Kevin Drum has a post up about the present and future of EV charging stalls in the US. As of 2023, the number was 184,000, with public charging stalls outnumbering Tesla stalls 6:1. Is that a lot or a little?
Well, lots of people say that they’re holding off buying EVs because of the range, which is still less than most ICE cars. One way to mitigate that concern is to have more charging stalls than gas station nozzles*.
So how many gasoline fuel nozzles are there? According to xMap, there are ca. 196,600 retail gas station locations in the US. If you assume each station has on average eight fuel nozzles, that’s ca. 1,570,000 gas fueling ports**. So there are probably about an order of magnitude *more* ICE fueling nozzles than there are EV charging stations. Even with the growth in public stalls funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, it will likely take close to a decade for EV charging stalls to catch up to gas fueling stalls.
* setting aside the issue that it takes much longer to recharge an EV than it does to fill an empty gas tank
** probably should add some number of diesel fuel ports, but I’m not going to hazard a guess as to how many of those there are.
