1 in 8 EV drivers still can’t finish a charge at a public fast charger

Roughly one in eight visits to a public fast charger in the United States still ends without the vehicle actually charging, even after the failure rate fell to a record low of 12% this year. J.D. Power’s sixth annual study of the public charging experience, based on surveys of 6,594 battery and plug-in hybrid owners, found non-charging visits down from 14% a year earlier, but a driver who pulls up expecting a charge still faces better than one-in-eight odds of walking away without one.

Overall satisfaction with DC fast chargers climbed 12 points this year to 666 on a 1,000-point scale, the study’s largest year-over-year gain in several cycles. Level 2 charger satisfaction moved the opposite direction, falling 12 points to 595, even as the fast-charging side of the network posted gains in availability, safety perception and the ease of actually paying for a session. Charger availability alone rose 27 points, safety perception improved 18 points, and satisfaction with charging cost climbed 18 points as well, suggesting the industry has made more headway on the parts of the experience it can control at the pump than on the underlying reliability of the hardware itself.

The 12% that still don’t get a charge

The non-charging visit rate fell to 12%, the lowest in the study’s six-year history, down from 14% the year before. Brent Gruber, J.D. Power’s executive director of EV solutions, framed the stakes in terms of who still has not bought an EV rather than who already owns one: “Public charging is the top reason new-vehicle shoppers reject EVs,” he said, tying the reliability numbers directly to whether sales keep growing from here. That single figure carries more weight than most of the rest of the study, since it is the number a shopper who has never owned an EV is most likely to hear secondhand from a friend or a bad review before ever plugging in themselves.

IONNA, Mercedes and Rivian knock Tesla out of first

Tesla’s Supercharger network had led the satisfaction rankings for five straight years before this year’s survey, and its score slipped from 709 in 2025 to 701 in 2026. The slip was enough to drop it to fourth place, behind three newer, automaker-backed networks: IONNA at 807 points, the Mercedes-Benz Charging Network at 797, and the Rivian Adventure Network at 755, each scoring more than 100 points above the industry average of 666.

IONNA launched in 2023 as a joint venture among automakers that compete everywhere else, including BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis, with a stated goal of building at least 30,000 high-powered chargers by 2030 running entirely on renewable energy. Toyota joined a year later as an eighth partner, and Toyota Motor North America chief executive Ted Ogawa said the investment was meant to promote battery-electric adoption and build customer confidence in the technology, both of which this year’s survey suggests remain works in progress across the industry rather than problems any one automaker has solved alone.

The bottom of the ranking told its own story. Red E Charge scored 628, just ahead of Electrify America at 616, EVgo at 601 and ChargePoint at 583, four networks that together operate a large share of the fast chargers scattered along interstates and retail parking lots nationwide, exactly the kind of stops where a stranded highway driver has the fewest alternatives if the charger a mapping app pointed to turns out to be broken.

Hotels beat dealerships for where to plug in

Satisfaction varies sharply by where the charger sits, the study found, with hotels scoring highest at 692 points, followed closely by gas stations and convenience stores at 689 and restaurants at 688. Stand-alone parking lots and garages trailed at 606, and dealership chargers scored lowest of all at 570, a gap J.D. Power ties partly to inconsistent upkeep at high-traffic public sites compared with locations where an on-site business has its own reason to keep the equipment working. A hotel or a restaurant depends on guests staying long enough to eat or sleep, and a charger sitting broken in the lot works against that business directly, while a dealership’s chargers often sit off to the side of a lot built around selling cars rather than servicing them.

The study was fielded from January through June 2026 in partnership with PlugShare, and J.D. Power has tracked the same non-charging metric every year since the survey began six years ago. Gruber’s own framing leaves the harder question hanging over the industry: whether a 12% failure rate, even at a record low, is low enough to stop turning shoppers away from EVs in the first place.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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