The U.S. EV charging network isn’t ready for your family road trip,

Electric cars are the future. Literally.

Whether you want to go green or not, most of us are going to be driving an EV in the next two decades. Automakers are spending billions retooling factories and revamping their fleets to go most or all-electric in the next ten to 15 years, plans fully endorsed by President Joe Biden who wants half of all U.S. auto sales to be electric vehicles by 2030. That’s a massive goal considering the market, including plug-in hybrids, currently stands at about 3%.

One of the biggest barriers to EV adoption is America’s charging network. There are roughly 136,400 gas stations in the U.S., but just 43,800 EV charging stations, according to the Department of Energy. And it takes about 10 minutes to fill your car with a tank of gas but about 45 minutes to fully charge an EV, sometimes longer.

While Biden has pledged to build out 500,000 charging stations across the U.S. by 2030 as part of his $2 trillion infrastructure plan, we are still a long way from there.

So my producer Harriet Taylor and I decided to put California’s charging infrastructure to the test on an 8-hour road trip from Southern California to San Francisco. California accounted for 9% of EV sales in the first quarter and has the largest charging network in America, so it made sense to start there.

We specifically wanted to test anything other than a Tesla, which has the single-largest charging network in the world with 25,000 global charging stations. You need an adapter to use it, but the benefits and wide availability of Tesla’s charging network are generally well known. 

Charging on the road with any car brand other than Tesla is something you don’t hear much about. 

I admit that even as a “car guy” I had a lot of questions about charging, the new terminology, the speed, potential costs and more. 

We rented a brand new Polestar 2, Volvo’s recent entry into the electric car market, from Enterprise. Most EVs have a range, how far it can drive on a single full charge, of between 100 and 300 miles. The Polestar’s range was advertised at 265 miles, but that can change depending on a variety of things: cold weather, driving up or down hills or using the AC, for instance.

I had driven the Polestar 2 on a brief test a few months earlier so was familiar with it enough to feel comfortable on a long drive.  

We drove about 60 miles from Enterprise to our first stop at Mountain Pass, Calif., about 15 miles from the Nevada border in the “high desert” at around 5 p.m. on a Tuesday night at 105 degrees.

We had to remove a metal cover from a power outlet at the mine but then we were able to plug in and get to 100% before setting off.

Two initial takes after just a few miles: One, its easy to get anxious by staring at the giant “percent charged” screen (so we turned it off) and two, we had to download a bunch of apps as we learned to navigate the new “range world.”

Our go-to became PlugShare, which shows you where charging stations are regardless of who owns them, which…