A summer road trip to Montreal and back has put the EV fast charging improvement of recent years to a proper test, and the numbers behind one driver’s near-flawless experience suggest the anecdote is no fluke.
The trip covered more than 600 miles in an Audi e-tron with a range of roughly 220 miles per charge. Three charging stops. No queues. No calls to customer service. Total charging time: about as long as the wait at US border control on the way home.
Compare that to a road trip to Maine three years earlier, also in the e-tron, roughly half the distance, and three customer service calls, chargers that broke mid-session, and a network app that reported two working plugs where only one actually worked. The contrast is stark enough to prompt a closer look at what changed.
How the EV Fast Charging Improvement Stacks Up in the Data
The headline figures are straightforward. In July 2023, the US had around 32,000 DC fast chargers, many of them restricted to Tesla owners. Today that number has more than doubled, with Tesla having gradually opened its network and other operators adding capacity steadily alongside it.
Reliability has moved in the same direction. Paren’s US EV charger reliability data puts the national average at 93.5% in Q1 2026, up from 93.4% in Q4 2025, with most states now scoring in the 90–95% range. Paren monitors more than 95% of US DC fast-charging infrastructure, processing over 100 million data events per day.
The picture for non-Tesla networks specifically is a little more nuanced. The Paren Q1 2025 State of the Industry Report put non-Tesla reliability at 82.6%, up from 81.2% in Q4 2024. Still below the Tesla-skewed national average, but a trajectory that points the right way. The worst-performing state as of Q1 2026 was Oklahoma, at 77.7%, a reminder that the improvement is uneven.
Longer-term context comes from the International Council on Clean Transportation, which found that around 6.3 million light-duty EVs had been sold and 204,000 non-home chargers deployed across the US by the end of 2024. Charging infrastructure deployment grew at roughly 25% annually from 2019 to 2024. Publicly announced investments point to a further 164,000 DC fast chargers and 1.5 million Level 2 chargers in the pipeline.
The App That Routed Around the Problems
Route planning mattered as much as the chargers themselves. The trip relied on A Better Routeplanner (ABRP), an app that optimises charging stops by factoring in weather, temperature, vehicle specs, and battery degradation. Rivian acquired ABRP and its Swedish parent company Iternio on 21 June 2023, with the deal structured so that ABRP now also powers Rivian’s in-car trip planner while remaining an open tool for all EV brands and networks.
That ownership explains why ABRP routed the trip through a Rivian charging hub near Lebanon, New Hampshire. Six 300-kilowatt chargers, all working, no queue, food nearby. The charger accepted a credit card directly and delivered more than 140 kilowatts, roughly the e-tron’s maximum. The Rivian acquisition announcement framed the deal as a way to improve EV journeys across the industry, not just for Rivian owners, and on this evidence the hardware at least backs that up.
The one genuine snag on the trip came at a Circuit Électrique station just outside Montreal, where the card reader was broken and required downloading the operator’s app and loading it with 20 Canadian dollars. Annoying, and a reminder that the network is not uniformly polished. But one broken card reader across three stops and more than 600 miles is a meaningfully different failure rate from three customer service calls across 350 miles.
Each session ran about 20 minutes and was combined with lunch or a rest break. Nobody waited in the car. That last detail is the one that tends to get lost in the charging anxiety conversation: when stops are planned around meals and breaks rather than treated as interruptions, the maths shifts considerably.
AAA surveys have consistently found public charging infrastructure among the top concerns for prospective EV buyers. The data from Paren, the deployment figures from ICCT, and the lived experience from a 600-mile trip all point to the same conclusion: those concerns were warranted in 2023, and the industry has spent two years quietly earning its way out of them. Oklahoma’s 77.7% reliability score suggests a few states are still earning.
