The problem is now apparently there are too many chargers

Someone just told me EVs are pointless because you can't charge them when the power is out for months on end, and he was oddly precise about that timeframe. If a big American city went without electricity for months, something truly awful would have happened, and the gas stations wouldn't be running either. Honestly, the vehicles still working by then would be those belonging to suburban folks with full solar roofs and an EV.

Without electricity, a fuel pump can't dispense anything.

After Hurricane Sandy hit the NYC area, this turned into a huge headache: every station in the region lost power, so nobody could find gasoline anywhere. My dad responded by purchasing a dual fuel generator. Propane can be dispensed without power and it stays good in storage for a very long time. Batteries for the home weren't available yet at that point, and solar wasn't an option at my parents' place because there are too many tall trees shading it.

What finally got my spouse on board with solar panels and a battery was Hurricane Sandy. Our power was off for about ten days, and everyone was driving around hunting for open stations to fill up their generators. We bought an EV in 2019, which was something I'd longed for ever since hearing Ed Begley Jr. talk about his back in the 1980s.

Even the handful of stations that did have generators burned through their fuel quickly. Afterward, more of them installed generators.

I'd love a zombie apocalypse film that actually shows the practical advantages of EVs over gas cars. Gasoline degrades faster than an EV battery does, and an EV can be charged from solar, flowing water, wind and so on. Pop culture should help teach some people this, haha.

Big EV could really use some better propaganda! Seriously though, the level of nonsense people believe about this topic is awful.

That would be amazing. Funny thing is, the most recent time I clearly remember an EV getting spotlighted was a pretty cringey product placement in the middle of Shang-Chi, during a chase through a jungle or forest. The characters loudly exclaim "tHIs is aN EV?!?!?" while the camera shoots the car like a commercial, speeding through the trees and looking cool 😂😂

My pick for funniest EV used as a plot point is an episode of "Poker Face." A killer tries to stage his victim's death as a suicide by connecting a dryer vent hose from the window of the victim's mobile home to the exhaust pipe of the victim's car. He seals up the doors and windows, tapes the hose firmly in place, then crawls under the car to find the exhaust and can't. When he pops his head up, he spots the "LEAF" badge above the rear bumper. 😁

Leave The World Behind has a scene where a bunch of Teslas go haywire and go after Julia Roberts.

Here's something funny we found out in Texas when that massive storm cut power for ages: my EV actually fared far better than my neighbors' vehicles, since it was at 80% charge while a lot of people rarely keep even half a tank.

Back in the early 90s I filled up a Volvo Laplander at a tiny station on a small island. Fuel came from barrels, and the pump was a hand-operated one with a counter attached. The island had only around 30 km of gravel road, and part of the area was a Norwegian air force range where F-16s practiced strafing and bombing. I'd guess that manual pump is still sitting there.

Funny enough, a handful of solar panels is all I need to charge my car. It's slow, but good enough to help out in an emergency. Unless that guy has his own oil well and a refinery at home, there's no way he's producing his own fuel.

Maybe he could brew biodiesel if he's got an arrangement with the local fish-and-chip shop?

That only works for a diesel vehicle, not a petrol one.

Quiet, you've ruined the joke for the rest of us. I'd have loved watching someone pour huge effort into making fuel for his oversized, never-really-driven truck, only to find it won't run on the stuff. Though I could burn that biodiesel in my 3.5 kW generator. And while we're at it, why do some preppers buy gasoline generators and then stockpile gasoline?

Probably they're building Molotov cocktails so they can fight for the Army of the Apocalypse.

So we've finally hit on one thing EVs can't do: electric Molotov cocktails for the AI wars.

As a prepper myself, I find EVs the better choice, for two reasons. 1) They're agnostic about their energy source. Grid power, a gas generator, solar panels, even a homemade waterwheel all work, so long as electricity is going in. 2) Right outside my home I've got two huge power reserves that could cover all my electrical needs for a good while and still let me drive.

Agreed. If even the most rural town in America that's still on the grid were without power for months, then something truly awful would have happened.

In southwest Louisiana we lost power for 3 weeks in 2020, since the whole grid needed rebuilding after Hurricane Laura. Weeks, not months. We slept at relatives' place an hour away and spent daytime cleaning up and repairing. I didn't own an EV then, but it would have handled that daily round trip of about two hours without trouble. People who stayed put around the clock wouldn't have driven much beyond trips to the relief site for daily food boxes. In fact, EVs are more commonly used to power houses.

For the last three years both of my EVs have been charged entirely off grid. I just came back from a road trip, and I was genuinely stunned to have to shell out $19 to fill up on the road. It stung. So when society collapses, I'll be the one cruising past everyone, giving a little wave.

Over in Ukraine, people drive electric vehicles because fuel is scarce there while electricity remains available.

I can picture the argument: "The government screws up, the grid dies, and your EV is useless! Big Electricity is ripping you off, duuude." But if the grid stays down for months, buddy, society has far bigger problems than your car 😂

Meanwhile my solar panels just chuckle at a citywide blackout and gas pumps that don't work.

Honestly, losing power for a few months would put all of us in serious trouble. It's one of my biggest fears, since society already seems to be balanced on the edge of a cliff and could come completely apart. And here's someone fretting over how to charge an EV. 🤣

I'm in the middle of the US, and a few years back a devastating windstorm hit us. Outages were widespread, and fuel ran short too, because the handful of stations that still had electricity ran dry. The refinery had lost power as well.

