The Great American EV Road Trip Will Have to Wait—for Chargers

Carl Ingber thought he’d have to get out and push his electric car on an August night when the battery flashed “0%” about five miles from the closest charging station in upstate New York.  

“It’s blinking zero, limited power,” Ingber, a driver with a Hudson Valley airport transport service, recounted to us as he stood charging his Hyundai EV.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, am I going to make it?’”

He did make it—just barely—to a fast-charging federally funded port tucked behind a Bank of America off Interstate 87 in Kingston. It’s the first electric vehicle charging station opened in New York state funded by the 2021 federal infrastructure law.

LISTEN: Kellie Lunney and Lillianna Byington talk about this story on our podcast, On The Merits

We encountered Ingber during an 840-mile trip between Washington, D.C., and New York taken to investigate the future of the federally funded EV charging network after a launch riddled with obstacles—which include location restrictions, state hurdles, grid reliability, and private sector charging woes.

The Biden-Harris administration has spent the past four years trying to make it easier for drivers like Ingber to charge their EVs using public infrastructure, and ultimately spur more Americans to buy the vehicles. The infrastructure law is pouring $7.5 billion into building tens of thousands of federal charging ports this decade.

And while private chargers are also a key part of the government’s overall plan, drivers of most non-Tesla EVs have to navigate complicated phone apps, a lack of signage for charging portals, ghost chargers that pop up on maps but don’t exist, slow charging ports, and varying price points. Federally funded ports play a crucial role, as they’re designed to be fast, interoperable across EV models, easy-to-use and available to more drivers in places that may not be commercially profitable.

It is all part of President Joe Biden’s larger goals to create thousands of clean energy jobs and reduce US greenhouse gas emissions—a key driver of climate change—to 50% of 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Climate activists celebrated the 2021 law’s enactment: transportation makes up about a third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and passenger vehicles are responsible for more than half of that total.

But the rollout has been slow: The Kingston station is one of only 19 charging locations funded by the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program that were operational as of this month, nearly three years since the law’s enactment. The administration’s goal is a network of publicly and privately funded chargers that totals 500,000 by 2030. As of Aug. 27, that number stood at more than 192,000, according to the Biden administration.

And in the years since the law’s passage, the rollout has faced more risks. EVs have become mired in political partisanship and charging companies have struggled to make money.

Now, the future of the EV market in the United States, which one environmental group estimates has attracted nearly $190 billion in US investments and created 195,000 jobs, may be dependent on the outcome of the November elections. Former President Donald Trump has said he will roll back the Biden administration’s pro-EV efforts if elected, and congressional Republicans, who could win one or both chambers, have proposed legislation (H.R. 7273, S. 3559) to rescind the law’s funding.

EV Road Trip

It was against this backdrop that we—two energy and transportation Bloomberg Government reporters who usually spend our days running around Capitol Hill—decided to take a summer road trip in a General Motors 2023 Chevrolet Bolt, playlist in tow. We wanted to see firsthand the benefits of federal chargers and the reasons behind the network’s slow rollout.

The federally funded charging stations we used in Kingston and in Pittston, Pa., near Scranton, were effective, with the equipment easy to operate and the price and charge time accessible on a display screen. But in talking to more than a dozen electric vehicle drivers along our route, the need for more federally funded chargers was clear. And the lack of accessible fast chargers was painfully obvious during the last leg of our trip, as we rolled back into Washington on a next-to-nothing charge after encountering snafus with private ports.

“I would say charging infrastructure is one of the biggest blocks to greater EV adoption in the US,” BloombergNEF EV charging analyst Ash Wang told us.

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Location, Location

One challenge to a better nationwide EV charging network: finding locations.

The administration is aiming to get EV chargers built as close to the interstate as possible, but the infrastructure act  didn’t change  a 1956 federal law limiting commerce at most interstate rest stops to vending machines, lottery tickets, and tourism promotion. Lawmakers didn’t garner enough support to change that nearly 70-year-old law, and that’s one reason why drivers won’t see EV chargers at a lot of interstate rest stops.

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More federal chargers—which are designed to be easy-to-use—could encourage EV adoption. The people we met on the road largely liked their EVs, but they also had stories about fumbling with charging ports away from home.

“My first time was a fail; I felt like an idiot,” Laura Graybill recounted to us while charging at the Kingston station. “I didn’t know what I was doing, so I panicked and drove home,” Graybill, a Connecticut resident who has owned her electric Porsche Taycan for a few months, said.

