About 80 percent of EV owners charge their cars at home—in their garages or driveways, or sometimes the shared parking lots and garages of their apartment buildings or condo complexes. The upside is that pretty much every morning, your car is juiced up and ready to go.

Just like range, the charging station question gets more complicated during road trips.

If your car can plug into a Tesla charger, you're in great shape. The Supercharger network is the largest and most reliable network of high-speed chargers in North America, with nearly 20,000 stalls in the US as of June 2023, and growing all the time with major expansion plans underway. They’re available every few dozen miles on essentially every major interstate in the US, and along many state roads as well.

Tesla EVs work with Tesla charging stations, of course. But it looks like most North American EVs will soon be able to use this network, too. Tesla has announced plans to open their network to other EV brands, and major automakers including GM and Ford have announced that they will start to build Tesla charging ports into their vehicles, too. Technically the Tesla charging port is known as the North American Charging Standard (NACS), though time will tell if that name catches on.

The other notable fast-charging standard is the Combined Charging Standard (CCS or CCS-1), with a little over 10,000 charging ports available. Most non-Tesla EVs in the US have come equipped with this port. Some of these stations can even reach higher charging speeds than Tesla Superchargers currently do.

Finally, about 7,000 stalls with the older CHAdeMO fast-charging standard are available in the US, though there are no longer any EVs in production in the US that use this plug shape.

Don't need a fast charger?
If you're not in a big hurry, you could plug into one of more than 100,000 mid-speed Level 2 chargers that are available in parking garages and lots around the country. For every hour you're plugged in, these chargers add about 20 miles worth of range. It's not great if you're trying to cover more than a couple hundred miles per day on a long road trip, but it's a fine strategy for overnight charging, or if you can cool your heels for a few hours during the day.

About 10,000 of these Level 2 stalls are Tesla Destination Chargers, though the vast majority use a generic J1772 plug type. (Teslas can work with the generic plugs—you'll just need to use a common adapter.) Thousands of these were actually installed way back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, thanks to funding from some of the Great Recession-era stimulus packages. So if you ever spot a clunky, weathered-looking EV charger behind your town hall or next to the local train station, it might have been installed as part of this program.