The world still doesn’t have enough places to plug in cars

Even in the biggest electric vehicle markets, a driver venturing too far from home can have a hard time finding a place to recharge.

Try your luck on California’s Pacific Coast Highway. The roughly 600-mile route between San Diego and San Francisco has dramatic sea cliffs, off-the-grid retreats, lush vineyards-and, in some long stretches, few places to recharge for anyone who isn’t behind the wheel of a Tesla car.

California is home to about half the battery-powered passenger cars in the U.S. and does more than almost anywhere else to encourage EVs, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to plug in. Drivers face similar frustrations outside of China’s major urban hubs and on road trips through Europe. Executives in the nascent charging industry, drawing investment from automakers and energy giants alike, know that limited infrastructure has become a chokepoint.

“It’s a pretty rubbish experience charging a car today,” Roy Williamson, vice president of oil giant BP’s advanced mobility unit, which is investing in charging operators and technology companies, said at a BloombergNEF conference in San Francisco this month.

The first thing needed is more places to plug in. The global electric-vehicle fleet reached 5 million last year, according to BNEF, supported by a little more than 600,000 public charging points around the world. Under a scenario where EVs hit 30 percent market share by 2030, the International Energy Agency projects a need for somewhere between 14 million and 30 million public chargers deployed globally to serve regular passenger vehicles.

Today’s limited infrastructure isn’t created equally. About half of existing public chargers are concentrated in China, by far the top EV market, and more than two-thirds globally are slower units that may add only 10 miles of power for every 30 minutes at the plug. The best-performing EVs are capable of driving more than 200 miles on a full charge, which means anyone who finds an out-of-date charger risks an hours-long wait before their batteries are filled.

That means drivers can have wildly dif- ferent experiences depending on where they recharge. A regular household wall socket can take about 12 hours to replenish a battery run down to 20 percent, although if this takes place overnight it will hardly be a problem. Hooking up to a charger capable of medium speeds-available at the homes of some EV owners, alongside highways or in a shopping-mall parking lots-will add between 10 miles and 60 miles of driving range per hour. The most common fast chargers can add at least 75 miles in 30 minutes, at a premium cost, although most still fall short of the dream of matching the 10-minute time it takes to refill at a gas station.

There’s also nowhere near standardization of the charging infrastructure itself. Some charging points, such as those owned by Tesla, are designed with plugs that won’t work with rival electric car models; others might require clunky adapters. The price of charging outside the home can vary wildly and sometimes require a cumbersome array of subscriptions or mobile apps. The U.S. has three charging standards, compared to one in China.

“Using an electric car to run long distance is a fake proposition at the moment,” said Beijing-based Chen Zhen, who owns two EVs, including a Tesla Model S, but uses a gasoline-powered car for trips outside the city. Charging at public facilities costs Zhen more than double the price he pays for electricity at home, while units are often out of service or incompatible with his cars. For many drivers, he said, “if they don’t have charging facilities at home, buying an EV would only cause them trouble.”

While for now about 80 percent of EV charging is done at home or the workplace, the roll-out of millions in additional public charging points is seen as crucial to give motorists enough confidence to ditch combustion-engine models. That balance of charging inside or outside the home is also seen shifting as EV prices fall and the vehicles are increasingly purchased by drivers who don’t have space to park within plug’s reach of their home. Already, it’s not uncommon to see power cords trailing from upper-floor windows of Chinese apartment blocks to charge vehicles parked at street-level, according to a report published this month by Columbia University.

Some markets are also proving to be a conundrum.