The State of DC Fast Charging in 2026: Now Comes the Hard Part
By John HIgham
EVA Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs
The physics of DC Fast Charging (DCFC) are well understood. The underlying equipment has been embedded into electric vehicles and the network infrastructure. Putting those pieces into place was the easy part. As I am fond of saying, it just took time and money.
And yet… charging anxiety is still very real.
Not because EVs can’t go far enough. Not because chargers don’t exist or aren’t fast enough. But because the human experience of charging still hasn’t caught up with the technology. Let me explain.
It should just work
A friend of mine—let’s call him Stan—recently bought a BMW i4. He loves it. At home, he charges using solar panels on his roof and delights in telling people he drives on sunshine. The car is quiet, fast, and unmistakably BMW. He loved driving it so much he took it on a long weekend trip.
Afterwards he called me, frustrated enough to consider trading it in. Not because the car failed him—but because charging away from home required using some brain cells he didn’t want to use.
His navigation system routed him to a charger that turned out to be out of order. BMW roadside assistance sent him to another charger, but he worried he’d arrive nearly empty. When he got there, the charger wouldn’t accept his credit card. He was told he could “just plug in and walk away”—but Plug & Charge wasn’t activated on his car. He needed to download an app. Cell coverage was poor. What could have been a “plug in and walk away” experience turned into an hour-long marathon of working with BMW roadside assistance, seeking out a working charger, then customer service for the DCFC network, going to a coffee shop to get Wi-Fi to download an app, configuring accounts and so on.
When we talked, it was clear he had never heard of PlugShare, A Better Route Planner, nor even that there was more than one DCFC network, let alone an app required for each network. More importantly, he had no desire to learn about them. After paying $80k for a car, he expected the car to take care of itself, so to speak.
“What car gives me the experience I’ve heard so much about? It does all the route planning, and I don’t have to worry about knowing how to use a bunch of apps?” he asked.
We talked about how Tesla’s cars and its own network being tightly integrated with charging experience, but he had his reasons to eschew the brand.
While we can get close to that experience in other EVs, it does come with a couple of asterisks attached: enable this feature, use that network, download this app, carry that adapter. Stan didn’t want any of that. He just wanted his car to work.
For years, I’ve been guilty of saying, “EVs are just cars now.” Stan’s story reminded me that for charging, that’s not entirely true—yet.
When Road Trips Meant Spreadsheets and Patience
To understand how far we’ve come, you need to know where we started.
My first EV was a Miata I converted to electric with my then-teenaged son in our garage. It had a range of about 40 miles and it required a full night of charging to replenish those miles. It was a blast to drive—but never got more than maybe 15 miles away from home.
Not long after, 2012 to be precise, BMW’s ActiveE showed up in my driveway. That car had about 100 miles of range and could charge at the (comparitive) blistering pace of roughly 20–25 miles per hour on a Level 2 charger.
The ActiveE was a test car with a limited number of drivers, known as Electronauts, participating in the program. We became a tight knit group on social media. It wasn’t long before about 20 of us decided to meet up. Since about half of us were from the Los Angeles area and the other half from San Francisco Bay Area, we split the difference and targeted a meet up in Morro Bay.
There were exactly zero DC fast chargers in California, not that the ActiveE could have used them anyway.
Making the trip required roughly 200 miles of driving and close to 20 hours of charging. Every single one of us making that trek had to rely on one strategically placed Level 2 charger in King City, CA that became the choke point for the southbound group. We coordinated arrival times. We texted when someone unplugged. It was equal parts camaraderie and absurdity.
Three years later (2015), we did it again.
In 2015, however, some people arrived in Teslas using their Supercharger network. Others used newly installed 50 kW DC fast chargers in a variety of cars that could use them. It felt like the future had arrived.
Fast forward to today—11 years after that second meet up—the route between LA and the Bay Area is blanketed with 350 kW chargers. You stop where you want to eat, not where you have to charge. In that time we went from adding 25 miles per hour to adding 25 miles per minute.
That’s generational progress.
Today Charging Is Easy…Until It Isn’t
I now drive between the Bay Area and LA about once a month. In a modern EV, it’s astonishingly easy. One 15-minute stop to charge, or sometimes none at all. Dozens of charging options. Zero planning required, except for those previously mentioned asterisks (juggling networks, apps and adapters).
Busy travel weekends bring out those asterisks. I learned that the hard way driving home on a holiday weekend. On a Sunday evening after Thanksgiving I knew there would be lines along the I-5 corridor between LA and the SF Bay Area. I knew traffic would be ugly. Just like that the trip wasn’t about range or charging—it was about accessing information.
What I wanted to know for my post-Thanksgiving drive was simple:
Are chargers working?
Is there a queue? How long?
What are my alternatives?
Is it worth paying more to avoid waiting an hour?
That information exists—but it’s scattered across multiple apps. And none of it is safely accessible while driving 5,000 pounds of glass and steel at freeway speeds, alone, with no co-pilot.
When I did stop to charge that fateful weekend, I watched drivers in a queue that could have easily been an hour long at a well known DCFC network while other chargers—literally in the adjacent parking lot—sat empty. Did those drivers not know? Did they care about price more than time? I have no idea.
But I do know this: the experience shouldn’t require guessing.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
We’ve solved the technical problems of DC fast charging. The equipment is deployed today. Now comes the hard part: making it feel easy.
EV drivers need:
Unified, real-time charging data
In-car guidance across all networks
Congestion and wait-time prediction
Simple, automatic “redirect me” logic
True plug-in-and-walk-away payment
And all of it needs to live in the car—not on a phone.
This is how EV charging goes mainstream. Not by building faster chargers (though we’ll keep doing that), but by making the experience intuitive, predictable, and boring—in the best possible way.
Because once charging becomes boring, EV adoption becomes unstoppable.
And after everything we’ve already accomplished, that’s a future well within reach.