The EV Industry Has a Charging Problem Nobody Wants to Admit

The EV industry is very good at counting chargers.

How many public charge points? How many rapid chargers? How many highway sites? How many kilowatts? How many plugs per EV?

Those numbers matter, but they hide the problem most drivers actually feel: charging access is uneven, awkward, and often tied to property arrangements the driver does not control.

That is the part nobody wants to admit.

An EV driver does not just need a charger somewhere in the country. They need a place they are allowed to use, at a time that works, near where the car is already parked, with a payment or cost model that does not create arguments.

That is a very different problem from building another public charging site.

It is also why the most important charging gap in the next phase of EV adoption may not be on highways. It may be in the car parks people use every day: apartments, workplaces, hotels, motels, short-stay accommodation, campuses, gyms, retail sites, and shared residential parking.

That is not anti-fast-charging. It is anti-distraction.

Why this matters in New Zealand

New Zealand has made public charging a national priority. The Government has set a target of 10,000 public charge points by 2030, and NZTA has long focused on public fast or rapid charging coverage across state highways. That work is important because confidence matters. People are less likely to buy an EV if they think they will be stranded between towns.

But public confidence and daily convenience are not the same thing.

EECA’s 2025 EV charging research says home charging is still the predominant way BEV drivers charge in New Zealand. EECA’s public charging material also says 97% of EV owners in its 2023 survey charged at home at least some of the time. Public chargers matter, but for many drivers they are the backup, the road trip tool, or the top-up option.

That model works well for people with a driveway, garage, or dedicated private parking space.

It works much less neatly for everyone else.

Those are not edge cases. They are the next adoption barrier.

What the evidence says

The public story is often about network expansion. The adoption story is also about housing, parking, and site control.

• EECA’s 2025 New Zealand EV charging research says home charging is the most common form of charging, while one in five BEV and PHEV drivers are entirely reliant on the public charging network. Those drivers are more likely to be younger, renters, and Auckland-based.
• EECA’s public charging material says public charging is widely used, but daily commutes and short trips around town are rarely the main reason EV drivers use public chargers.
• MBIE’s smart EV charging work says most EV charging happens at home and warns that unmanaged charging can increase peak demand, infrastructure costs, and power bills as EV uptake grows.
• The IEA’s Global EV Outlook 2025 says home charging remains the preferred way to charge when available, but housing type shapes charging access. Apartment-style housing can make private charging harder to install.
• New Zealand’s national public charging work is necessary, but its strongest public language still centres on public charge points, highway coverage, network visibility, and reducing range anxiety.

The reasonable inference is clear: the next charging gap is not only about whether New Zealand has enough public chargers. It is whether enough people have charging access in the ordinary places their cars already sit.

That gap is harder to count. It is also harder to solve.

The missing middle of EV charging

EV charging is usually discussed as if there are two worlds.

On one side, there is the private home charger: simple, convenient, and mostly invisible once installed.

On the other side, there is the public charging network: visible, mapped, funded, counted, and debated.

Between those two worlds is the missing middle.

This missing middle is where EV charging becomes a property problem.

And property problems are slower, messier, and more human than charging maps make them look.

A charger can be technically available and still practically useless if the driver cannot access it. A building can want EV charging and still fail to approve it because nobody trusts the cost recovery model. A workplace can install two impressive chargers and still leave most staff without realistic access. A motel can advertise EV charging and still create friction if guests have to negotiate use at reception.

The problem is not just infrastructure. It is permission, coverage, payment, and operational simplicity.

The industry keeps solving the visible problem

Public charging is visible. It has maps, grants, press releases, utilisation numbers, and ribbon-cutting photos.

The missing middle is less visible. Nobody holds a launch event because an apartment building finally agreed on a fair way to recover electricity costs. Nobody produces a national dashboard for “people who can charge in their allocated parking bay without starting a committee argument.”

So the visible problem keeps absorbing the attention.

That creates a distorted industry conversation.

The first list is important. The second list is where mass adoption gets stuck.

Access beats proximity

One of the industry mistakes is assuming that “nearby” means “usable.”

A public charger near your apartment is not the same as home charging if you have to move your car, wait for a bay, pay public rates, monitor the session, and move the vehicle again later. A charger at a nearby supermarket is not the same as workplace charging if your car sits in an office car park all day. A fast charger ten minutes away is not a solution for a motel guest who parked for the night and expected to leave full in the morning.

Public charging policy usually improves physical proximity. That matters. But the missing middle needs all four forms of access.

This is why “more chargers” is an incomplete answer. A country can increase charger counts and still leave many people with poor daily charging access.

The property owner is becoming part of the energy system

The next phase of charging will pull property owners into infrastructure decisions they did not expect to own.

Apartment committees will have to decide whether charging is a private upgrade, a common-property service, or staged shared infrastructure.

Employers will have to decide whether staff charging is a perk, a paid amenity, or part of their fleet and sustainability planning.

Accommodation operators will have to decide whether EV charging is a paid guest amenity, a recoverable utility, or a baseline expectation.

Retail and destination sites will have to decide whether charging is about dwell time, customer attraction, revenue, or service.

That is a major shift. The old fuel system mostly belonged to fuel retailers. The EV charging system will be distributed across property owners who do not think of themselves as energy infrastructure operators.

This is where the industry needs more honesty. The charger is not the hard part by itself. The hard part is making charging deployable for people whose core business is housing, hospitality, employment, retail, or parking.

What usually solves this

The missing middle needs a different deployment mindset.

It needs charging that is boring in the best possible way: easy to approve, easy to install, easy to explain, easy to pay for, and easy to expand.

That usually means:

• prioritising coverage over a tiny number of high-power bays
• matching charging power to dwell time rather than marketing appeal
• making cost recovery explicit instead of hiding it in common bills
• giving hosts and operators usable records, not just charger hardware
• keeping the driver experience simple enough that charging feels normal
• designing for staged rollout because most sites will not electrify every bay at once

Fast chargers still have a job. Public networks still matter. But they do not remove the need for practical charging at the sites where people already park.

The better question is not “How fast can this charger be?”

It is “How many people can realistically use charging in their ordinary day?”

Where WattSpot fits

WattSpot is focused on the missing middle: long-dwell, shared, and destination parking where charging access is more important than charger spectacle.

That includes apartments, shared residential sites, workplaces, hotels, motels, short-stay accommodation, and other places where cars sit for hours but the site still needs a practical way to manage access, cost recovery, and rollout.

The strategic bet is simple: the future of charging will not be defined only by public networks. It will also be defined by whether ordinary properties can offer charging without turning it into an electrical project, a billing dispute, or a support burden.

The EV industry has spent years making drivers confident they can charge on the road. The next challenge is making them confident they can charge where they actually park.

That is the charging problem worth admitting.

Sources

• EECA EV charging research 2025
• EECA: How New Zealand is electrifying its roads
• MBIE: Supporting the uptake of Smart Electric Vehicle charging in New Zealand
• Ministry of Transport: Supercharging EV Infrastructure
• NZTA: Enabling a nationwide network of public EV charging infrastructure
• IEA Global EV Outlook 2025: Electric vehicle charging