The answer to this question is: more places than you think. (with appropriate apologies to the movie of a similar name.)
Anyone who drives an electric vehicle today is constantly on the lookout for charging stations.
If you drive a Tesla or Volkswagen electric vehicle, you can start smirking now, and this article isn't about you.
For the rest of us, the auto manufacturers and the charging 'industry' are making this about as difficult as possible. In Ontario, Canada, where Green Tech Nerd lives, it's chaos.
August 2023 update - after a 1800km (1,120 mile) road trip from Toronto to Connecticut, I can confirm both that there are way more chargers now than three years ago AND that charging is still very much hit and miss in terms of the experience.
What the more successful auto manufactures do (hello again Tesla and Volkswagen) is build their own infrastructure, and then tie it into the vehicle software. If Tesla opens a new supercharger, its location should just auto-magically show up for the Tesla driver as an option.
Most of the electric vehicle drivers I know who don't have a Tesla or VW just throw their hands up in the air with frustration about the current charging scene.
The charging locator feature on my Hyundai Kona's built-in navigation does not show most of the AC and DC chargers that I regularly use. (Yes, I've let Hyundai know this.)
So if your car doesn't 'see' any chargers, your next option is to get an app on your phone. (I listed most popular ones here recently.) Not all the apps show all the chargers, so that's frustrating. Very few of the apps work with Apple CarPlay, so even if you do have the app on your phone, someone else in your car has to look up the stations for you if you are driving.
On a long journey, even the charger you identified might break or be occupied while you are driving. Only some of the apps will notify you along the way, and even that is fiddly.
Many electric vehicle owners I know can tell you THAT story of the dark and stormy night where the charger they were counting on was busted or used by the time they showed up.
The nascent charging 'industry' has a long way to go. We need common standards and up-to-the-minute data on charger availability so that every map has all the chargers. If Google can't or won't do this, some start-up should be able to fix this.
My biggest wish is that fast chargers would already use the communication protocol that is built into every CCS or Chademo charger cable to figure out payment. Tesla does this, so if you are on a pay-by-use, you just plug in the charger, and all the payment is handled automatically between the vehicle and the charger. No tap-to-pay, no wonky app to wrestle with. For everyone else, we have to order a specific payment fob or card, or have an app that works in the middle of nowhere. In some rare cases we can tap to pay just with a credit card if the credit card reader is working. But someday (soon hopefully) all the electric cars and all the chargers CAN take care of even that for us. Dude, where's my charger of the future?
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