Something along those lines has already happened: Hurricane Katrina. I once talked to a National Guard soldier who'd been sent there, and he told me dogs were eating the many bodies left decomposing in the streets. Around 1,300 people died, and roughly half of New Orleans's population left the city.

Didn't Katrina also leave gas stations empty and cause a fuel shortage? Whether you drive an EV or not wouldn't have made much difference then. If anything, an EV could act as a power source while the grid was being brought back.

Whenever a big hurricane in the Gulf comes ashore on the Texas or Louisiana coast, gas supplies can be hit if the refineries get damaged.

Don't they all just trail their senator off to Cancun when that happens?

An EV can power a household for around ten days to two weeks before it needs to be plugged in again.

After the hurricane struck Florida and the Carolinas, it was clear that electric vehicles handled evacuating and the recovery period better than gasoline cars did.

As far as I know, once Hurricane Helene passed, the earliest vehicles able to get around were those belonging to the government and ATVs, with EVs coming next.

Where I was, the real first responders were folks with chainsaws, cutting through fallen trees so roads could open. Everybody else could get moving, but not far at all during the first two or three days.

These days, when an evacuation clogs the highways, gas-powered cars frequently burn through their fuel idling with the AC on and end up left on the shoulder. EVs can sit in the same standstill traffic with the AC running without trouble and still make it out.

Katrina was chaos, yet power came back to most of New Orleans pretty quickly. A few small pockets stayed dark for as long as two months. That's awful for the people living there, but for EV owners it isn't a big issue: you drive several miles to somewhere with electricity and charge. An outage covering a huge region for months is extremely unlikely.

I find it amusing how people who say things like that show their entitlement and Dunning-Kruger effect right in front of you. They believe they're brilliant and full of wisdom, and I'd wager the commenter is a boomer too. Trust me, if the grid were down for 8 months, everyone's priorities would shift in a hurry. Solar or an EV wouldn't be what you'd want, except as a way to get far into the middle of nowhere quickly. Most people in wealthy countries have no idea how to live without running water, power, and grocery stores. Generators only last so long. In time the refineries stop working, natural gas stops flowing, water stops being pumped, and furnaces won't light. Filling up and commuting to a job won't exist if the outage stretches past weeks into months or years. You'd be focused on surviving and on not drawing attention to any comforts you still had. Our whole way of life rests on electricity.

Come on, leave boomers out of it. I'm one myself, with solar since 2008 and EVs since 2019. Tossing out sweeping generalizations like that just reveals sloppy thinking.

A lot of people don't recall when the Northeastern US lost power for several days. Where I lived, every gas station had shut down within roughly 30 minutes or so. I have solar panels now.

Is he not aware that gas pumps need electricity to work as well?

If the world ended, I'd say electric vehicles come out ahead. Solar panels are everywhere, and with a modest amount of know-how you could keep one charged indefinitely, which means range stops being a limit.

What I can't figure out is how that guy expected to find petrol after the grid had been down for months. It's pure Mad Max thinking.

I put that exact question to him. All he came back with was "I can get gas, you can't plug in, you stupid liberal!" It seems he believes the tanks at gas stations just fill themselves by magic.

Gotta be sure every scenario is covered, however far-fetched it is. /s

I've lived in PA for 60 years, and the longest outage I can recall was about 7 hours, and that was just recently.

I once asked someone: if the power's out for miles and miles in every direction, where exactly would I need to drive to?

When Helene hit North Carolina, we lost power for several days, and there was no gas to be had because the stations had no electricity to run their pumps.

Same here with Helene. A few days in, I was practically the only person still driving around, in my AWD Nissan Ariya EV. The pumps were dead, so I charged overnight off my propane generator. Once the grid finally returned, people queued for hours since fuel was scarce and trucks couldn't get through the damaged roads.

Honestly though, at that stage where would anybody even be heading? Work?

Give yourself solar panels plus a battery, either a hybrid or fully islanded setup, and within a couple of weeks an EV would be the only thing still moving on the roads.

Actually, it's entirely doable. With solar panels on your house you could keep an EV charged for years. And think about it: if the grid is out across an entire region, what exactly is the fuel supply supposed to run on?

Is he under the impression that gas pumps run by siphoning?

By then, the vehicles still getting people around will mostly be bicycles.

Even certified by themselves, no less. It's such a flawless loop of stupidity that it almost reads like poetry.

Maybe he should check how many fuel stations are currently out of gas.

Wait for it: his next point will be some video he saw of long queues at Russian gas stations, as if that proves gas cars are still wildly popular.

Every single car on the road during the 1970s fuel crisis was a combustion car. Case closed, EVs lose.

Agreed. I've driven an EV for 15 years. Early on, charging took ages, but today's fast chargers are incredibly quick. And the faster you charge, the less time you spend plugged in, so you simply need fewer chargers.

Speaking as an older guy, I'd add that pulling up to a Tesla Supercharger used to be quite a civilized affair. Folks chatted with one another and swapped stories about their cars. These days everyone's glued to their phone and it's silent. I miss those gentler days.

I'd say covid has more to do with that than anything. People have been socializing less across the board since then.

