Tech
Unreliable public charging stations deter many potential electric vehicle buyers
Public electric vehicle charging stations in America have a bad reputation. They’re notorious for breaking down, charging at a snail’s pace, refusing customer payment and leaving drivers stranded without juice.
Advocates for electric vehicles, or EVs, worry that reliability concerns are hampering adoption at a critical moment in the campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but data on the topic is limited.
To address this problem, researchers at the University of Washington designed a survey to tease out exactly how much a car owner’s perception of public charging reliability influences their willingness to buy their first EV. The research was published in Transport Policy.
The team created a series of hypothetical scenarios to study the factors that might nudge a skeptical shopper towards an EV over a gasoline-powered car, including vehicle and gas prices, driving range and public charging access.
The results were dramatic. Participants with a negative view of public charging were much less likely to choose an EV than those with a moderate view. It took some serious hypothetical improvements to offset those negative perceptions: The EV needed to be discounted 30%, have 366 extra miles of range or there needed to be 30,000 additional public charging stations.
“No one knew how much charger reliability was coloring the decisions of prospective EV buyers,” said senior author Don MacKenzie, a UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.
“I was not at all surprised by the direction of the response. What surprised me was the size. These were monster results. This is a warning for the whole industry.”
The results come at a tenuous time for EV adoption in America. The market continues to grow, but political factors like the end of federal tax incentives are complicating sales outlooks. The federal government is also challenging California’s plan to phase out gas car sales, which could threaten similar efforts in Washington and several other states.
The state of public charging isn’t inspiring confidence in buyers, either. Studies in recent years have shown significant reliability issues with public networks. There are signs that the situation is improving, and home charging is an option for some drivers, but the threat of slow and flaky public chargers remains a powerful deterrent for anyone venturing outside their “home range.”
“We know there’s a lot of range anxiety out there,” said lead author Rubina Singh, a UW doctoral student of civil and environmental engineering. “EV owners often tolerate charging problems, while newcomers are less aware of the hurdles. If trust erodes, adoption could slow.”
The team found it tricky to measure the link between station reliability and buyer behavior because there weren’t obvious real-world groups to compare. Tesla’s stations get consistently higher marks than other networks, but Tesla cars and their owners are too different in other ways to make for a useful comparison. Simply asking people for their thoughts about charging may produce answers that are colored by their overall feelings about EVs.

Instead, the researchers turned to hypothetical scenarios. They recruited roughly 1,500 participants who had never owned an EV and surveyed them in three groups, asking the first to picture a world where public charging is a mess, the second to imagine a charging utopia and the third to simply give their preexisting opinions about charging.
Each group then went “shopping.” Each round of the survey, participants chose between an EV and a comparable gas-powered car. The researchers tweaked variables such as vehicle cost, gas prices and range, and trends emerged over several rounds.
Participants with a negative view of public charging demanded strikingly large concessions before choosing an EV. In some cases, the adjustment needed was nonsensically large.
“People wanted a 366-mile increase in range before they bought an EV,” MacKenzie said. “Lots of EVs don’t even have a 366-mile range today. That’s obviously not a practical demand. But it illustrates the strength of this effect.”
There were other surprises in the data, too.
“The results were basically the same for people who have access to home charging and people who don’t,” Singh said. “So even if they wouldn’t actually have to rely on the charging network, respondents were still concerned about reliability.”
As the auto industry works to bring EVs into the mainstream, these findings are both a warning and an invitation for further study. Little is known, Singh said, about what specific improvements would have the greatest impact on public charging perception. Asking the right questions could help stakeholders throughout the industry figure out where to invest.
“What are the specific factors that would convince skeptics?” she said. “Does a station need to be online 90% of the time to improve a user’s perception? Or 95%? Or 99%? Or would improving the point of sale system help more? Where do you put your dollars to have the greatest effect on public perception?”
What’s clear, MacKenzie said, is that reliability must be prioritized as charging networks expand.
