\n<\/p>\n
By Francesca Paris and Eve Washington<\/span> <\/p>\n Francesca Paris has taken a 400-mile road trip in an electric car. Eve Washington makes great road trip playlists.<\/p>\n Sept. 29, 2025 <\/p>\n Long drives that were once effectively impossible with an electric car have become doable. Routes that once required careful planning now have abundant fast chargers.<\/p>\n For E.V. owners, one quintessential American experience \u2014 hitting the open road \u2014 is no longer just a dream.<\/p>\n Consider the drive from Nashville to New Orleans.<\/p>\n E.V. fast-charging stations in the United States have soared in number from around 1,000 a decade ago to 12,000 today, according to federal government data. And despite the Trump administration\u2019s hostility toward electric vehicles, and its attempts to end federal funding for public chargers, new stations are still going up \u2014 around 2,000 so far this year.<\/p>\n The cumulative effect of that boom means that large portions of the country are now within reach of a fast charger, though some rural regions and smaller roadways lag behind.<\/p>\n Everywhere in the U.S. within a 50-mile drive of a fast charger<\/p>\n Fast chargers are the key to an E.V. road trip because they can fill up a car in around half an hour. (Other chargers, like the kind you use at home, take hours.)<\/p>\n The Upshot used charger location data from the Department of Energy to analyze more than 1,000 single-day trips connecting major U.S. cities. A decade ago, all but a handful of those routes had gaps of more than 100 miles between fast chargers. In many cases, those charging deserts stretched over 200 miles, making many routes effectively impassable for E.V.s.<\/p>\n By 2025, that had flipped. The vast majority of these routes now have a fast charger at least every 100 miles; most have far more than that.<\/p>\n We picked major cities from each state and mapped out trips between them. (We looked at drives you can do in a day; any longer than that and you can use a slow charger overnight.) You can find a route \u2014 and see how it\u2019s changed \u2014 on the map below. Or, just pan around to see the whole country.<\/p>\n Fast chargers are often built at gas stations, outside restaurants and by shopping outlets. Most electric car owners don\u2019t need to use them frequently. The overwhelming majority of car trips are below 50 miles, and most new E.V.s can easily drive well over 50 miles, even in poor conditions, so charging usually happens at home.<\/p>\n New fast-charging stations are often next to gasoline pumps, like this one in Pearl River, La., on the route from New Orleans to Nashville.<\/p>\n Annie Flanagan for The New York Times<\/p>\n But just as the rest-stop gas station has become an integral part of American highways, fast chargers are critical for driving beyond a single charge, whether to visit family, work or sightsee. (They\u2019re also important for people who can\u2019t charge at home, or who drive Ubers and Lyfts.) And they\u2019re a key to soothing \u201crange anxiety,\u201d or people\u2019s fear of not making it to the next charger \u2014 which for years has been the single most important concern among potential E.V. buyers, according to the market research firm J.D. Power.<\/p>\n Their concerns haven\u2019t been unfounded. Through the 2010s, it was hard for E.V. drivers to leave certain urban pockets. But for most major destinations now \u2014 thanks to both longer vehicle ranges and the proliferation of chargers \u2014 E.V. drivers can just get up and go.<\/p>\n Some of that growth is recent, in just the last few years. Since 2020, fast chargers have popped up across the South, Midwest, Great Plains and more rural parts of the Northeast, playing catch-up with more populated areas.<\/p>\n StateIn 2020In 2025Pct. ChangeAlabama16160+900%Alaska321+600%Mississippi961+578%Louisiana1276+533%Nebraska1275+525%Arkansas952+478%New Hampshire1269+475%Michigan66379+474%North Dakota740+471%Indiana34180+429% <\/p>\n Show all 50 states<\/p>\n The picture isn\u2019t perfect. On-the-go fast charging still takes more time and can cost more than going to the gas pump. (Home charging is typically cheaper than gas.) On average, 3 percent of fast chargers are out of commission at any time, according to the E.V. charging data firm Parens, and those that do work can be challenging and confusing to use, depending on your car.<\/p>\n But things are getting better. New chargers can refill E.V.s faster, on average, than those built just a few years ago. And new stations have more chargers than they used to: In 2015, the average fast-charging station had two ports. Now it has five.<\/p>\n Total number of fast-charging …<\/p>\n Data as of Sept. 3 of each year.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the charging gap between Tesla owners and everyone else is shrinking.<\/p>\n Tesla has opened up its extensive charging network to other cars, and some carmakers are building new vehicles with Tesla\u2019s style of port or offering adapters. If you buy a new E.V. this year, there\u2019s a decent chance you can access both Tesla and non-Tesla chargers.<\/p>\n That makes a big difference. Tesla has built around <\/strong>a fifth <\/strong>of the country\u2019s fast-charging stations, and because its stations tend to be large, more than half of all ports.