Two more things seem to be going on in Europe. First, Tesla once felt like a real community with Elon as a genuine hero, but after a couple of Trump elections and some salutes, that image has been stained. Second, owning one used to mean being an adventurous type, someone prepared to throw a good chunk of money at a risky bet, and those owners bonded the way members of a classic car club do. Now it's something almost anyone buys.

This just shows that people like that don't debate honestly and will never admit they were wrong about anything.

I'd argue many of them aren't even aware they're being dishonest. They reason backwards from the conclusion they want, and since their minds latch onto whatever supports their existing beliefs and downplay the rest, they honestly feel they've weighed the evidence. Take him: not long ago he was sure the real problem was too few chargers, and that has basically vanished from his memory, replaced by the fresh observation that plenty of chargers sit empty.

Funny, because in my EV I pass gas stations constantly and typically see just a car or two at the pumps. Guess that proves gas cars are unpopular and a dead-end technology. /s

Your coworker probably can't grasp that chargers are effectively already in place at nearly every address in the country. They won't all be quick, granted, but electricity reaches everywhere.

Across five years of driving an EV, I've never arrived at a completely deserted set of chargers, and I've never had to wait in line for one. Perhaps I'm fortunate with where I live, but to me the charging network looks slightly ahead of demand, which is ideal. Modern software also steers you to other chargers when some are taken, spreading out the load rather than letting the popular spots soak up everyone. I realize this varies by location; I'm in Scandinavia.

After 8 years with my EV, I've had to wait for a charger perhaps 2-3 times, usually at chargers outside a busy store. Navigation now shows which chargers are free, which helps. I've also come across lots of empty ones, mostly on long road trips when we drive overnight.

My honest take is that we need more slow chargers at spots like beaches, hotels and theme parks, where people leave the car for hours and don't want to return to shuffle it.

Agreed, mid-speed charging is what's missing! Something around 30 kW would do: enough to add a solid amount of range in an hour or two while I shop, catch a movie or eat at a restaurant, without billing me at DC fast charging prices.

I'm a bit amazed hotels haven't embraced this more. Does anyone know a good way to find hotels that have charging on site?

Try this on for size: it's around midnight where I live, and the gas station directly opposite my place has nobody at it, so clearly California has turned against cars. Hear how ridiculous that reasoning is?

Side note, we drive the same model, and mine is blue. 😉

Trust me, Western Pennsylvania doesn't have an excess of chargers. Visiting relatives there in our EV isn't realistic, since there's nowhere sensible to plug in. It's pretty heavily pro-Trump country too.

Do your relatives out in western PA not have power at their house? Pack a portable Level 2 charger with a long 240V cord and plug it into the dryer outlet overnight. At about 7kW that adds roughly 25-35 miles of range each hour, so even limited to 32 amps, a night of 9 hours or so should fill you up, unless your vehicle is something like a Ford F-150 Lightning or a Hummer.

I recently drove a road trip in convoy with another family who had a gas car, and the father is a committed EV doubter. Before we set off I explained that since I travel with my wife and child, fast charging adds almost nothing to our travel time, because we already need a stop of about 25 minutes every 2-3 hours at most for restrooms, stretching, food and so on. His comeback was that this only holds if you never have to queue for a charger. Fair point, but I honestly can't recall when I last waited, and this was a tollway on the morning and midday of Labor Day weekend, about as busy as it gets. Even in Indiana, the travel plazas pretty much all have Tesla Superchargers (around a dozen at each) plus Electrify America stalls (four to six each), so free spots were always available. I did see him wait briefly at one point when every pump was taken. They still got to the destination ahead of us, by a full 5 minutes, and he was driving faster than us at the end, which split up our convoy (and hurt my feelings). After all that he still said it "just seems like a hassle." I don't know what's left to doubt, but he seems to be treating EVs like a detective game where he keeps hitting the same dismissive button. He's also previously claimed charging isn't "that much cheaper" than fuel, though I worked the numbers out for him and he knows I was paying about a third of the gas cost before prices climbed to $4-5 a gallon (obviously the gap is wider now, closer to a fifth or sixth). Bottom line: some people just can't be reached. They'll switch their story or shift the goalposts, whatever it takes to avoid facing the facts.

This strikes me as typical conservative rationalizing. They keep comforting themselves by treating coincidence as cause in just about every subject.

Someone told me buying an EV actually hurts the environment more, because the fossil fuels used to build the battery supposedly dwarf what an ICE burns in daily driving. I looked my coworker right in the eye and said that maybe saving the environment wasn't why I bought it. Maybe I wanted to stop being at the mercy of $5 gas every time someone in power throws a tantrum. He drives a huge truck, naturally.

I've owned my EV for roughly 3 years now. Compared with my old ICE sedan, I broke even environmentally somewhere around 1 to 1.5 years in. The savings on fuel and maintenance have been remarkable too, with more than $6k saved on gas alone.

Those people don't actually care about the environment. They just assume you do.

Easy now, leave potatoes out of this.

The reason public chargers look empty is that they're pricey next to plugging in at home. For most owners it's only a concern on a road trip, haha.

That guy obviously believes public charging stations are supposed to replace gas stations one-to-one. In reality the whole picture is more like roughly 90% home charging plus about 10% public charging, and together that adds up to what a gas station does.

Here's my logic: I was driving to work at 4:30 this morning and went by a gas station with nobody fueling up. So obviously the country has far more gas stations than it needs.

