Pubic EV Charging still sucks, but it’s fine

As I braced a chilly 3-minute walk from my office to where my EV was charging this week, I thought: “we’ve made so much progress, and also none.”.

I had wanted to try one of 10 new Flo chargers in an office parking lot near my office. I planned to leave the eKona charging for a few hours while I walked back to my office on a -10C day. I pulled out my Flo NFC card from the glovebox and waved it in front of the charger but it gave an error about payment. I re-downloaded the Flo app (I so rarely use it that my phone had offloaded it). It showed a negative balance on my Flo app account. Why doesn’t this top up automatically like my parking app or my transit pass??

Dear charging companies: WHY CAN’T WE JUST PAY WITH CREDIT CARD TAP?!!? I can tap top pay on any bus, subway, City Bike, or parking or gas pump but only Petro-Canada chargers let me pay without signing up for an account, downloading the app, or having a fob mailed to me. Fix this please.

The good news about this encounter was I could drive 15 seconds to a cluster of ChargePoint branded chargers where my fob and app worked fine.

So on the one hand, the charging network is unfortunately still invisible, woefully fragmented, and inconsistent, but on the other hand it kind of doesn’t matter because chargers are in enough places now for the number of EVs we have.

The problem for EV skeptics is, no one except EV drivers know where chargers are; the locations are sometimes buried in single-brand apps or sometimes apps like PlugShare or A Better Route Planner (ABRP), but more often chargers are invisible to Google Maps or Apple Maps and your car’s built-in maps. (I’m talking about you, Hyundai!).

Consumer appetites have cooled to EVs; while more and more people year on year are buying EVs, the rate of that increase has slowed somewhat. Early adopters are driving EVs, but would-be EV-buyers are still balking at issues like range anxiety, charging network reliability, and the general change inertia slope associated with new tech.

The good news is that in a few years, we’ve gone from very few public chargers within driving distance, to many options I can walk to from my home or office. This is remarkable and also boring.

2025 will be quite a tumultuous year for Canadians interested in electric vehicles. Government incentives for purchasing electric cars are petering out as the price gap between electric and combustion models narrows. Looming trade tariffs threaten to upend the very integrated Canadian-US car part supply chains that produce vehicles for the North American market. Many consumers are souring on Tesla because of its eccentric founder’s controversial political activities.