<\/p>\n Number of stations<\/p>\n Number of charging ports<\/p>\n Tesla was first to build chargers across swaths of the U.S. interior, and others followed. In just the past five years, dozens of routes that were effectively impassable or at least quite tricky \u2014 with charging gaps more than 200 miles long \u2014 have become reasonable to drive.<\/p>\n Routelargest gap on routein 2020in 2025Amarillo, Texas, to Includes routes at least 300 miles long, with gaps no bigger than 135 miles in 2025. Numbers are rounded. Routes are the most direct path from one city to another; in some cases, there may be less direct paths with smaller gaps. Similar routes excluded.<\/p>\n Consider North Dakota, which was nearly impossible to cross with an E.V. in the 2010s. In 2020, it became the last state in the lower 48 to get a Tesla supercharger. At that point, a Tesla driver could traverse the state from Bismarck to Fargo. But if you wanted to head south through South Dakota to get to Omaha, you\u2019d hit a 250-mile gap \u2014 too far for a standard Model 3. If you drove fast, or if it was cold \u2014 both factors that reduce range \u2014 you would run out of charge well before you reached Nebraska.<\/p>\n Over the next five years, Tesla and other charging networks built stations that connected the 600-mile drive. There are now a few dozen stations along the route, making the drive possible for most E.V.s (An older car with less range might have more trouble.)<\/p>\n Some corridors of the Northeast and West Coast have been accessible for a decade now, thanks to fast chargers that have dotted the highways of coastal states.<\/p>\n Those routes have gone from doable to easy. Driving from Boston to D.C., for example, you\u2019re never more than 10 miles from a charger. Most of the time, you\u2019re within three miles.<\/p>\n Routeshare of route within…3 mi. of a charger<\/span>10 mi. of a charger<\/span>Boston to Includes routes at least 300 miles long. Numbers are rounded. Similar routes excluded.<\/p>\n Even five years ago, these kinds of dense charging corridors were rare, and located mostly on the coasts. Now they\u2019re common, and can be found across the country, from the South \u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 to the Great Lakes \u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 through upstate New York \u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 and Texas and Oklahoma.<\/p>\n These improvements aren\u2019t limited to urban areas and big interstates. The drive from Charleston, W.Va., to Indianapolis, for example, crosses through a long rural stretch in West Virginia and Ohio. But the trip has better charger coverage in 2025 than the route from Boston to Philadelphia did a decade ago.<\/p>\n Some routes, however, remain largely barren of fast charging, especially in rural areas.<\/p>\n Try to cross parts of Arizona, Kansas and Montana, or drive up I-25 in Wyoming, and you\u2019ll still run into charging deserts. Portions of Louisiana and southern Arkansas also remain without fast-charging ports.<\/p>\n If you find yourself driving an E.V. through these areas, there are almost always alternate routes to reach a fast charger, but it might take you an hour or two out of your way.<\/p>\n Consider this route from Great Falls, Mont., through Billings, down to Rapid City, S.D., which has several long gaps:<\/p>\n Or this route, from New Mexico through the Oklahoma panhandle and into Kansas:<\/p>\n These routes still have gaps because they veer off large interstates, and onto smaller highways and roadways, where the charging network can be more sparse. Some 40 percent of U.S. counties still don\u2019t have a fast charger, according to federal data, the vast majority of them small and without a major interstate crossing through.<\/p>\n Still, the network\u2019s expansion appears to be speeding up, not slowing. The Trump administration tried to cancel billions in funding for chargers from the Biden administration\u2019s bipartisan infrastructure law, but those funds have been unfrozen. (So far, the funds have helped less in volume \u2014 they\u2019ve contributed only a few hundred chargers \u2014 and more by pushing companies toward standardizing ports.)<\/p>\n Significant private investment continues to pour in. A group of major car manufacturers has started the Ionna network, which has committed to building 30,000 charging ports across the country. Ford and Rivian have each already built more than 100 fast-charging stations. Volkswagen funded the Electrify America network with $2 billion that it was required to set aside after cheating on diesel emission tests; the network now has around 1,000 fast-charging stations.<\/p>\n There are also major E.V. infrastructure companies building out their networks. In total, six big networks \u2014 Tesla, ChargePoint, EVgo, Electrify America, EV Connect and Blink \u2014 have built more than two-thirds of the country\u2019s fast-charging stations. A number of smaller operators own the rest, including power companies like Hawaiian Electric, Florida Power and Light and Iowa\u2019s MidAmerican, which have all become major fast-charger operators in their states.