We own a pair of EVs plus a PHEV. The PHEV exists mainly because we take a 1,800 mile road trip a few times each year, around 3 to 5 times. One of the EVs has made that drive, but it eats up three days each direction, whereas the PHEV finishes it in a single day each way. Visiting friends in South Texas isn't workable in an EV for us since there are basically no chargers below San Antonio. Still, we're getting close to where it works.

Honestly the issue is that there are plenty of fools out there, and it's not worth wasting energy talking with them.

He's basically the EV version of someone shouting "this is great for bitcoin!" regardless of what happens. He just bends every fact until it supports his anti-EV theory.

I pass the gas station near me constantly, and a lot of the time nobody's fueling up there. So by that reasoning, combustion cars must be unpopular and nobody uses them.

We're a two-EV household, and neither car has seen a Supercharger in over six weeks. Charging away from home just isn't something we do on a daily basis.

Exactly! Even some reporters miss this. Around 90% of my charging happens at home, so the steep prices at ultra-fast chargers hardly touch me.

It's kind of funny, because gas pumps also sit idle with no cars for long stretches. That was a terrible analogy on his part.

Comparing the US to France is revealing, because the US is far from having plentiful public charging relative to the number of EVs on its roads. The IEA figures for the end of 2025 put the US at around 33 electric light-duty vehicles for every public charge point, while France sits near 15 electrified vehicles per point. Even so, the French government doesn't consider that sufficient: it wants 400,000 public points by 2030, about twice what it had in 2025. Nor is France building just for ordinary days. Its road plan to 2035 includes roughly 22,000 high-power points for cars across about 900 motorway rest areas, which is five times the current motorway count. Officials openly state that the network coped with the summer 2025 peaks, but that it will need strengthening as more EVs arrive. So if a driver in the US passes an unused charger and decides there are too many, I'd treat that conclusion with caution. France is already provisioned far more densely, and its planners still project 300,000–400,000 public points to serve over 12 million EVs by 2035. A fully electric passenger fleet would be a different order of magnitude again. France has about 200k public points today, plus millions of private charge points at homes and workplaces. Public chargers aren't meant to deliver every kWh, since most charging takes place wherever the car is parked. The useful question, then, isn't how many chargers you happen to see idle. It's whether home and workplace charging combined with public charging can meet typical demand and still handle holiday and motorway surges without long queues. Seen that way, a charger that looks underused may signal a network in good shape. If every unit were busy around the clock, the network would already be too small.

A couple of years back I drove an EV in France, a rental with modest range and slow charging, and it was a pleasure. The rest stops were excellent with dependable access to chargers, and I rarely got stuck with app lock-in (which can shut out foreign visitors) because nearly every charger took a credit card. Other countries should copy what France did.

From what I can tell, France's one real issue is the summer holiday rush, when people from the northern countries all head south toward the south of France and Spain and need plenty of motorway charging. For the rest of the year, those big charging hubs would sit mostly idle, which makes the business case hard.

Life is simply easier when you avoid talking to fools.

I just finished a Car & Driver video about the BMW i4, and the presenter said something along the lines of "when you buy an EV, make sure its range covers your worst-case trip." That can be read sensibly, but anyone new to EVs will likely take it to mean they must do the whole round trip on one charge, so if they visit Frob City every couple of years, 240 miles each way means needing 480 miles of range. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt, he overlooks the fast-growing DC fast charging network, and the fact that a quick restroom and coffee break in a 400V car can add a hundred miles or more. I'm quite disappointed, though I probably should have expected that kind of nonsense from a legacy car magazine. As for your coworker, don't bother. The goalposts will keep shifting, and there will always be some new "reason."

Those outlets are also funded by companies that sell products for the old technologies. Huge sums go toward motor oil, fuel additives and aftermarket parts, whereas there's barely any aftermarket for EV performance.

People get extremely attached to whatever they're used to. Fundamentally it's just a different drivetrain and energy source. What drew people to early EVs was the cutting-edge tech, and that tech has since moved into gas cars too, so the real difference is shrinking to drivetrain and fuel storage. When a new technology enters the market, it usually improves very fast and each known weakness gets fixed. Range went from around 70 miles to 400 miles, and charge times fell as charger power rose. So much money is going into batteries that their remaining flaws will probably vanish within the next generation. In that sense this old-school holdout will watch the world move past him, though he can still enjoy his motorcycle, since nobody is taking that away. What really convinced me was a neighbor who put solar and a battery on his house. He told me how much lower his power bill is, and he stores more than enough during the day to charge his car overnight. The grid is just his backup, not his main source. I hadn't realized things had advanced that quickly. Add the new solar co-ops where neighbors share surplus power, and it's genuinely revolutionary.

Conservative pundits and politicians turned it into a political fight, so now it's tied up with people's identities. And honestly, who in their right mind would go to bat for the OIL INDUSTRY of all things?

Exactly. For over a hundred years the fossil fuel industry has shaped US foreign and domestic policy, and the endless wars and coups all trace back to what benefited them. I think the green movement threatened their dominance so badly that they poured billions into politicians to crush it. Here's a fun fact: the Solyndra panels that Midwest GOP politicians sank worked great, and most of the installed ones are still running more than ten years after politics shut the company down. A European firm is now copying them. And the White House had solar panels on its roof back in 1979, made in the US, at a time when only the US made them. We could have owned the whole industry. Instead oil got Reagan elected, supposedly by paying Iran to keep the hostages, and solar was wiped out. Then Reagan supplied Iran with weapons and jet parts and more. Brilliant move. Yes, the Gipper started all this (see Iran-Contra, one of many GOP crimes against the country).

