Bradley Brownell / Jalopnik »

Electrify America exists as government mandated penance for Volkswagen’s diesel cheating scandal. Without it, the state of non-Tesla charging would be extremely bleak. With this network of chargers in place, however, CCS infrastructure has bloomed up along interstate routes for the last few years in a rapid fashion. Having used them for most of this trip across the country, I can say that we can do no better than drop the “extremely” but it’s still pretty bleak.

Sections of Indiana and Colorado have been the worst of the trip thus far. Following the chargers means going several miles out of your way to get juice. For example, there are no public DC Fast chargers in a fairly large city like Ft. Wayne, Indiana, so we had to divert south through Ohio to Dayton in order to catch a charge to get to Indianapolis. In Colorado things got even more bleak, as the fastest chargers along our route were 125 kW stations, but they’re “shared” stations. If two cars are plugged in at the same time at the same location, it’ll split that 125 kW between them. And it won’t do it evenly, either. As we found out, second to get to the charger received around 30 kW and the first car to the station got 70-ish. We couldn’t account for the other 25.

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