<\/p>\n And retailers and gas stations have joined the rush: Buc-ee\u2019s, the supersize travel stop chain, is adding E.V. chargers to its stations, and Walmart has announced it will install thousands of fast chargers at its stores.<\/p>\n The investment isn’t coming from one place, in other words. It’s coming from everywhere, at an increasing rate. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates the country will need some 180,000 fast-charging ports by 2030. If the expansion continues at today\u2019s pace, the U.S. will hit that number in the early 2030s. If the rate continues to accelerate, as it has in recent years, that day could come much sooner.<\/p>\n About the data<\/p>\n Locations of chargers come from the Alternative Fuels Data Center\u2019s historical data sets, for Sept. 3 of each year. We included only stations recorded as open to the public and functional on that date, with at least one DC fast-charging port.<\/p>\n Over the last decade, the A.F.D.C. transitioned from manually counting stations to automatic data collection. Networks share data on different time frames, which means new stations may not always be included. Existing stations could also be missing if they were down for repair on Sept. 3, missing data or otherwise absent from the A.F.D.C.\u2019s records.<\/p>\n Sometimes, chargers for the same network at the same address were counted as separate stations in the data. We considered them as one station.<\/p>\n For the route selector, we chose the two biggest cities in each state. When those cities were close together, we excluded the second. We added additional major cities and destination spots.<\/p>\n To determine route starting and ending points, we used census data to pinpoint city centers. If there was a fast-charging station in a five-mile radius around the city center, we used that as the start and end of routes, instead of the city center.<\/p>\n We used Mapbox\u2019s Driving Directions A.P.I. for routes, and included only drives that were at least 150 miles and fewer than 10 hours long. We excluded routes that went primarily through Canada.<\/p>\n For each station in A.F.D.C. data, we used the Mapbox Isocrone A.P.I. to find driving distance from the station at three, 10 and 50 miles. We only counted a charger as \u201calong a route\u201d if it was within 10 driving miles.<\/p>\n For all tables, we removed routes that were subsets of other routes or covered similar ground. For the most inaccessible routes in 2020 that are doable today, we removed routes if there was an obvious alternative drive similar in length with smaller gaps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Francesca Paris and Eve Washington Francesca Paris has taken a 400-mile road trip in an electric car. Eve Washington makes great road trip playlists. Sept. 29, 2025 Long drives that were once effectively impossible with an electric car have become doable. Routes that once required careful planning now have abundant fast chargers. For E.V.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24769,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[15016,5293,8873,1377,3816],"class_list":{"0":"post-24768","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-e-v","9":"tag-easy","10":"tag-impossible","11":"tag-road","12":"tag-trips"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Number of fast-charging stations<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
From Big Gaps to Feasible
Most challenging routes in 2020 that are doable in 2025<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tLas Cruces, N.M.395 mi.100 mi.Anchorage to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tFairbanks, Alaska355 mi.110 mi.Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tLittle Rock, Ark.320 mi.105 mi.Fayetteville, Ark., to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tNew Orleans275 mi.115 mi.Amarillo, Texas, to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tCheyenne, Wyo.240 mi.130 mi.Bismarck, N.D., to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tOmaha240 mi.100 mi.Minneapolis to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tMarquette, Mich.210 mi.75 mi.Memphis to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tDes Moines195 mi.85 mi.Indianapolis to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tRaleigh, N.C.195 mi.45 mi.Louisville, Ky., to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tTulsa, Okla.185 mi.85 mi. <\/p>\nFrom Easy to Easier
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tWashington, D.C.72%100%Portland, Maine, to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tWashington, D.C.69%100%Bridgeport, Conn., to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tRaleigh, N.C.62%95%Rutland, Vt., to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tWashington, D.C.59%98%Charlotte, N.C., to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tNewark57%90%Birmingham, Ala., to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tRaleigh, N.C.53%94%San Diego to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco51%89%Jacksonville, Fla., to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tMiami51%94%Pittsburgh to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tVirginia Beach49%92%Oklahoma City to
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Antonio48%90% <\/p>\nStill Tough
Counties with no fast charger<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n