Empty gas pumps are everywhere I look, so by that logic nobody wants gas cars and the technology is doomed.

By that logic, unless every single wall socket is being used around the clock, electricity must have fallen out of favor.

Surely he's well aware of Norway, where more than 85% of new cars sold last year were electric. Clearly a technology on its way out.

Give it a few years and this same person will be complaining that charging an EV costs too much. There's always a new objection. Meanwhile, let him keep his landline phone and his old tube television.

He'll call EVs too expensive while handing over $6/gallon at the gas pump. These critics conveniently skip over the fact that most owners do the bulk of their charging at home, using cheap overnight rates.

A buddy wondered whether I'd take my EV9 on a cross-country drive, so I mapped it out. Covering 550 miles in a day would take about 3 stops, each under 25 minutes, plus a level 2 charger at the hotel overnight so I can start fresh the next morning. Where 350kW chargers are located does affect where you can stop efficiently between Denver and Chicago, so some of the legs end up unevenly spaced. DC fast charging on those days also doesn't beat gas on cost. Still, the rest of the year I spend around 75% less per mile and never stand around for a 5-minute fill-up, so overall it evens out. Besides, for a 2,500-mile trip I'd just fly, since I have no desire to spend 3 days stuck in any car.

Yawn. These folks just refuse to learn. Chargers sitting unused at the far end of a parking lot where no one ever parked anyway harm nobody. I doubt the idiot understands that most people only use public chargers a handful of times a year; I'm at maybe 4-5 times annually. His tiny brain can't grasp that charging an EV isn't the same as filling up an ICE car, because we start out every trip from home with a full "tank." Have you asked him what his weekly gas bill runs for his ICE car?

Passed 3 gas stations on my way in this morning and most of the pumps were sitting idle. Guess gas cars just aren't popular.

Did you call him out on it? How did he respond?

Weirdly, I get jealous seeing people at Superchargers. I rarely take road trips, and Level 1 charging works perfectly well for me, but I still get a little FOMO about not using the SCs.

Don't worry, you're not missing out. Doing something else is far better than sitting in your car waiting for it to charge.

You don't have to sit in the car while it charges, though! I usually pick up something to eat and walk around a bit, and by the time I'm back the car is normally ready before I am, haha.

It really comes down to how long you can go before needing a break and how much you can stand on a road trip. For me the charging stops fit nicely with how far I can drive in one stretch. I could push longer, but it exhausts me. And since I have a Tesla, it's restful to let the car handle all the driving. A trip that takes me 12 hours in a gas car ends up around 13.5 hours in the EV.

I was in Seattle recently, and one parking garage within four blocks had 64(!) L2 chargers, with a handful of other garages offering somewhere from 16 to 30 each. At least half were occupied, and that's counting only the ChargePoint ones. On the fast-charging side, nearly everything I used during the trip was EVgo or Tesla Superchargers, and the two were frequently at the same location.

I noticed more Teslas in Seattle than I've ever seen in Southern California. The city has largely tackled the issue of not being able to charge at an apartment by installing huge numbers of L2 chargers in parking garages.

Americans seem to have a particular strain of conservatism (I mean temperamental, not political) where change just isn't tolerated. Back in the UK we used to mock it, with a thick old mining-town accent: "It were good enough fer me father, and it were good enough fer me fathers father, and it's good enough fer me." Even the Australians have embraced EVs now, mate!

Ah yes, the classic "it's empty, so nobody must be using it" line. Bike lanes get exactly the same treatment.

Follow-up question: is every gas pump occupied all the time, or is gas a dead technology too?

Any home already has an ordinary outlet, and charging overnight from it covers about 90% of what an EV driver needs.

My husband and I drove our EV about 6,500 miles through the northern US this summer, and we were surprised that we never once had to queue for a charger. It made us curious what that says about the EV charging business, but for us it was wonderful.

I've driven EVs since 2011, starting with a first-generation Nissan LEAF. That's a solid 15 years or so, and in all that time I've charged away from home no more than 3 times total.

A guy I worked with insisted, totally sure of himself, that fast charging an EV costs more per mile than putting diesel in his huge truck. That was around 2024. It's frustrating how some people just aren't curious about how things actually work and would rather stick to disliking stuff.

Let's state the obvious for a second. Drive along any big city boulevard and you'll likely spot gas stations with hardly any cars at the pumps, or none at all. We rarely register it, since nobody pays attention to something as ordinary and everywhere as a gas station. So would a pile of idle pumps seen on one random, completely unscientific drive show that combustion cars are unpopular because there's supposedly too much capacity? Of course not. On top of that, I can't install a working gas pump at my house cheaply or easily, whereas I plug in both of my EVs at home every day (they're the fourth and fifth EVs I've owned). Given all that, it's easy to see that OP's ex-coworker is a complete idiot.

Honestly, how busy do gas stations get? I'm not being snarky. It's been years since I set foot in one, so I have no idea.

It varies by hour. The ones near me are generally crowded from morning until mid-afternoon, then things quiet down after the evening rush is over.

