There are more chargers than (most people) you think.
Having more is a good thing, but gas stations adding them wont move the needle any time soon.
A friend was telling me recently that there aren't many chargers. He lives in Boulder, of all places. There are a million public chargers around Boulder, but they're relatively invisible compared to a gas station, especially if you aren't actively looking for them. When I showed him the plugshare map he couldn't believe it, he thought this stuff was a decade away.
In my experience owning five EVs, public charging isn't really an issue, especially for Tesla and J-1772. If anything, I worry for chargepoint et. al. in the face of so many free chargers in the short term.
That said, there are some weird spots between superchargers if you have a tesla. And if you rely on CCS with the coming onslaught of F-150 lightnings... I wish you good luck and to reconsider. Slow charging speed and crappily maintained CCS / CHaDeMo are really going to suck the life out of you on road trips compared to superchargers. But if you can get by with J1772 then life is good.
The vast majority of those EV chargers won't be fast chargers. They're also often in parking garages where you have to pay per hour, on private (corporate) land meant for office workers, attached to hotels, etc.
So the gas station model, where you want a fast charger and for it to be ubiquitous, is anything but. San Francisco has 4 non-Tesla stations with >=75 kWh, for example. And then of course there's the Tesla vs non-Tesla divide.
Having more is a good thing, but gas stations adding them wont move the needle any time soon.
A friend was telling me recently that there aren't many chargers. He lives in Boulder, of all places. There are a million public chargers around Boulder, but they're relatively invisible compared to a gas station, especially if you aren't actively looking for them. When I showed him the plugshare map he couldn't believe it, he thought this stuff was a decade away.
In my experience owning five EVs, public charging isn't really an issue, especially for Tesla and J-1772. If anything, I worry for chargepoint et. al. in the face of so many free chargers in the short term.
That said, there are some weird spots between superchargers if you have a tesla. And if you rely on CCS with the coming onslaught of F-150 lightnings... I wish you good luck and to reconsider. Slow charging speed and crappily maintained CCS / CHaDeMo are really going to suck the life out of you on road trips compared to superchargers. But if you can get by with J1772 then life is good.