August 17, 2026
666 is where DC fast charging satisfaction landed in the 2026 JD Power public charging study released August 12, up 12 points year over year with gains across all ten index factors. Charger availability improved most at 27 points, followed by how safe owners feel at a location at 18 points and cost of charging at 18. The study drew on 6,594 battery electric and plug-in hybrid owners and was fielded from January through June 2026.
12% of visits ended without a charge in the most recent quarter, the lowest rate in the study’s history and down from 14% a year earlier. That figure is the one worth carrying into a sales conversation. Public charging is the single most cited reason new-vehicle shoppers reject an electric vehicle, and a failure rate falling by two points is a change in the product being rejected rather than in the marketing of it.
IONNA scored 807 and ranked first among DC fast charger networks in its first year of award eligibility. Mercedes-Benz Charging Network took second at 797 and Rivian Adventure Network third at 755. All three are manufacturer-backed, all three are new to eligibility, and JD Power reports their largest advantages over the segment average fall in ease of charging, charging speed and charger availability, in some cases by more than 100 index points.
Level 2 public charging moved the opposite way, down 12 points to 595, driven by weaker scores for ease of payment and ease of charging. The split between the two segments is the operational headline. Capital concentrated in high-power destination sites is producing measurable satisfaction gains while the slower distributed layer is losing ground, and both are counted when a shopper says public charging is unreliable.
570 is the score for chargers located at dealerships, the lowest of any location type in the study. Hotels led at 692, followed by gas stations and convenience stores at 689 and restaurants at 688. Stand-alone parking lots and garages scored 606. A dealership charger is typically installed to satisfy a program requirement rather than to serve a road trip, and owners are rating it against a network they now expect to work on the first attempt.
That gap is a fixed operations question with a service lane attached. A charger that scores 570 with an owner standing on a dealer’s own lot is a customer experience problem occurring inside the store’s footprint, and unlike most satisfaction findings it has a maintenance and siting fix. Uptime monitoring, payment reliability and placement away from the back of the inventory lot are within a general manager’s control.
None of this changes the demand picture, and it should not be read as doing so. Charging infrastructure improved through a period when US electric vehicle share fell, which GCBC connected to policy timing in coverage of the 30C charger credit expiry on June 30. The networks scoring highest here were built on manufacturer consortium capital committed years before that expiry, which is a different funding basis from the site-level credit and one that did not lapse with it.
Scale remains the open question rather than quality. The United States is improving satisfaction on a comparatively small network while China’s build sits at an entirely different order of magnitude, a contrast GCBC laid out in the 21 million charger comparison. A 12% failure rate on a network of this size is a genuine improvement and a partial answer.
