- A new study indicates DC fast-charging ports are being installed at the highest pace the United States has ever seen.
- Tesla alone installed more than 600 new ports in May.
- The U.S. could see 3,000 more DC fast charging ports installed in 2025 than in 2024.
You may think that the electric-vehicle industry has permanently hit the skids in 2025. That after several years of promising (if uneven) growth, a combination of still-high prices, a hostile presidential administration and automakers losing their nerve might keep the EV revolution from truly taking off.
While it’s true that the American car industry’s EV transition faces more headwinds than it did a year ago, there’s one big bright spot that proves that this kind of thing isn’t going anywhere: public charger installations. That’s actually doing better than you may think.
New data from the charging data analytics firm Paren indicates that various charging networks are set to deploy as many as 3,000 more DC fast charging ports in 2025 than they did in 2024. Along with affordability, access to charging is widely seen as one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption.
And while the U.S. had admirable charger growth last year, the process was infamously bogged down by permitting challenges and other concerns. This led many critics to write EV charger projects off as a kind of boondoggle that would take months to materialize, if they did at all.
Now, Paren’s chief analyst Loren McDonald indicates that things may be changing for the better. “The fast charging industry is deploying new [DC fast-charging] ports and stations at its highest pace ever in the U.S.,” McDonald posted on LinkedIn this week. “Don’t believe the FUD. The charging industry is moving full speed ahead, building larger, higher-power stations with amenities, greater reliability, and a better customer experience.”
Data: Paren
Photo by: Paren
Interestingly, and despite implementing cuts to its charging team last year, Tesla’s Superchargers are driving the lion’s share of the installations. “While Tesla could finish 2025 opening fewer new Supercharger ports than in 2024, the company had a monster May with 646 new ports opened, accounting for 42% of all new ports last month,” McDonald said. And as we reported recently, the reliability of new chargers is improving dramatically all of the time.
That’s great to see, especially as more and more automakers pivot to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug and allow their EVs to access the vast Tesla charging network. As my colleague Mack Hogan wrote recently, that hasn’t been the silver-bullet solution for charging access that some people hoped, but more ports are always better. And a NACS adapter has saved several of us on our road trips as well.
Photo by: Patrick George
And other charging providers are quickly leveling up from the “always-broken station located behind the garbage dumpsters at a strip mall” model that felt like the industry standard for so long. As McDonald said, many new players—often backed by automakers—are including covered areas, bathrooms, lounges for resting and other amenities to offer a much more pleasant experience when charging is needed on the road. Those networks include automaker-powered Ionna, Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging, Walmart, Pilot Flying J, BP Pulse, Rivian and Buc-ee’s, among many others. McDonald calls this the “Charging 2.0” era, and it should represent bigger and more serious leaps than what the industry has delivered until now.
The reason is simple. Even if EV sales growth isn’t expected to continue at some breakneck pace, the technology itself isn’t going anywhere, and those owners will always need places to charge. And since study after study indicates EV owners rarely go back to gas-powered cars, they’re going to be in this for the long haul.
Meanwhile, home Level 2 Charger installations are rising very quickly as well. That’s especially true now that many automakers have figured out how crucial it is to toss in chargers when someone buys the car, which can help eliminate a substantial amount of range anxiety.
All in all, the charging space seems to be growing up, even if federal funding for it is in the crosshairs of the new administration. And that’s great news for anyone looking to break up with gasoline.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
