EV charging should be easy—why is it still so complicated?

Americans like electric vehicles (EVs). We bought more than 1.3 million of them in 2024 alone. So why do some people still hesitate when it comes to making the switch to an EV?

Two big issues that often hold people back from investing in an EV are range anxiety and charge anxiety—the fear of keeping an EV powered and moving, and the fear that an EV’s battery won’t maintain enough charge to reach its destination.

Those are understandable concerns, and there’s evidence to show those fears aren’t unfounded: A 2024 study found that of the more than 64,000 public charging stations in the U.S., roughly one in five didn’t work.

The study also found that locations of charging stations were clustered together, putting rural areas and smaller cities known as “charging deserts” at a disadvantage when it comes to access to public charging stations.

While these infrastructure issues are complex and will take time to solve, a new wave of startups is taking on the challenge of developing software systems and charging networks that work in tandem, helping to stabilize EV charging across the country.

Right now, there are almost 80,000 EV charging stations stacked with more than 242,000 individual chargers in the U.S. That number represents a significant uptick from last year, when only about 64,000 charging stations were operating, but the country still has a long way to go.

Unsurprisingly, California leads the pack with 24% of all charing stations and 28% of all chargers, with New York, Florida, and Texas following. West coast cities tend to have more chargers overall: Los Angeles has the most EV charging stations, followed by San Diego, Atlanta, Seattle, and Austin.

In 2024, EVs captured a full 10% market share of light-duty vehicles in the U.S.: That kind of charging station growth is promising, and suggests the 30C tax credit was working as intended—but it also highlights a critical need to build more charging networks in areas currently lacking access to public charging stations.

Luckily, most companies that build and operate charging networks, known as Charge Point Operators (CPOs), are beginning to recognize the increasing demand and work to increase supply and reliability.

Take the new partnership between Driivz, an energy management software platform for EV operators, and Greenspot, a CPO that operates charging stations in more than 18 states.

“Our software is really the engine for CPOs to manage their network of chargers and determine if they’re healthy,” said Andy Bennett, chief executive officer at Driivz. “If they're not working, then how do we fix that without human intervention?”

Here's how it works: Driivz uses a “self-healing algorithm” that can detect everything from whether a charger is working properly to an issue like a billing error— and then fix all of those problems remotely. If physical repairs are needed on the charging hardware, the company also runs a 24/7 call center that dispatches field technicians to troubleshoot maintenance issues in person.

Software that can support all types of chargers

Many legacy chargers, almost all of which are Level 2 AC chargers and tend to be located parking garages and office buildings, have vastly different management needs than next-generation DC fast chargers, which tend to be concentrated at gas stations and shopping centers, and can charge EV batteries in a fraction of the time.

This is the problem Driivz says its software helps solve: It supports more than 2,000 types of chargers, making it flexible enough to interoperate across almost every type of charger.

That also makes the software ideal for deployment across the thousands of legacy chargers at Greenspot locations around the world. “Our growth is proportional to their growth,” Bennett said.

One of the chief concerns among CPOs is having continuous access to reliable power, a sentiment that's shared among developers of large, energy-intensive infrastructure, be it data centers, manufacturing plants or otherwise.

With the OBBBA’s rescinding and rolling back of investment and production tax credits in the renewable energy space, combined with the Trump administration’s pause on $3 billion for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, issues like grid reliability and EV charging network growth are now top of mind for industry executives.

But Bennett and others are confident that market growth is far enough along to weather today’s political headwinds. As energy consumption increases across the country, CPOs still have complex decisions to make and a tight timeframe to do it, Bennett said.

“As we move away from just megawatts of energy consumption into terawatts, which is where we’re already at, CPOs have to decide when to buy energy, when to dispense it, and when to throttle back,” he said.

These questions are also related to concerns over other common issues like utilization rates of specific charging stations, peak demand hours, variable energy loads, and network-wide availability, among other factors. Creating a fundamental structure for managing all of those issues is a key part of Driivz’s software, Bennett says.

In the EV space, issues like charging “deserts,” areas with few public charging resources in overlooked regions, present a problem for the companies looking to expand public EV charging networks.

That's because EV car owners must consistently use their charging stations in order for their business model to work. Enough people who own EVs need to live nearby these charging stations for CPOs to turn a profit. Most CPOs need roughly an 18% utilization rate to break even, but not every station can manage that.

“Across the entire ecosystem, the average utilization is 12%,” Bennett said. “Some stations are as high as 40%, and some are as low as 5%, so you get a lot of variability there.”

The other issue looming over the industry is interoperability: how to build software systems and chargers that seamlessly share and use data on their own, without humans intervention. With so many different types of chargers, developing industry standards is paramount.

 “The industry has done a great deal [in the last decade] with creating standards for interoperability,” though this wasn’t always the case, Bennett said. This progress has allowed Driivz’s software to be installed in more than 200,000 individual chargers across the globe, representing thousands of types, sizes, and capacities all successfully working on the same system.

There are a few ways the EV sector can move towards standardization. One is to make the switch from Level 2 chargers to DC fast chargers. This is likely a ways off, given that many of the biggest CPOs, including ChargePoint, only have small percentages of fast chargers in their networks. There are some exceptions like EVgo and Electrify America, which both have more DC chargers than Level 2 AC chargers.

There are a few main reasons for this ratio — starting with the fact that it’s more expensive to operate and charge with a DC fast charger. Additionally, not every EV can absorb that much power in such a short period. So, while the transition will be gradual, maintaining a healthy mix moving forward is likely the smart play.

For the time being, the complexity and cumbersome nature of global charging networks – from legacy hardware and new tech to reliability concerns – is the core problem Driivz is tackling. As EV charging gains more flexibility and industry standards are adopted, startups like Driivz and Greenspot will continue to push clean technology forward.

“The endpoint for the automotive industry is electric. You can’t find anyone who will disagree with that,” he said.“The only question is, where does that endpoint sit?”