I did not plan to buy an electric vehicle.

I had 10 days left of my 14 day relocation window to find a car and a place to live in a city I'd never lived in. On day 14, I bought a 2022 Audi e-tron with 8,000 miles on it. No research. No YouTube deep-dives. No spreadsheet comparing total cost of ownership. I saw a low-mileage luxury SUV at a price that made sense and I signed the papers.

For the first few days, I absolutely loved it. Quiet. Fast. Smooth. The kind of car that makes you feel like you made a great decision.

Then I needed to charge it.

My hotel listed an EV charger as an amenity. It did not have one. This is more common than you'd think — hotels add EV chargers to their listings as a marketing feature and then either never install them or let them fall into disrepair. I learned this the hard way.

So I did what any reasonable person would do: I googled "EV charger near me" and drove to the nearest one. It was at a car dealership. It was free. I pulled in late one night thinking I was being clever — free power, nobody around, just me and the quiet hum of a luxury SUV getting what I assumed was a meaningful charge. I turned on the radio. Surfed the web. Took some photos. When I figured a reasonable amount of time had passed, I unplugged and drove away feeling pretty good about myself.

I had gotten almost nothing.

What I had found was a Level 2 charger. Level 2 chargers add roughly 20-30 miles of range per hour. They are designed for overnight charging — eight hours minimum to go from low to full. Thirty minutes of "free power" gave me maybe 10 miles. I had not solved the problem. I had just sat in a parking lot for half an hour feeling clever while accomplishing very little.

I needed a Level 3. A DC fast charger. The EV equivalent of a gas station.

Here is something nobody tells you before you buy an EV: there are multiple charging standards, they are not compatible with each other, and figuring out which one your car uses requires research you will not think to do until you are sitting in a parking lot at 11pm.

There's J1772 — the standard Level 2 connector used by almost every non-Tesla EV in America. There's CCS1 — the DC fast charging standard used by most American and European EVs, including my e-tron. There's CHAdeMO — an older Japanese standard, fading out. There's NACS — Tesla's connector, which Tesla recently opened to other manufacturers. They do not plug into each other without an adapter.

I drove around Fayetteville, NC learning this the hard way. I also learned something else: a significant percentage of public EV chargers are broken. Or occupied by cars whose owners are nowhere in sight. Or both.

The charging infrastructure in America is real and it is growing. It is also uneven, inconsistent, and occasionally infuriating in ways that no one who has never owned an EV will understand and no one who has owned one for years will remember to mention.

I currently have eight charging apps on my phone. Eight. ChargePoint, Electrify America, Blink, EVgo, Tesla, PlugShare, and a couple of others I downloaded in desperation at various points. This is normal. This is the current state of EV charging infrastructure in America. You may balk at managing that many apps. You will balk less at 11pm in an unfamiliar city with 40 miles of range left.

The Tesla Supercharging Membership costs $12.99 a month and gives non-Tesla EV owners the same per-kWh rates as Tesla drivers — roughly 30-35% cheaper than paying without it. You can cancel anytime. When you don't have a home charger and you're figuring out life on the road, that $12.99 is the best money you'll spend. It pays for itself in one or two sessions.

Also: Google Maps has an EV charging overlay. Turn it on. It shows every charger along your route, with connector type, speed, and real-time availability. Your car's own app likely has the same feature. Use both. They will save you at 4am in a city you don't know yet.

One night — and I want to be clear that it was approximately 4am — I drove to the maintenance lot behind a local Ford dealership because their chargers were available and I needed power.

I want to describe what this felt like. I was a grown adult, in a luxury SUV, creeping through a dark parking lot in the middle of the night, looking for an outlet. I felt like I was casing the place.

I downloaded the app. I deciphered which charger was mine — they name them, like pets — and I plugged in.

The plug got stuck.

Not "a little resistance" stuck. Stuck stuck. And here is something about EV charging that I did not know: when a charger is connected and actively charging, the car locks the port. It is a safety feature. It makes complete sense. It also means that if the plug gets stuck, your car is immobile. You cannot start it. You cannot leave.

It was 4am. I was in a dark parking lot. My car was locked to a charger. I will not tell you I was calm.

I googled. I found two solutions. The first one didn't work. The second one did. The plug released. My car was free.

I still needed juice. So I went back. Plugged in again. This time it worked.

That was my first successful Level 3 charge.

On one of my last days in the hotel I found a house. Moved in. Told my landlord I had an EV and would need to install a home charger. They agreed.

The house was built in the 1960s. A Frank Lloyd Wright-adjacent ranch. Beautiful bones. Original wiring.

The first electrician I called assessed the situation — no attic, no crawl space, mid-century construction — and told me it was impossible to run a new circuit for a Level 2 charger. I thanked him and made a note to call someone else.

The second electrician — someone I'd met through work — came out a few days later. He walked through the house. He looked at the panel. I asked him, point blank: can you do it?

Yes, he said. Matter of factly. Like I'd asked if he could change a lightbulb.

An Amazon order for parts. A week of Level 1 charging — which adds roughly 3-5 miles of range per hour, which is to say it charges with all the urgency of a glacier — and $1,500 later, I had a Level 2 charger. Two 25-foot cables connected together to reach from the outlet to where I park. It is not elegant. It works perfectly.

Turn on the heat or AC at full blast and watch your estimated range drop 20-30 miles in real time. The first time this happens you will question every decision you've ever made.

Don't panic. Climate control draws power. So does it in a gas car — you just never see it because nobody shows you a live readout of your remaining miles.

The fix: seat warmers instead of full cabin heat, or find the middle setting that keeps you comfortable without hammering the range. You'll lose a few miles either way. You won't lose 30. There's a happy medium. Find it.

The month I got my car, Tesla opened their Supercharger network to non-Tesla vehicles.

There is a Supercharger station called the Oasis that sits almost exactly halfway between Fayetteville and my family's home. I stop there now on every trip. I connect my CCS1-to-NACS adapter, plug in, and in about 30 minutes I'm charged to full. I get snacks. I walk around. I buy something I don't need. I unplug and get back on the road.

It is, genuinely, fine.

Now that I charge at home, here's what my actual costs look like versus what I would have paid in a comparable gas SUV — say, an Audi Q7 at 22 MPG combined:

Gas nationally is averaging $4.16 a gallon as of June 8, 2026 — up nearly 45% from a year ago. Virginia electricity runs about 15 cents per kWh. North Carolina is slightly cheaper. The math gets better the more you drive.

Over five years that's $7,200 in fuel savings alone. Before oil changes, which the e-tron doesn't need. Before the federal EV tax credit, which can be up to $7,500 depending on how you bought it and your income.

The Department of Energy has a free calculator at fueleconomy.gov. Four minutes. Plug in your zip code and the cars you're comparing. It's the math I should have done before I bought the car.

The fear around EVs is not irrational. The charging infrastructure is genuinely inconsistent. The connector situation is genuinely confusing. There will be a night where something doesn't work and you have to figure it out in a parking lot at 4am.

But here is what's also true: it gets better fast. Tesla's network opening to other vehicles changed the road trip equation overnight. Home charging — once you have it — eliminates 95% of the anxiety because you leave every morning with a full battery. And the people who tell you something is impossible are often just the first opinion, not the last.

I bought this car in 10 days with zero research. I do not recommend this approach. But I also don't regret it.

I have also, somehow, become a person who knows more things about kilowatt-hours for someone who doesn’t work at Con-Ed should know. I did not ask for this. It happened anyway.

Gas is $4.16 a gallon. My last "fill-up" cost me $6.

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— The BL:UF desk · [email protected] · thebluf.news