In the minds of potential EV buyers, charging is too much. Just over half of them Surveyed by AAA. Last year said public charging infrastructure was a key concern.

These concerns are not unfounded. EV fast charging has historically been weak. In 2023, after a disastrous road trip, I drafted an EV fast-charging “bill of rights,” outlining seven improvements to charging networks needed to turn things around.

What a difference a few years can make.

During a recent road trip, I was amazed at how much the situation had improved. With one small exception, my charging experience was flawless, something I couldn’t say about a similar road trip three years ago.

A nearly flawless experience

This summer’s road trip to Montreal covered more than 600 miles. We had planned to use our Kia EV9, which can travel about 300 miles on a single charge, but the Kia is in the shop with a broken air conditioner. Instead, we drove our Audi e-tron, which has a range of about 220 miles per charge. Despite the disparity, the e-tron handled the journey gracefully. Rangemaxxing might sound nice, but it’s not necessary.

To find chargers, I used A better route planner (ABRP), an app optimizes charging stops by calculating everything from prevailing winds and temperatures to vehicle specs and battery wear. You can use a Bluetooth OBD reader to feed ABRP live data from the car, but I found the app to be pretty accurate without one. ABRP said our first stop should be a. Raven Charger Near Lebanon, New Hampshire. The app is now owned by Raven, so I wasn’t entirely surprised.

After my experience at the Lebanon Chargers, I can see why App chose them regardless of Raven ownership. There were no lines, plenty of food options, a grocery store, and six 300-kilowatt chargers that all worked. I had already downloaded the Rivian app, but I didn’t need it. The charger accepted my credit card and delivered over 140kW, almost the e-tron’s maximum. We used the same chargers on the way home and had a similar experience.

After that, we used a Circuit Electric Station just outside of Montreal to top up for next week. There, we experienced the only difficulty of the trip: the card reader didn’t work, so I had to download Circuit Électrique’s app and load it with 20 Canadian dollars. After that the session went smoothly. In the past, the stop was not entirely necessary. We didn’t drive much during the week, and the hotel charger worked perfectly. But the kids needed a break and my wife needed coffee, so we probably would have plugged in regardless.

Each session lasted about 20 minutes, and we interspersed charging with lunch or rest stops. We never waited for a car. All in all, our wait at border control on the way back to the US was almost as long as the three sessions.

As it used to be.

Three years ago, the trip didn’t even come close. I knew fast charging could be hit or miss—I’ve driven a non-Tesla EV for over a decade—but I still came away disappointed.

This summer, we drove the same Audi e-tron to Maine, making a round trip of about 350 miles, about half the distance of our trip to Montreal. The car could get to Maine on one charge, but the hotel didn’t have an EV charger. To make sure we had enough juice for the long weekend and the start of the drive home, we planned to do a little charging halfway there.

Before we left, I also used ABRP to eliminate less reliable chargers, but the experience was still miserable. The first charger broke right after I plugged it in, forcing me to go to another stall. The first charger never ended the session with my car, which means the second one won’t start without calling customer service. At another stop, the charging network’s app reported two out of four working plugs, but only one actually worked. In total, I drove about seven hours and had to call customer service three times.

Imagine if gas stations worked like this?

The data shows great improvement.

Thankfully, EV charging infrastructure looks very different today. My experiences in 2023 and 2026 are of course anecdotes. But the available data suggests they’re representative of a broader trend: Fast charging has improved rapidly in the U.S.

In July 2023, there were approximately 32,000 DC fast chargers in the country. Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. At the time, many of these chargers were limited to Tesla drivers. (Tesla announced plans to open up its network in 2023, but it took more than a year for widespread access.) Today, EV drivers can use much of Tesla’s network. Continued expansion by Tesla and other companies has helped more than double the total number of DC fast chargers available in 2023.

Moreover, they are more reliable.

My near-flawless trip last week appeared to be the norm, not the exception. Since last year, reliability has improved about 10 points, from the 85s to the mid-90s. Perrin’s Reliability Indexwhich includes metrics such as successful charging sessions and station downtime. According to Perrin, Tesla’s network remains dominant, but other networks are growing rapidly. This competition has undoubtedly helped improve charging experiences across the board.

Gaps still exist in the network and EV chargers are still breaking. But more chargers are being installed every month and broken chargers are being fixed faster than in the past.

It’s not perfect, but I’m really surprised at how fast charging has improved. Someone must tell the holdouts what they are missing.