The United States gained nearly 600 public fast-charging electric vehicle (EV) stations in the first three months of 2024, a 7.6% increase over the end of 2023, according to a Bloomberg Green analysis of federal data.
There are now almost 8,200 EV charging stations across the country, or one for every 15 gas stations, Bloomberg said. Tesla is responsible for slightly more than one quarter of them.
By 2030, the United States is on track for EVs to be about 50% of light-duty vehicle sales, according to Anila Siraj, senior vice president and EV practice lead at Impact 21, New York. That brings the number of EVs on the road up to about 26.4 million, which is 10% of all light-duty cars being electric.
BloombergNEF estimates that annual worldwide public-charging revenues will rise to $127 billion by 2030, with Tesla on track to account for $7.4 billion of that.
Also, 1.4 million plug-in EVs were sold in the United States in 2023, which was 9.1% of total light-duty vehicle sales. That’s more than 50% year-over-year growth, according to the Department of Energy; however, 2.5 million, or less than 1%, of all light duty vehicles on U.S. roads are electric.
“EV demand has slowed, but it hasn’t stopped,” said Chris Ahn, head of electrification consulting at Deloitte. “[There] aren’t a ton of charging deserts left. A lot of location problems have been solved.”
The first-quarter infrastructure blitz was fueled in part by the Biden administration’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, a $5 billion plan to fill in the remaining gaps in the charging map.
“We are getting closer to where a lot of these charging stations actually turn profitable,” said Philipp Kampshoff, who leads McKinsey’s Center for Future Mobility. “Now, you have a sort of line of sight and then obviously it makes sense to scale further.”
Of the chargers that went online in the first quarter, 10 opened at Buc-ee’s convenience-store locations and another nine at Wawa, shown in the image below.
- Wawa is No. 10 on CSP’s 2024 Top 40 Update to the 2023 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count. Buc-ee's is No. 153 on the 2023 Top 202. Watch for the full 2024 Top 202 ranking in the June issue of CSP magazine and in CSP Daily News.
For all the growth in public chargers, EVs are still trying to overcome the stigma of a dearth of charging, according to Samantha Houston, senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“There tends to be a lag in when the charging infrastructure is out there and visible and when public perception catches up to it,” she said. “In some areas of the country, it’s just not as easy to see.”
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