Remember when the big selling point of an EV was never visiting a gas station again?
Six years and a few hundred billion in infrastructure spending later, the average road trip still involves a phone with four charging apps open, a prayer, and a spouse asking why the car is beeping.
The plugs themselves aren't really the problem anymore.
Counts from the Department of Energy put public ports north of 200,000, and Tesla's Supercharger network finally opened its gates to rival brands.
In practice, "solved" means you arrive at a Walmart parking lot to find six working stalls, two occupied by gas cars, and one showing a fault code that looks like a captcha.
Industry surveys keep finding that a meaningful chunk of public chargers are broken, offline, or delivering a fraction of their advertised speed.
A 350-kilowatt pedestal that actually gives you 40 is like ordering a double cheeseburger and getting a single with no cheese.
Some want an account you set up in 2019 and forgot the password to.
A few still require you to call a number, which feels less like the future and more like ordering a pizza in 1994.
Electrons can cost you anywhere from 20 cents to 70 cents a kilowatt-hour depending on state, network, and whether the moon is in retrograde.
Gas prices at least pretend to follow supply and demand.
The automakers aren't off the hook either.
They keep shipping cars that route you to a charger with the confidence of a GPS that has never been outside.
You roll in with 8 percent battery, the app says the stall is available, and you spend the next twenty minutes watching a guy in a Rivian unplug, apologize, and drive away because it was never working.
To be fair, the trajectory is genuinely improving.
New stations are going in faster, federal money is finally hitting the ground, and the NACS standard means one plug shape is winning.
It's just slower than the marketing promised, and the gap between the ad and the parking lot is where all the rage lives.
Here's the thing nobody in a boardroom wants to admit: charging isn't a hardware problem anymore.
It's an experience problem, and experience is unglamorous.
Nobody gets a keynote slide for "the screen on the pedestal doesn't freeze in the rain." But that's the stuff that decides whether your neighbor buys an EV or a hybrid.
It's just aggressively mediocre in a way that punishes you precisely when you're most tired, most far from home, and most desperate for a bathroom.
Which, coincidentally, is exactly when you're supposed to be feeling great about the future.
Final Thoughts
And until plugging in is as boring as pumping gas, every road trip review is going to read like a Yelp page for a restaurant that's out of everything except the napkins.