For EV charging companies, the obstacles are piling up like a nasty freeway wreck. There’s slowdown in EV adoption in the United States. The Trump administration has put EVs in the crosshairs by gunning for fuel-economy and climate-change standards, abolishing consumer tax credits on 30 September, and slapping stiff tariffs on EV makers. The current administration even sought to claw back federally approved funding for public chargers, but has reluctantly reversed course after being rebuffed in the courts.
Defying those hurricane-force headwinds, companies are still poised to open 16,700 public DC fast chargers in the United States this year, a single-year record and a 20-percent jump from 2024, according to charging analytics company Paren. Electrify America is key to those gains: The nation’s largest non-Tesla purveyor of fast charging is expanding its own footprint by 30 percent this year. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Rachel Moses, Electrify America’s senior director of sales and marketing, who explained what it will take to keep a growing army of EV drivers plugged in and charging—as quickly as possible for time-pressed drivers.
What has Electrify America been up to lately?
Rachel Moses: We’ve really been focused on upgrading our early-generation equipment. Go back to 2018, in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles, and we built a three-charger location that was the first of its kind, with 350 kilowatts. But we know we need much, much larger sites. Our latest is in Santa Monica, near the I-10 freeway, with 20 Hyper-Fast chargers that can add up to 20 miles of driving range per minute for capable EVs. Our focus is building those large-format locations, with a minimum of 10 dispensers, and improving the customer experience to reduce queuing, a phenomenon that’s happening mostly in California and parts of the Northeast.
In those early years, the company concentrated on installing chargers along highway corridors, as Tesla had done with its Supercharger network, to reassure potential owners they could cover long distances in an EV. Now you’re targeting cities themselves?
Moses: We’re really building in specific metro areas, to support drivers who maybe don’t have access to off-street parking—but now can get into an EV because they can use our public infrastructure. We have a 20-dispenser station in San Francisco with a bathroom, amenities, and security cameras, next to a highway where there’s a lot of multi-unit dwellings that may not have overnight charging. All told, we now have 5,000 dispensers at more than 1,000 sites.
Improving EV Charger Reliability
Electrify America and other providers took a lot of heat for balky or out-of-service chargers, especially compared with Tesla’s reliable network. But many infrastructure experts agree the situation on the ground has markedly improved over the last year. Anecdotally, my stops at Electrify America chargers have gone off without a hitch for several months now. What’s been changing?
Rachel Moses is Electrify America’s senior director of sales and marketing.Electrify America
Moses: That improvement has really come from the replacement of legacy hardware. We’ve seen a 75 percent reduction in service dispatches on next-generation equipment. We’ve taken our learnings and insights to invest in remote diagnostic capabilities that simply didn’t exist in 2017. We’ve also made our field service engineers more strategically located. These rapid-response engineers are keeping more parts on hand for more high-touch, high-failure components, such as the connectors or the [human-machine interface] and screens. That next-generation equipment now has a 97 percent uptime. And we continue to invest in how to ruggedize the equipment with the highest touch points.
A reporter for InsideEVs witnessed a demonstration of BYD’s new “Megawatt charger” in Beijing, a 1,000-kilowatt charger that can fill a compatible BYD model to 80-percent in five minutes, nearly as quickly as filling a gasoline tank. Electrify America pioneered 350-kilowatt DC charging in the U.S., and now we’re seeing small numbers of cars and chargers that might achieve charging peaks of about 400 kilowatts. Is the U.S. in danger of falling behind the charging curve? Or is megawatt charging just overkill, as some skeptics suggest?
Moses: When we launched 350-kilowatt chargers in 2018, there was a perception that it was too much power for vehicles on the road. Today, there are still only a handful of vehicles that are capable of maxing out a 350-kilowatt charger. So our current output is still beyond what most EVs on the road can take. We’re certainly still looking forward. We want to engage with all hardware manufacturers, and continue to develop next-generation equipment. But we also want to be really thoughtful about our future investments, and the timing to bring newer technologies to market.
Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS)—now standardized as the SAE JC 3400 connector—seems to be the clear winner of the standards war. Nearly every major automaker is ditching the Combined Charging System‘s Combo Plugs to switch its models to a Tesla-style plug over the next few years. But that will still leave millions of existing EVs reliant on the CCS plugs used by Electrify America and other non-Tesla charging providers. Owners of non-Tesla models are also accessing Tesla stations by carrying adapters, and vice-versa. How will Electrify America manage this transition?
Moses: We are committed to supporting the NACS 3400 connector, and we currently have two pilot locations to gain insight from the customer experience and understand the data. But we have to be very measured about the way in which we deploy it across our network. We certainly don’t want to orphan the existing CCS population. Those drivers had over 16 million sessions on our network in 2024, and we delivered over 600 gigawatt-hours of energy, which was 65-percent growth from 2023. Making sure we have the right balance (of the two plug standards) and rolling out NACS at existing and future locations is important to us. We do see some adapter use today, and we will continue to see that over coming years, but I don’t think it’s an ideal customer experience.
Testing EV Compatibility Standards
Before Elon Musk decided to open his network to all comers, his company had a big advantage: Their proprietary Superchargers only had to work with Teslas. But Electrify America’s chargers have to be compatible with cars from every global automaker, and be ready the minute their new models leave the showroom. Ideally, that includes a streamlined payment system. How do you stay on top of that?
Moses: At our Center of Excellence in Northern Virginia, we opened a new technology development lab in 2024, with 22 chargers for testing. We bring in the auto manufacturers, so we’re testing the hardware, software, and firmware, and how various standards have been deployed by each manufacturer, because there can be some nuances. We’ve completed more than 45,000 hours of testing, which enables that seamless experience. As stewards of the industry, we also want to help set and evolve standards and collaborate industry-wide. In North America, we were pioneers of Plug and Charge (the EV communication and payment standard enabled by ISO 15118). But not all automakers have deployed it. So we have to make sure that every authentication method, whether it’s Plug and Charge, or our mobile app, or a credit card reader, is constantly being tested and improved in collaboration with the automakers.
EVs are facing new hurdles, including the end of federal $7,500 credits that made it easier for buyers to make the leap to electified cars. Many analysts foresee at least a temporary dip in EV sales, and several automakers have postponed or cancelled EV introductions. Are you concerned that momentum is slowing?
There are industry headwinds, and we are kind of navigating this period of recalibration, while also seeing that consumer interest remains high. But we had that 50 percent year-over-year growth in charging sessions in 2024, and we expect that again in 2025. I’ve been in this industry for 16 years, and we’ve faced headwinds in the past. But the transition to electric mobility is a global shift that transcends short-term market fluctuations. Automakers and private sector players are maintaining robust investments in EV development and infrastructure. So we have longer-term confidence that the future is electric.
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