See How E.V. Road Trips Went From Impossible to Easy

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. owners, one quintessential American experience — hitting the open road — is no longer just a dream.

Consider the drive from Nashville to New Orleans.

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’s hostility toward electric vehicles, and its attempts to end federal funding for public chargers, new stations are still going up — around 2,000 so far this year.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 — and see how it’s changed — on the map below. Or, just pan around to see the whole country.

Fast chargers are often built at gas stations, outside restaurants and by shopping outlets. Most electric car owners don’t 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.

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.

Annie Flanagan for The New York Times

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’re also important for people who can’t charge at home, or who drive Ubers and Lyfts.) And they’re a key to soothing “range anxiety,” or people’s fear of not making it to the next charger — which for years has been the single most important concern among potential E.V. buyers, according to the market research firm J.D. Power.

Their concerns haven’t been unfounded. Through the 2010s, it was hard for E.V. drivers to leave certain urban pockets. But for most major destinations now — thanks to both longer vehicle ranges and the proliferation of chargers — E.V. drivers can just get up and go.

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.

Number of fast-charging stations

The picture isn’t 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 Paren, and those that do work can be challenging and confusing to use, depending on your car.

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.

Data as of Sept. 3 of each year.

Meanwhile, the charging gap between Tesla owners and everyone else is shrinking.

Tesla has opened up its extensive charging network to other cars, and some carmakers are building new vehicles with Tesla’s style of port or offering adapters. If you buy a new E.V. this year, there’s a decent chance you can access both Tesla and non-Tesla chargers.

That makes a big difference. Tesla has built around a fifth of the country’s fast-charging stations, and because its stations tend to be large, more than half of all ports.

From Big Gaps to Feasible

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 — with charging gaps more than 200 miles long — have become reasonable to drive.

Most challenging routes in 2020 that are doable in 2025

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.

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’d hit a 250-mile gap — too far for a standard Model 3. If you drove fast, or if it was cold — both factors that reduce range — you would run out of charge well before you reached Nebraska.

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.)

From Easy to Easier

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.

Those routes have gone from doable to easy. Driving from Boston to D.C., for example, you’re never more than 10 miles from a charger. Most of the time, you’re within three miles.

Easiest routes in 2025

Includes routes at least 300 miles long. Numbers are rounded. Similar routes excluded.

Even five years ago, these kinds of dense charging corridors were rare, and located mostly on the coasts. Now they’re common, and can be found across the country, from the South …

… to the Great Lakes …

… through upstate New York …

… and Texas and Oklahoma.

These improvements aren’t 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.

Still Tough

Some routes, however, remain largely barren of fast charging, especially in rural areas.

Try to cross parts of Arizona, Kansas and Montana, or drive up I-25 in Wyoming, and you’ll still run into charging deserts. Portions of Louisiana and southern Arkansas also remain without fast-charging ports.

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.

Consider this route from Great Falls, Mont., through Billings, down to Rapid City, S.D., which has several long gaps:

Or this route, from New Mexico through the Oklahoma panhandle and into Kansas:

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’t have a fast charger, according to federal data, the vast majority of them small and without a major interstate crossing through.

Counties with no fast charger

Still, the network’s expansion appears to be speeding up, not slowing. The Trump administration tried to cancel billions in funding for chargers from the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure law, but those funds have been unfrozen. (So far, the funds have helped less in volume — they’ve contributed only a few hundred chargers — and more by pushing companies toward standardizing ports.)

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.

There are also major E.V. infrastructure companies building out their networks. In total, six big networks — Tesla, ChargePoint, EVgo, Electrify America, EV Connect and Blink — have built more than two-thirds of the country’s fast-charging stations. A number of smaller operators own the rest, including power companies like Hawaiian Electric, Florida Power and Light and Iowa’s MidAmerican, which have all become major fast-charger operators in their states.

And retailers and gas stations have joined the rush: Buc-ee’s, 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.

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’s 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.

About the data

Locations of chargers come from the Alternative Fuels Data Center’s 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.

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.’s records.

Sometimes, chargers for the same network at the same address were counted as separate stations in the data. We considered them as one station.

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.

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.

We used Mapbox’s 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.

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 “along a route” if it was within 10 driving miles.

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.

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