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Demand for EV chargers is outstripping supply, says ChargePoint report
EV growth is happening, even in the US, and those EVs will need plugs to charge.
There might not be the same degree of optimism regarding electric vehicle adoption as a few short years ago, but the transition toward battery-electric vehicles continues nevertheless. More than 1.8 million EVs had already been sold between the start of this year and the end of August, according to analysts. And in the US, there has been a large uptick in drivers considering EVs that they might have written off last year, due to escalating fuel prices with no clear end in sight. Despite this, charging infrastructure continues to lag, according to a new report from ChargePoint.
“All in all, things are moving forward. I think the North American market has been better shaped than a lot of the press reports,” said ChargePoint CEO Rick Wilmer. “Part of it is just the data we see in terms of the amount of RFPs that we receive for charging solutions. They haven’t slowed down. We reported quarter over quarter growth in the last quarter we reported. And you look at the data around used EVs going up in price because the demand is so high. I saw a recent report… EV retention rates are 96 percent. So those folks that are putting their leased cars on the used market, they’re not going back to gas, they’re going to another EV,” he said.
Beyond that, cheap electric trucks from Slate and Ford indicate further future demand for charging. “When you look at how much interest there is in the used EVs that are at parity with an equivalent gas vehicle, that tells you the appetite is there for EVs if it’s the right vehicle at the right price point,” Wilmer said. “So I think the auto OEMs, maybe not homogeneously, but they’re figuring out what the market wants in North America, and they’re starting to introduce those vehicles, which I don’t think a lot of the forward-looking forecasts accommodate the fact that the product market fit is getting better coming out of the car companies.”
ChargePoint says that for 2025, its data shows that there was a 34 percent increase in charging sessions, yet new charger installations only grew by 16 percent. I asked Wilmer what the ideal utilization rate ought to be.
“So what we’ve determined, especially for—and we’ve got so much workplace charging, this is where most of our data comes from, but I think it’s relevant for other use cases as well—but on a five-day, eight-hour-a-day workplace scenario, if you’re above 30 percent utilization, you’re going to have drivers coming in that can’t find an open charger,” Wilmer said.
“And it’s fascinating to watch this happen because you’ll see a workplace make the decision to put some chargers in the parking lot because their employees are demanding it… So they put some in, and then other employees now have charging at work, so they buy EVs, and all of a sudden you’re up above 30 percent. And the employees are now more upset than they were before they even had EV charging because they can’t find a charger. So again, in a workplace, eight-hour-day workweek, 30 percent is kind of the magic number,” he said.
ChargePoint has developed a new range of cheaper and more powerful Level 2 (AC, 240 V) chargers for North America and has partnered with Eaton (for its smart breaker technology) to enable bidirectional charging. “We’re really pushing to get to a point where you can do a vehicle-to-home solution at a much, much lower price point than what’s available today to make it palatable for consumers that want basic use cases, just power my house when the power’s out,” Wilmer said. “You get into the more interesting use cases where I can sell my energy back or things like that, that’s all possible as well. But in the US, I mean, I had three power outages on Christmas Day; that was brutal.”
But Wilmer thinks a degree of standardization, both among the automotive industry and electrical utilities, is a necessary step before the widespread growth of V2G, where EVs might send spare power back to the gri