In total, we saw a single highway sign advertising EV charging, which stood near the Pittston charger in Pennsylvania. About 19 guests per day use the four EV charging ports at the station, manager James Vogel told us.

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State Scrutiny

Some of the scrutiny of the charger rollout has also started to land on states.

The administration approved charging plans for all 50 states in late 2022, but some have stalled on opening grant applications for providers to build stations.

Florida, for example, faced criticism this year from the Charge Ahead Partnership, a coalition of businesses wanting to expand EV charging infrastructure, for being one of the states that had not opened applications for EV charging site funds for providers. There are 13 states that have yet to do so, according to BloombergNEF.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), an EV champion, said in June it was “pathetic” how few chargers have been built since the infrastructure law’s passage.

Still, administration officials say they always knew it takes about 12 to 18 months to install a charger in part due to state-level-processes, and that the government is on track to hit its goal of at least 500,000 publicly available chargers by 2030.

“It’s been a little frustrating,” Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation at the Energy Department, told us in an interview when asked about criticism of the program. “We always sort of knew that this was the timeline,” Klein said, adding that officials need to do a better job of explaining that timeline.

Grid Issues

Another obstacle to a government-funded expansion of fast chargers is the electricity grid.

The NEVI program uses level 3 chargers—the fastest available. But they’re also more expensive than level 1 or 2 chargers often used in private residences. This is because of the electrical upgrades necessary to ensure the grid can handle a level 3 charger’s output.

“It’s a local strain” on the grid in the specific location where the charging infrastructure is, Kingston Mayor Steve Noble (D) told us in an August interview in his office. “A mom-and-pop restaurant isn’t going to be able to afford to put one of these in.”

Noble said a level 3 charging station with two portals the city is installing near its popular waterfront will cost $250,000.

“That’s why the federal funds that came through have really made a difference in helping to build this kind of nationwide charging infrastructure,” Noble, who has owned electric vehicles since 2013, told us.

The grid infrastructure overall needs to be modernized to support fast charging in particular, said Jen Metzger, the county executive for Ulster County, where Kingston is located. Metzger said the county just bought a completely off-the-grid mobile unit that can be used for EV charging.

Private Sector Uncertainty

Another challenge: the Biden administration’s goal of half-a-million charging ports relies heavily on the private sector, which has been struggling financially.

In a sign of strain on the industry, some major automakers are scaling back on their plans for EVs, while other charging companies have faced recent financial troubles—challenges that analysts say are linked.

The White House touted last year that Tesla would open its US network of superchargers to make it available to other vehicles, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk disbanded the company’s Supercharging team as part of a broader restructuring earlier this year, laying off hundreds of staff and then later rehiring some back.

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Separately, less than a year since EV charger maker Tritium boasted it won the first fast charger order through the federal program funding, the company quietly declared insolvency in April. And earlier in September, ChargePoint, operator of the largest EV charging network in the country, said it would lay off 15% of its workforce, citing lower-than-expected revenue.

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Still, EV advocates have reasons to be optimistic. Pilot Travel Centers, a chain of travel centers with fueling stations located off of major highways, has partnered with GM to put in charging stations at 500 locations coast-to-coast over the next few years. To date, 67 charging stations are in operation.

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Tipping Point

All of these headaches converged during our road trip, where access to more federal chargers could’ve saved us—and EV drivers we encountered— a lot of stress.

For example, we tried to recharge near touristy Hershey, Pa., but the privately funded stations appearing on our apps turned out to be nonexistent, defunct, or “coming soon,” in real life. We thought we were destined to be stranded on the roadside as we faced a 2-plus hour drive in rush-hour traffic with only a 14% charge. A Nissan dealership off of our path let us use their EV charger, but—unlike the federal ports — it was slow and required a separate app to pay for it.

We waited over an hour to hit a 44% charge and headed into Washington with less than 7% battery left, the equivalent of gas fumes. The rental car business we used added to our indignity by billing us $40 for returning an undercharged car, which we paid to put an end to our adventure.

At that point, it became clear to us the nationwide build-out of chargers is not widespread enough for many Americans to easily adopt EVs for road trips. We’ll be watching if potential Republican wins in the White House and Congress in November stifle momentum behind the national charger build-out if they withhold or slow-walk funding.

Noble, the Kingston mayor, said that makes him nervous.

“We also recognize that this money is not enough,” Noble said. “There’s more that will be needed to be able to rebuild this whole system and to be able to create this transition.”