Tiya Gordon runs a startup that just won the contract to put curbside chargers across New York City. She recently got a tattoo of the Strait of Hormuz. Her bet is that pricey gas swings drivers back to electric cars. The sales numbers say she's early. U.S. EV sales are down by half from last year. The charger builders aren't waiting.
The charger builders are on pace to match a record year anyway, the Journal's Patrick George reports. By early October the U.S. had added nearly 2,000 stations with more than 12,000 plugs, by Paren's count. That puts 2026 roughly even with 2025, which ended with 3,885 new stations and 19,839 plugs. The country now has more than 80,000 public fast-charging plugs. “I still think people are breathing into paper bags,” ChargePoint (CHPT) CEO Rick Wilmer says of the industry's mood. The growth is real, he adds.
The slump is real too. Washington ended the EV tax credits and the fuel-economy rules. Automakers canceled models and took multibillion-dollar write-downs. EVs peaked near 12% of new-car sales in the third quarter of 2025, before the credits went away. They've hovered around 6% this year. The old federal goal was 50% electric, hydrogen or plug-in hybrid by 2030. The market is a long way from it.
Better plugs, closer to the restrooms
Here's the upside. Bill Ferro, Paren's co-founder, says the builders learned from the years that drove EV owners nuts. Stations now open with more plugs each, and the chargers push power faster, so the line and the stop are both shorter. The industry has also gotten pickier about location, putting sites by restaurants and busy corners rather than in far-off lots with no restroom. “I've started calling it the Great American Build-Out,” Ferro says. Growth clusters in California and New York, with Texas and Florida catching up fast.
The money still isn't easy. ChargePoint grew revenue 18% to $116 million last quarter and lost $35.6 million. EVgo (EVGO) lost $46.3 million. Tesla (TSLA) added more than 3,500 fast-charging plugs this year for about 40,000 total, inside a services business that brought in $4.6 billion last quarter. Walmart (WMT) opened its 100th fast-charging station in late August.
Our read
This is Cash Flow (M5), the car line of the budget, with a note on Investments (IN04). The Journal says buyers are moving to used EVs, and the builders are building for them. The thing that made a used EV a bad idea in 2021, nowhere to plug in on a trip, is fading. There are more than 80,000 fast plugs, and the new ones sit by the diner. On the investing side, the operators still lose money and the desk holds none of them. Tesla is held at weight in 13 books and Walmart in 12; nothing added. Gordon's tattoo points at the same oil risk the house hedges with energy stocks, Chevron in 37 books and Exxon in 34, held and not added.
The piece of your plan this touches is the car line in your budget. If a used EV is on your list, the check this week is a map, not a spreadsheet. Open a charging app, drop a pin on your home, your job and your longest yearly drive, and count the fast plugs along the route. Then get one quote for a home charger and set it beside a year of gas receipts. If the plugs and the quote both work, the used EV can stay on the list. If they don't, no sticker discount fixes it. You plan the route before the trip, not at the first empty battery.