U.S. public EV chargers and charging stations 2007-2022

As of 2022, there were over 136,500 public electric vehicle chargers in the United States, spread across nearly 53,800 charging locations. The volume of public chargers has been steadily increasing since 2007, and was over six times larger than the volume of private charging ports recorded in the country in 2022.

A challenge for the electric vehicle market

The United States' public electric vehicle charging network must meet the demand of a growing electric vehicle fleet, with EV sales rapidly increasing. In an October 2022 survey, 46 percent of U.S. consumers mentioned the lack of public charging as one of their leading concerns regarding battery-electric vehicles, compared to 40 percent of respondents mentioning the lack of chargers at home as a hurdle, and the availability of chargers per 100 electric vehicles in some key U.S. states suggest improvements could be made to the network to better meet consumer demand. As of the third quarter of 2022, there were around 4.4 available chargers per 100 vehicles in California, the leading U.S. state for electric vehicle sales. To tackle this issue, the U.S. government launched the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, aimed at expanding the public charging infrastructure.   

The North American Charging Standard

In 2023, many automakers, among which Ford, Rivian, and BMW, have committed to use the charging standards put in place by Tesla, the leading electric vehicle manufacturer in the U.S., by 2025. The Tesla Destination charger was the second public charging network in the United States as of June 2023, while the Supercharger ranked fourth during that same period, excluding non-networked stations. This commitment to the North American Charging Standard would lead automakers to use the company's Superchargers, which provide fast-charging to electric vehicles and have been increasingly more present along the global roads.