“This is the Achilles’ heel right now for EVs,” he said.
“If we push the broader market towards EVs, or if it grows on its own before we can fix this problem, it’s really bad news for continued growth. I think it could engender a real backlash. It only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. That’s a big danger for EV adoption.”
More information:
Rubina Singh et al, Poor reliability of public charging stations can impede the growth of the electric vehicle market, Transport Policy (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2025.06.026
Citation:
Unreliable public charging stations deter many potential electric vehicle buyers (2025, September 23)
retrieved 23 September 2025
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Tech
6 Great After-Christmas Deals to Spend Your Gift Cards On
After-Christmas deals are an excellent way to redeem any gift cards or cash you got for Christmas. You can purchase something you actually want, and you can do it for less money than usual. I’ve scoured the Internet for truly good after-Christmas deals on the gear that we’ve hand-tested on the WIRED Reviews team. Many of these sales will end this weekend, so keep that in mind while you’re shopping. Find all the highlights below.
For more inspiration, check out some of our recently updated buying guides, including the Best Office Chairs, the Best Cheap Phones, and the Best Space Heaters.
WIRED Featured Deals:
Anker Laptop Power Bank for $88 ($47 off)
We love this beefy power bank. Its 25,000-mAh capacity is more than enough for fully charging your iPhone between 4 and 6 times, and it can deliver up to 165 watts to two devices meaning that you can charge your laptop, gaming console, or anything else you fancy. The built-in USB-C cable doubles as a carrying loop. There’s also a nifty display that’ll give you at-a-glance information on remaining battery, temperature, charging speeds, and more. It has pass-through charging support and only takes about two hours to fully recharge. This deal price matches what we saw on Black Friday.
Google Pixel 10 for $599 ($200 off)
There was an on-page coupon (PIXEL10) that had the best price we’ve tracked for any of the phones in the Google Pixel 10 lineup. That coupon is not available as of Saturday morning, but it may be back—clip it if you see it. This is still a good deal on the smartest Android phones you can buy, with fantastic cameras, snappy processors, gorgeous displays, and more AI integration than the average person needs. Check out our dedicated buying guide to figure out which Google Pixel 10 is right for you. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, now is a good time to buy considering that we’ve never seen any phone in this flagship lineup sell for less.
Bruvi BV-01 Brewer Bundle for $228 ($120 off)—Clip the Coupon
I’ve tested a lot of pod coffee makers, and the Bruvi BV-01 is my favorite. This deal price is the best we see outside of special events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The brewer is cute and looks great on a counter, with a large reservoir, an intuitive touchscreen display, and a built-in wastebin that collects used pods for you. The best part are the proprietary B-Pods, which are designed to biodegrade in a landfill. The bundle gets you the machine plus an assortment of bestselling coffee and espresso pods to get you started.
Fitbit Charge 6 for $100 ($60 off)
The Fitbit Charge 6 has been at the top of our fitness tracker buying guide since we first tested it. It’s attractive, affordable, accessible, and on sale for a match of the best deal we’ve seen. It’ll play well with iOS and Android, and it has a solid suite of features that’ll cover almost anyone’s needs—including skin temperature, heart rate readings, ECGs, activity and workout tracking, and more. The battery lasts for at least a week on a single charge. This deal comes with a six-month subscription to Fitbit Premium, which normally costs $10 per month.
Hydro Flask Standard Mouth Water Bottle for $30 ($10 off)
This budget-friendly deal gets you a steal on the best reusable water bottle. Hydro Flask bottles are durable, portable, and easy to cover in all the stickers you’ve been hoarding. The handle is flexible, the bottle is leakproof, and every component is dishwasher safe (though you may want to opt for hand-washing if you do end up plastering it in stickers). A few different colors are on sale at this price.
Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 for $200 ($50 off)
If hitting the gym is one of your New Year’s resolutions for 2026, the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 are worth considering. They’re the best workout headphones we’ve tested thanks to their comfortable and ergonomic fit, noise cancelation, spatial audio, a heart rate monitor, and the fact that they play well with both iOS and Android phones. The sound is solid, the battery life is good, and they’re water-resistant. This deal price comes within $20 of the best we’ve seen. Every color—orange, lavender, grey, and black—is on sale.
Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that’s too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.
Tech
Hyperkin’s Competitor Upgrades the Xbox Controller by Copying Sony’s Design
The most immediately striking difference is that Hyperkin’s product swaps the typical Xbox approach of asymmetric thumbsticks for the PlayStation’s horizontal layout. It also separates the D-pad (it’s one piece inside the pad, but splits its cardinal directions so each appears to be its own button), while the ABXY face buttons are spaced slightly further apart. Where the DualSense’s touchpad would sit, we have the Xbox home, menu, view, and share buttons, all blended in rather smartly. An LED ring around the home button just about echoes the lights running the periphery of the DualSense’s touchpad, although it’s really more of an inversion of the regular Xbox controller, where the home button itself lights up.
The Competitor’s thumbsticks come equipped with thumbcaps that mirror the PS5’s, an outer ring with a convex central point, but a pair of Xbox-standard concave caps are included. These easily pop on and off, and can be mixed and matched, if you were so (strangely) inclined.
There are two areas where this departs from both the standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers in terms of inputs. The first is the presence of two programmable rear buttons, M1 and M2. By default, these duplicate the input of the A and B buttons, but holding down the Mode button between them lets you remap them. There are also physical button locks to prevent their use entirely. The other is that while the Competitor boasts a 3.5-mm headphone jack like Microsoft’s official pad, it adds a built-in audio mute button, hidden in the black between the thumbsticks—a nice little upgrade.
Oddly Familiar
In use, the Competitor feels … well, a lot like a PS5 pad. The slightly wider grip fits in the hand comfortably, all inputs are accessible, and those symmetrical thumbsticks sit nicely in reach for all but the smallest hands. A microtextured underside provides a solid grip that, when coupled with its 232-gram weight, makes the Competitor feel particularly suited to longer play periods. It’s all very familiar if you’re already a multiformat gamer, to the extent that it sometimes slightly threw my muscle memory off, reaching a thumb out to do a PlayStation touchpad function and finding only the Xbox system buttons.
Photograph: Matt Kamen
Tech
In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom
When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz.
Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions of new memecoins had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act.
Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue’s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows.
The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper arguing that memecoins, despite their juvenile spirit, had a place in professional investors’ portfolios. In the six months prior, a basket of 25 “bluechip memecoins”—an oxymoron if ever there was one—had outperformed bitcoin by 150 percent, he pointed out. Some of the attendees murmured their approval.
Since then, the shine has come off the memecoin market. The paper value of Trump’s coin, which climbed to a peak of $14 billion two days after its launch, has cratered to roughly $1 billion. Hundreds of thousands of small investors lost their shirts. Pump.Fun’s daily revenue, a proxy for the overall appetite for memecoin trading, is barely more than a tenth of what it was in January. The memecoin gold rush has spawned a raft of litigation.
Next up: the stablecoin. If memecoins are symbolic of reckless abandon and unflinching profiteering in cryptoland, stablecoins are a symbol of the industry’s search for purpose and respectability. Designed to hold a steady $1 valuation, stablecoins are pitched by proponents as a faster and cheaper way to make everyday payments and international money transfers.
In a year in which the US has declared itself open for crypto business, where previously crypto firms feared regulatory backlash under the Biden administration, stablecoins have supplanted memecoins as the coin à la mode—and punctured the mainstream.
Though stablecoins have been around since 2014, they have predominantly been used by crypto traders as a safe harbor during bouts of market volatility, not by regular people. The concept has also faced resistance from regulators skeptical of a new form of money; Diem, a stablecoin venture incubated at Meta, famously shuttered in 2022 in the face of broad-based opposition.
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