It differs a lot from one country to another. In certain places the charging network operators built out capacity ahead of expected demand, so there can be more chargers than cars to use them. That isn't true everywhere, though.

People who hate things will keep hating them, and their reasons hardly matter. 🤷‍♂️

Interesting, your coworker has the math wrong here. The point isn't to keep every existing charger busy. Consumers don't care about that, and to some extent neither does the wider infrastructure effort, whose aim is simply to make charging available. What matters is avoiding a cascading failure. Picture charging demand as a share of capacity: 50% demand means 50% of chargers in use, and 10% demand means 10% in use. But on the busiest day of the year, 250% demand pushes usage to about 99%, so effectively nothing is free, and the queue keeps growing rather than shrinking, because each hour brings several times more cars than can be charged in that hour. So a steady supply of unused chargers is essential. Once utilization hits around 85%, you're in the danger zone, and if demand reaches even 105% of capacity, it's already too late.

"Whenever I drive past a gas station, some pumps are sitting empty. That proves gas vehicles aren't popular."

By that same reasoning, empty gas pumps would lead you to conclude that everyone just walks everywhere.

Financially, public chargers just can't beat charging at home. Getting a utility connection capable of even 50kW is costly, let alone several of them or 350kW units, and then there are demand charges that apply even if the charger is used only once a month. All of those costs have to be built into the price to recoup the investment. I once heard DC fast charging economics compared to souvenir shops: people only need them when traveling. There's no loyal base of repeat customers like gas stations enjoy. In the city I visit most, there are very few chargers that are actually usable, and most are badly located. PlugShare shows more options, but when you read the details, they turn out to be at dealerships and fenced off to stop use, or behind a locked gate. Still, it's true that the fast chargers I do use are seldom crowded. I charged twice last week. One site had 8 chargers with just one other car there, priced at 65¢/kWh. The other was also 65¢, had 2 chargers, and was empty. Since I was leaving the car to charge and didn't want idle fees piling up before I returned, I paid per minute instead, 12¢/minute at 18kW, which came to roughly $0.90/kWh. There used to be more chargers, but when they needed repairs, the owners just shut them off instead of sinking more money into them. Rural areas are worse still. Part of why we had trouble finding a charger was that the one fast charger we normally use when visiting my sister-in-law was out of service for repairs.

This is the "gas station mindset" again, and it's especially common with rural folks. A buddy of mine out in the country keeps saying an EV could never work for him, since the closest fast charger is about 50 minutes away. That's despite me having driven an EV across two states to see him more than once. Every time, I point out that he'd simply charge at home, and that fast chargers only matter on long trips away from his place. He nods along like it's sunk in, and then on my next visit we have the exact same conversation.

People in dense suburbs and cities often depend on public chargers, because they're renting and can't install one, their garage is stuffed with other things, or they don't have a garage at all. The stations near me get plenty of use, though nobody queues since there are alternatives close by. At my neighborhood EVGo site today I spotted a Hummer EV, a Mercedes EQE, a Hyundai Ioniq 5, a Honda Prologue, a BMW i3, and my own Audi e-tron.

Back more than 4 years ago I came up with a way to charge in the city. My street is one-way and I've got no driveway. In my little front yard I fastened my portable charger to a garden stake, and ran a heavy-duty extension cord to it through a basement window. Each night the cable goes across the sidewalk under a cord protector so nobody trips, then beneath my car and into the charge port. Come morning I unplug, toss the cable into the shrubs, and head out. Soon after I set it up, neighbors began knocking, curious about EVs and full of questions. Since then I've helped more than 30 people in my big-city neighborhood set up something similar, or explained how. Now, about 4 years and 3 months in, nearly every block has a couple of these scrappy charging rigs. Where there's a will, there's a way. 😁

I stopped at the charging site in a shopping center lot near me in Stamford, CT, which has 8 Electrify America stalls and around 12 Tesla ones. Every EA stall was taken, so I had to wait for one to free up. There are clearly a lot of EVs around here.

It costs 70¢ per kWh. I get that's expensive where you are and it's all relative, but it makes me want to cry how cheap electricity is in the US.

Drawing conclusions from a small sample is risky. At the Home Depot near me in the SF Bay Area, the DC fast chargers (12 bays) are nearly always over half occupied, yet it's rare to actually wait. At my friend's place in Bend, OR, with 10 bays, I've had to wait every single time.

On the other hand, Electrify America does keep me as a loyal customer. I pay a $5 monthly fee (which I always forget to cancel) to get a 25% discount, and that makes them the cheapest option along most of my road trip route.

Exactly right, I fully agree. Few people bother checking what a 1MW transformer costs or how hard it is to get one. A site could have 8 chargers rated 350kW each, but without the transformer and AC/DC equipment behind them those ratings mean nothing. Transformers aren't easy to come by, and they frequently need replacing after natural disasters around the world. It reminds me of Carl Sagan: we live in a society that depends on science while understanding very little of it.

Every day I pass gas stations, and most of the time some or most of the pumps are sitting unused. All of them in use at once is rare. So is gasoline on its way out entirely? /s

Where I live, Supercharging overnight actually beats charging at home on price: as little as $0.21/kWh at a Supercharger versus $0.33/kWh at home. That's only because the utility gives commercial customers off-peak rates. Residential customers get a time-of-use plan, but the super off-peak price is about 0.31/kWh and the peak price is only around 0.40/kWh, so shifting usage barely helps and doesn't make sense.

