There are now more than 60,000 public EV charging stations scattered across the United States, and a growing number of them are broken, abandoned, or quietly rusting behind strip malls.
Drivers call it "charger roulette" — you pull up with 12 percent battery, and the screen is dead.
Power found that one in five charging attempts ends in failure, and customer satisfaction with public charging has actually dropped even as more stations open.
Part of this is a business model problem.
Many chargers were installed with grant money and no maintenance budget.
When a unit breaks, there's no revenue stream to justify fixing it, so it sits there — still glowing on the map apps, still promising a charge it can't deliver.
A driver in rural Georgia told a local news crew she now plans her routes around a single working station, 40 miles out of her way.
Unlike gas pumps, where the experience has barely changed in 50 years, EV charging requires an app, an account, a sometimes-baffling network membership, and a credit card reader that works maybe half the time.
The federal government's new standards aim to fix this, but retrofitting tens of thousands of older stations takes years.
Tesla's Supercharger network remains the gold standard, which is why nearly every rival brand cut deals to use it.
But opening those plugs to Ford, GM, and Rivian drivers has created new congestion — and Tesla's own layoffs this year slowed expansion right when demand was climbing.
For everyday Americans, this isn't an abstract policy debate.
It's whether you can visit your mother two states away without white-knuckling the last 30 miles.
It's whether a family with one car can go electric at all.
It's whether the promise of cheaper driving turns into a subscription to anxiety.
It's maintenance contracts, standardized payment, and treating charging like the utility it actually is.
Until then, the map will keep lying, and drivers will keep learning not to trust it.
We built a nationwide network on optimism and ribbon cuttings, then acted surprised when nobody budgeted for the unglamorous work of keeping the lights on.
Final Thoughts
That's not an infrastructure failure — it's a character failure.