Taking an electric car on the road is still a gamble in the United States

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For the past few months, our new electric car has worked perfectly. One of the first BMW iX SUVs to hit the US market, it draws praise from garage attendants and car aficionados, and the rapid charger we installed in our garage easily powers it up for the daily commute.

Then we try to get it on the road. A charging station black hole in much of the Midwest made that route impossible. Then, along the supposedly well-served highways between Boston, New York, and Washington, we repeatedly encountered unresponsive touchscreens, jacks that wouldn’t connect, and very slow charging. In a place with eight stations, the first three we tried didn’t work.

Adding insult to injury, our two years of BMW-funded “free” charging disappeared from the system halfway through the trip, forcing us to pay up and seek a reward later. Online discussion groups are full of similar stories, which suggests that mine was not an isolated experience.

This can be a pain in the ass: the number of electric vehicles on US roads has grown seven-fold in 5 years to 3 million, and many of the 135,000 public charging stations are brand new. But it also raises questions about whether the focus on making and selling electric vehicles has led us to neglect the changes that will make people happy once they own one.

The International Energy Agency predicts that one in five new cars sold this year will be electric vehicles, up from one in 25 three years ago. Much of the growth is concentrated in China, which made an early bet on technology and supported manufacturers, buyers and charging suppliers with subsidies. EV adoption has been so rapid that foreign automakers were unable to keep up, allowing local brands like BYD to grab market share.

In the west, the Norwegian experience is instructive. Battery electric vehicles have jumped from 20 percent of new cars to 80 percent in less than five years, thanks to tax breaks. But charging infrastructure has struggled to keep up, despite broad government support, leading to long lines at motorway charging stations on holiday weekends.

The American experience is likely to be even more bumpy. The Biden administration has announced plans to have 500,000 public charging stations by 2030, but that is a far cry from China, where 1.8 million are already in operation, and the government is targeting 20 million by 2025.

The US situation is complicated by the fact that Tesla, which has more than 60 percent of the electric vehicle market share, operates a proprietary charging network and had until recently refused to open it up to other cars. But that is starting to change. Volkswagen, which operates the country’s largest network, Electrify America, has deliberately made it open access. and ford announced a deal on Thursday that it will give access to its vehicles to 12,000 Tesla superchargers.

Ford CEO Jim Farley argues that adding chargers will not only reduce wait times, but also lower the overall cost of electric vehicles. That’s because customers will be more comfortable with cheaper, smaller batteries that go 200 miles, rather than the 400 that many manufacturers strive for. “We should make the battery as small as possible,” he says.

Cutting back on batteries would also help solve another looming problem. If current patterns hold, converting just the US fleet to electric vehicles would require three to four times as much lithium as the entire world produces. “You need a 1,500-fold magnification in extraction, processing, manufacturing, and what is done at the end,” says Keith Czinger, one of the early pioneers of electric vehicles. “What is the impact of that on the environment?”

Until now, EV charging providers have largely failed to address the problem that the process takes much longer than refueling with gasoline. No one wants to be stuck in a dilapidated mall parking lot for 45 minutes like I was last month.

History suggests that someone is going to take advantage of this opportunity. South Dakota’s Wall Drug became a national tourist destination by offering free ice cold water to travelers to Mount Rushmore in the days before car air conditioning. The construction of the interstate highway system helped fuel the rapid expansion of McDonald’s and its competitors, especially after drive-throughs opened.

But the fledgling freight industry has so far not failed to monetize the growing demand. Shares of EVGo and Chargepoint are down 80% from their 2021 highs, and Volta was sold to Shell at a similar loss earlier this year..

The lack of infrastructure has real consequences. Concerns about charging helped drive a quarter of early US electric car buyers back to buying an internal combustion engine, according to a US government study and the proportion of Americans who say they are “very unlikely” to buy an electric vehicle is increasing. If this is the wave of the future, there are rough seas ahead.

brooke.masters@ft.com

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