After I finally got my EV, a relative told me these cars are actually hazardous. Their reasoning was that one-pedal driving becomes such a habit that, the next time you climb into a gas car, you'll crash because it won't slow down the same way when you lift off the accelerator.

The real problem is how charging gets laid out: we need fewer sites with more plugs at each one, though I expect that'll happen eventually. Chargers should also be concentrated where people already spend time. Put 50 kW DC units where visits typically run under two hours, and 11 kW AC units where people stay longer.

I'd be curious to see a Monte Carlo simulation pitting those two buildout approaches against each other. My instinct favors more locations, since drivers could stop at well-chosen intervals and not have to top up early and spend time in the slow part of the charging curve. A wider spread also puts chargers in front of more non-EV people, which helps counter the "there are no chargers around here" line. Then again, fewer but larger sites would probably cope better with peak travel days, especially where there aren't many alternate routes.

In the biggest car markets on the planet, battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles make up the largest share of purchases. The madness going on in the US isn't something that spreads easily to other places.

I sometimes wonder how fast chargers manage to turn a profit when hardly any cars seem to be using them.

Profitability comes at roughly 15% utilization. One breakdown of EV charging unit economics (per charger and per session) says the working industry threshold for DC fast charging has been about 15%, and usage is trending up: average US Level 3 utilization reached 12.9% in June 2025. Even fairly modest daily use can put a station in the black. The same article covers costs. DC fast charging is where the capital outlay gets serious, with commercial installs typically running $70,000 to $200,000 per port once you add transformer upgrades, demand charges, and site work. NREL figures put some stations at up to $150,000 per unit, and complex high-capacity sites can reach several hundred thousand. That's pricey, but it's still within reach for a small retail-lot landlord or an investor with some working capital. If a port costs under $100k all-in, even a small landlord or small partnership could build a two- or four-port site. Now compare that to building a gas station, which usually costs $1.5M to $10M+. Small independents typically run $1.5M-$3M. A mid-size station with a convenience store, the most common kind, tends to cost $2.5M-$6M, mostly because of land and the store build. Big truck stops, travel centers, or wholesale fueling sites can hit $8-$15M+ given the specialized equipment. Gas stations also need much more land for storage tanks, and I'd guess the regulatory and environmental burdens are very costly. Running heavy copper from a utility trunk line to power fast chargers should be a fraction of a petrol install, which involves a lot of digging and trenching for tanks and lines to every pump. So even against a small gas station, a four-stall DCFC site is at least 50% cheaper in the worst case, and if you can reach that $70k target for four chargers, it's far cheaper to build and maintain.

The smallest, oldest convenience store in my small town recently swapped out its tanks, which were more than 40 years old, and it turned into a staggering construction job. Cranes and heavy machinery, huge pits and trenches, the whole site fenced off, and the store closed for a couple of weeks. By contrast, when the store across town got a Tesla Supercharger station, the pedestals showed up on trucks as prefabricated units and were simply set in place, with a transformer beside them. A bit of digging for conduit, some concrete curbing and paving, and that was it.

Tesla's chargers cost about five times what I pay per kWh.

A charger sitting empty on a random Tuesday says very little about whether there will be enough of them on the August chassé-croisé Saturday.

This is a textbook logical mistake that people against EVs keep making.

Two forces that can't possibly coexist, locked together like yin and yang 🫸☯️🫷

Mostly, congrats on getting out of that person's circle. They're a true believer who picks out whichever so-called facts suit them and feeds their own echo chamber...

Think of EV chargers the way you'd think of the parking lots at a mall. Pass by on an ordinary Tuesday and hardly any cars are there. On a Saturday it's noticeably fuller, and around Christmas the lot is jammed, with drivers circling for a space. Your friend's logic would only hold up if he also believed shopping is dying, just because the mall looked empty when he drove past one random Tuesday.

Nearly all transportation infrastructure sits mostly idle. Take the Buc-ee's near me: late on a weekday morning, only a few pumps and one or two chargers are in use, and the store has a scattering of customers. From Friday through Sunday afternoon, though, every pump and charger is taken and the store is chaos. Because so many people charge at home, fast chargers might see an even bigger swing between peak and quiet periods than gas pumps do. That could be a headache for the fast-charging business model, but I expect the operators will figure it out.

Is anyone else sick of the constant talk about "road trips"? We take perhaps one or two a year, and none run past 5 hours. Beyond that distance we just fly. Road trip, schmoad trip.

It reminds me of folks who say EVs cost too much (which isn't even accurate these days) and then turn around and gripe about their supposedly steep depreciation.

I've never once needed a public charger, because the level 2 setup at home covers everything I need. I drive an EV, and my son has two ID.4s now, after trading in their Volvo C40 Recharge. At the moment we're looking at EVs for my wife as well.

Whenever I've had to use DCFC in Orange County, CA, or around Las Vegas, they've been packed. I don't need them often, but going by my small unscientific sample, those areas need more of them, along with the I-15 corridor.

On my travels, most gas stations have looked pretty deserted, unless the prices were really low.

He's against EVs and will put a negative spin on anything. Even if every charger were occupied, he'd say, "You'd have to wait 20 minutes just to charge. Not worth it."

Your co-worker might want to take a look at what the Chinese EV industry is up to.

