For electric vehicles to really take off, drivers need more places to plug in.
According to Elaine Buckberg, prospective buyers care more about having fast, available public charging options than anything else, even the price of buying a new car.
“EV drivers want it to be at least as easy as getting gas,” Buckberg, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, told an audience this month. “What we find is that we should be working on — and policy should also focus on — highway and urban charging.”
In an online event hosted by the Salata Institute and the Harvard Alumni Association, Buckberg and Christian Kaps, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, discussed their research on what drives EV sales, how people use EVs, and how charging anxiety remains the critical factor. The talk, titled “The Road Ahead for Electric Vehicles,” was part of Harvard Voices on Climate Change, a virtual series where Harvard faculty and fellows discuss aspects of the climate challenge., a virtual series where Harvard faculty and fellows discuss aspects of the climate challenge.
Which policies matter most? Charger subsidies, battery and critical mineral production tax credits, which remain intact, and the California [Clean Air Act] waiver. What matters least? Those very expensive subsidies for new EV purchases.
Elaine Buckberg
Senior Fellow, The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability Lecturer on Environmental Science and Public Policy
Federal policy is becoming less EV-friendly, Buckberg noted, even as high gas prices, triggered by the war in Iran, are causing more people in the U.S. to think about going electric. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 eliminated consumer tax credit for electric vehicle and charger purchases, while Congress approved a separate measure blocking California regulations that would have phased out gas-powered vehicle sales. Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives have also proposed legislation that would require EV drivers to pay an annual $130 fee.
But Buckberg, former chief economist of General Motors, says this doesn’t necessarily spell doom for EV sales. Why? Because even though subsidies matter to consumers, market research surveys show that charging concerns remain the most powerful indicator of whether someone will buy an electric vehicle.
“Which policies matter most? Charger subsidies, battery and critical mineral production tax credits, which remain intact, and the California [Clean Air Act] waiver,” Buckberg said. “What matters least? Those very expensive subsidies for new EV purchases.”
Some cities have a long way to go before their public charging infrastructure is good enough to make people want to buy EVs, Buckberg said, citing research she conducted with Salata Institute director Jim Stock and other scholars. They analyzed data from Plugshare, an app that helps EV drivers find reliable charge points, to see how efficient it is to access public charging in different U.S. cities.
In Los Angeles, home to what Buckberg calls the “most advanced charging market in the country,” many drivers can reach a public charging station in 15 minutes or less. By contrast, reaching a charger can take over an hour in Indianapolis.
“You’re very unlikely to adopt an EV if you would need to rely on public charging there,” Buckberg said.
Boston’s results are mixed. Neighborhoods like the Seaport District, South End, and Columbia Point area of Dorchester have public charging stations within a 10-minute drive. In other neighborhoods, including Brighton and the Franklin Field area of Dorchester, it takes over an hour.
Buckberg says direct current fast charging (DCFC) stations, which can charge a car to 80 percent within 20 to 60 minutes, are the most efficient choice for cities, beating out Level 2 equipment (where charging to 80 percent can take up to 10 hours) in every case study.
“You could have fewer convenient fast chargers, because each car takes way less time to charge at a fast charge,” Buckberg said. “You don’t need as many, because the throughput is higher.”
Charging on the go is especially concerning for people considering EVs. “Range anxiety” is the term experts use to describe the fear that the EV will run out of battery, leaving passengers stranded.
The canonical story is that the electric vehicle is sort of the ‘secondary car,’ and it's not quite up to par with all the capabilities that the [internal combustion] cars have.
Christian Kaps
Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
But 2023 research co-authored by Kaps and Michael Toffel, Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at HBS, shows that people who actually own EVs are using them with nearly identical frequency to people who own gas-powered vehicles. In collaboration with BMW Group, the researchers analyzed the use of 319,471 U.S. vehicles (both electric and internal combustion engine) in a dataset that includes 252 million trips.
For short- and medium-distance trips under 150 kilometers (or about 93 miles), EVs are actually being used slightly more than their gas-powered counterparts.
“I think that this is remarkable,” Kaps said. “The canonical story is that the electric vehicle is sort of the ‘secondary car,’ and it's not quite up to par with all the capabilities that the [internal combustion] cars have.”
Buckberg noted that after people actually try driving EVs, their charging worries tend to subside.
“There’s a tiny percentage of households that do more than one trip over 100 miles each year. But people say, ‘Wait, what if both my kids go to a summer camp or college and we need to take them both in opposite directions on the same day? Can my EV do the trip?’” Buckberg said. “There’s a lot of psychology here. Consumers are risk-averse; they buy for their extreme use case.”
Kaps’ research did identify a “road trip gap” on long drives of 150-plus kilometers, where gas-powered vehicles were used more often. They took, on average, three more trips per year than EVs.
But the gap is smaller when driving to destinations with robust charging infrastructure, the researchers discovered by analyzing Plugshare data. It’s all the more evidence, Kaps said, that people would use EVs more frequently if public charging was improved at popular road trip destinations.
“There’s still some way to go on road trips,” Kaps said. “If those long trips are really salient, this will matter for customers being willing to adopt them.”
