the charger you're standing at was reported "temporarily unavailable" three weeks ago by someone who is now your enemy.
It's the customer experience equivalent of a surprise root canal.
Automakers keep promising bigger batteries and faster charging, which is great, except a bigger battery just means you can wait longer in more places.
And the "faster" part only works if you find a charger that isn't throttled, occupied, or actively on fire in a way the app describes as "minor maintenance." The real fix isn't more chargers, by the way.
A little sign that says "move your car when you hit 80%" would do more for this country than most infrastructure bills.
Until then, we're all just standing around a parking lot, bonding over our shared hatred of the guy who's still at 96%.
It just looks a lot like a suburban Costco on a Saturday, except everyone's quieter, angrier, and refreshing an app that won't load.
The bottom line: charging networks will get better eventually, but for now the experience is a group project where nobody did the reading.
If you're buying an EV to save time, you're buying the wrong appliance.
Final Thoughts
Buy it because you like the car — not because you enjoy competitive parking.