Tesla is clearly serious about California. This one is on the corridor linking LA and the Bay Area, where there are already hundreds of Superchargers, and once it's complete it'll be the largest of them all.

I used to think this was pure fantasy: yesterday I plugged in at 25%, crossed the street for lunch, and by the time I'd finished eating my phone told me the car was already at 80%. Still, my honest view is that there are way too many level 2 chargers and not nearly enough level 3. Stopping for about 30 minutes mid-trip is fine, but sitting around for 3 hours is a non-starter.

Did you mix up the charger levels? Going by what you said next, I'd assume you meant there are too many level 2 chargers.

In my opinion we've finally hit the point where there are enough chargers to justify some regulation. I'd like the rule that makes gas stations show prices on a lit sign extended to EV chargers too, and session fees should be banned while we're at it. Checking prices through all the different apps is practically impossible in real time when I'm driving down a street that I know has 3 chargers I could use.

Both sides have a point. There can be more chargers than today's EV numbers need and still far fewer than a fully electric future would require. The network was built assuming faster adoption. Without bans and rebates propping up sales, the shift has happened more gradually, so for the moment lots of chargers go unused. Once EVs make up a much bigger share of traffic, I fully expect rest stops to be swamped with people waiting to plug in. A charger for every parking space probably won't pay off for most of the year, so around holidays and other busy travel periods, stops will take much longer. With 2 cars ahead of you in line, a 1-hour stop becomes closer to 3.

I'm constantly amazed at how many people lecture me about EV problems, charging infrastructure especially. I tell them I drive from Boston down to North Carolina without any charging trouble, and that I see more chargers appear every month, with Starbucks, Sheetz, Wawa, Target, Walmart and others putting them in at their stores. My current car is my second EV; it goes 100 miles farther on the same energy and cost less than my first. It also goes from 20% to 80% in about 20 minutes. Thanks to my solar panels I haven't paid for electricity in 6 years. I'd figured on an 8-year payback, but rising electricity and gas prices got me there in 6, and for roughly the next 20 years I won't be paying for gas or electricity. I do admit EVs aren't ideal for everybody, particularly people who can't charge at home or who face high electricity rates and have no solar. Hybrids keep improving, though, and running big SUVs and trucks purely on gas will only get pricier. Most of them wander off muttering that I'm lying. It's sad that people can't look at things objectively.

Funny logic: empty chargers mean people don't accept EVs? I see plenty of idle gas pumps, yet nobody would say that means ICE cars are rejected. Smh. Haters will hate. I wasn't a fan of EVs until I went through this: 1. I test drove one. 2. I bought one for local commuting. 3. I took one on a road trip. 4. I saved hundreds of dollars a year on "fuel" and maintenance. To be upfront, mine is a Tesla with FSD, which I know changes things. We use it rather than our Lexus NX350h luxury for road trips. I've even reached the stage where a loud ICE or the whine of a Toyota hybrid engine bothers me.

I'd bet your former co-worker wears a red hat as well. Sounds like a real intellectual giant.

Anyone commenting on how crowded chargers are probably doesn't own an EV and doesn't know what they're talking about. Owners mostly charge at home on inexpensive electricity, and only use fast chargers on long trips or when they can't charge at home, like people in apartments. I love never having to visit a gas station. Charging at home saves me more time than I spend fast charging on any long trip.

I'd be curious whether he also glanced at the gas stations he passed and noticed any pumps sitting idle.

Try telling him that since you constantly pass gas stations with plenty of pumps nobody is using, it must mean everyone is ditching gasoline cars for EVs.

Sure, and honestly I'd expect chargers to be available most of the time. Picture a gas station that had just a single pump. Toll tags like EZ Pass give planners telemetry on how many EVs pass through particular areas, so they can size capacity ahead of time and avoid charging queues that last an hour.

Every so often I pass a gas station with nobody fueling up, so apparently that proves combustion cars are a failed idea.

EV ownership really has to begin with charging at home, with a solid public network coming second in importance. The trouble is that most younger people can't afford a house, never mind paying to get a charger installed. And fast charging at a Supercharger isn't dramatically cheaper than gasoline, so where's the appeal? In my state, at least, only charging at home actually saves money.

The line "nobody will buy a car that can't do road trips" makes me laugh, because most people who say it then go on to never take a road trip at all.

In fairness, these two things could both hold at once: * Chargers are too far apart to support road trips * Chargers are underused Personally I don't believe either one, but I don't see the coworker's two observations as necessarily conflicting.

Bet he also passed fuel pumps standing unused at every stop he made. By that reasoning, internal combustion must be a dying technology that people are walking away from (and then he'd actually be correct).

The comment I like hearing most is that "the grid will never cope with this." Homes have had electricity since the 1880s, and it's hardly rocket science. Wherever there's demand and profit to be had, utilities will build out what's needed. It's not as if nobody knows how to do it.

Haha, go ask the guy how many gas pumps were sitting empty at that very same moment.

Their view of the world is being steered by mental illness, and that's the root of the issue.

Part of why so many slow chargers sit empty is the hassle of using them. You show up and need yet another company's app. Fine, you've got it installed, but then comes two-factor authentication, and then the password needs resetting. Next you find the credit card on file expired since you last charged there 2 years back, so you type in a new one, and the payment fails a few times before it finally goes through. After all that, you get maybe 10-25 miles of range for standing around 45-90 minutes.