- calendar_today August 14, 2025
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Electric car adoption in the United States is meeting renewed headwinds as sales decelerate and questions swirl over charging. After more than a year of positive month-on-month growth, sales of battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles have started to contract. Already, buyers have largely spurned electric vehicles from Genesis and Volvo, and both brands are reviewing their EV lineups as a result.
The White House hasn’t helped either. By trimming subsidies and vehicle pollution standards, the current administration has left prospective buyers with a bare bones federal EV incentive. But a new report from Sam Abuelsamid, vice president at Telemetry, finds that the biggest barrier to EV adoption may not be government policy but American garages.
Level 2 Chargers: Charging Where You Park
Surveys and studies for several years have identified charging as the number one reason for resisting an EV purchase. Telemetry’s Abuelsamid examines this anxiety in a new market research report that highlights one unexpected issue: garage utilization.
Fast-charging stations grab the headlines, but the majority of EV charging occurs at home. As much as 80 percent of EV charging uses AC power, almost all of it from a single-family home. Data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) shows 42 percent of American homeowners already have access to a level 2 (240-volt) charging circuit simply by parking near an existing outlet.
Abuelsamid believes that number could more than double to 68 percent of homes with a “maximum utilization scenario in which all drivers use the private garage for parking cars rather than storing other items.” According to Abuelsamid, “90 percent of all houses can add a 240 V outlet near where cars could be parked. Parking behavior, namely whether homeowners use a private garage for parking or storage, will likely become a key factor in EV adoption.”
Opening up existing garage space to parking rather than storage would increase the number of homes with EV charging from 31 million to more than 50 million. If you include households where new wiring would be practical, that number jumps to over 72 million. That’s more than the Telemetry estimates of EV penetration by 2035, which ranges from 33 million to 57 million vehicles.
The Cost of Charging
This is all theoretical, however, as the actual number of EV-ready homes today is lower than raw capacity suggests. The NREL report found nearly 34 million would need electrical upgrades, including new wiring and possibly a new electrical panel, to handle a level 2 charger. These renovations can easily cost thousands of dollars.
This makes it harder to sell the electric car as the cheaper alternative over time. Buying an EV is one thing; paying for home charger installation is another, and when added to the purchase price, total cost of ownership can approach or exceed that of a gas-powered vehicle.
Multifamily Homes Face Greater Challenges
Affordability, availability, and utilization of home charging capacity is only part of the problem. Telemetry’s Abuelsamid points out that a significant fraction of the US population—23 percent of Americans—live in multifamily homes like apartments, condominiums, and townhomes.
In these units, the typical EV owner has limited ability to choose whether or where to install chargers. Rather, they must work through building owners, management companies, or co-op boards for permission to do so. Even if these decision makers are willing, the costs are steeper.
It is not uncommon, for example, for a shared level 2 charger in a co-op to require an entire electrical panel upgrade first. This kind of work is measured in millions of dollars, far higher than in a single-family home. Wires must be run to far-flung parking spots, and these residents are typically ineligible for municipal or utility subsidies.
While there are currently about 1 million EV owners in multifamily housing, only 11 percent are parked near enough an outlet to charge. States are beginning to mandate 20–25 percent of spaces in new developments be EV-ready, but that would only give Telemetry estimates of 6.7 million to 11.4 million charging capable spaces in multifamily housing nationwide by 2035. This would be far lower than demand.
Public Charging Infrastructure Lags
It is no surprise, then, that public charging infrastructure has a role to play. Telemetry estimates between 11.7 million and 14.3 million EV drivers that own homes will still use public charging by 2035. Another 7.8 million to 8.1 million EV owners that live in multifamily residences will also depend on public stations.
This will require installation of between 523,000 and 586,000 DC fast chargers. This expansion of public charging capacity will also include an additional 1.5 million to 1.6 million level 2 chargers across the country. Both are major undertakings with their own obstacles and challenges. Power companies are already seeing their generation and distribution strained by new data centers and AI workloads. Trying to get those same generation companies to dedicate capacity to a large scale charging site may not be easy.
The Bottom Line
Enthusiasm for electric vehicles and estimates of EVs market share of future vehicle sales in the U.S. may overstate how quickly consumers make the switch. Millions of American homes have the potential to provide charging for electric vehicles, but lack of garage space, high costs of electrical upgrades, and the structural problems of multifamily ownership and occupancy suggest adoption could lag.
Even an extensive rollout of public chargers may not satisfy the demand for EVs in the coming decade. For the moment, it may be more important to clear your garage than the legislative logjam or automaker positioning.
