I remember the exact moment I stopped believing the hype. It was a Tuesday, 7:43 PM, stuck in Chicag

I remember the exact moment I stopped believing the hype. It was a Tuesday, 7:43 PM, stuck in Chicago’s I-90 construction hell near Austin Boulevard. My Chevy Bolt’s dashboard said I had 42 miles of range left. My apartment was 14 miles away. But I wasn’t worried about getting home. I was worried about the $47.83 I’d just spent at a DC fast charger in a Target parking lot. That was more than I’d ever paid for a full tank in my old Honda Fit. And I was supposed to be saving money.

I’d bought the Bolt in April 2023, right after Illinois doubled its rebate to $4,000. The math in my head was bulletproof. No gas. No oil changes. No smog checks. Just cheap, clean electrons flowing from my wall outlet like a magic money hose. The salesman, a kid named Marcus with a meticulously groomed beard, actually said the words “fuel for less than a dollar a gallon equivalent.” I wanted to believe him. I did believe him. I drove off the lot feeling like I’d outsmarted the entire oil industry.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that magical dollar-a-gallon math. It assumes you have a garage. Or a driveway. Or a dedicated parking spot with a 240-volt outlet that your landlord didn’t install in 1972 and hasn’t touched since. I live in Logan Square, in a three-flat built in 1908. My parking is a detached garage behind the building that smells like my neighbor’s weed and has exactly one standard 120-volt outlet. That’s it. No Level 2 charger. No Tesla Wall Connector. No dream.

So for the first three months, I did the slow bleed. Level 1 charging at 120 volts adds about four miles of range per hour. You do the math on that when you drive 30 miles each way to cover stories in Waukegan or Joliet. I’d plug in at 8 PM, unplug at 7 AM, and get maybe 44 miles of range back. If I drove anywhere after work? I was eating into the next morning’s commute. I started skipping the Loop entirely for lunch meetings. I planned my routes like a logistics manager at a failing trucking company. It was exhausting.

The moment I realized the whole “charging at home is cheap” narrative was a privilege I didn’t have was a Thursday night in July. I’d driven to a story in Naperville—a dealership that swore its EV sales were booming. I got back to Logan Square at 10 PM with 11 miles of range. My garage outlet, as always, was occupied. My neighbor had parked his ancient Toyota Camry right in front of the garage door. Not inside. Just parked there. Blocking me. I sat in my Bolt for ten minutes, air conditioning off to save power, staring at the 11 on the dash. Then I drove to a Supercharger at a Jewel-Osco on Fullerton.

It was 11:17 PM. The lot was half-empty. Three of the four chargers were down, wrapped in yellow caution tape. The one working unit had a piece of dog poop next to it. I plugged in anyway. The screen said $0.43 per kilowatt-hour. I sat there for 33 minutes, scrolling Twitter, watching my phone battery drop, watching my money vanish. The final cost: $23.18. For 140 miles of range. My friend with a Toyota Corolla spends about $32 for a tank that gets him 360 miles. I saved nine bucks and lost 33 minutes of my life in a parking lot that smelled like garbage and regret. Who won?

I started keeping a spreadsheet in August. I track every single charging session. Date. Location. Cost. Miles added. Time spent. I’m a business reporter. I love a spreadsheet. But I hated what it told me. Over the next four months, I spent $613.47 on public charging. That’s an average of $153.37 per month. My old Honda Fit cost me $140 a month in gas. I was paying more to drive an EV. More, plus the anxiety, plus the planning, plus the broken chargers, plus the dog poop.

The cheap charging exists. I know it does. There’s a Level 2 charger at the Chicago Public Library branch on Sacramento that costs $0.12 per kWh. I’ve used it exactly once, on a Saturday when I was already there for a story. It took four hours to add 80 miles. Four hours. I don’t have four hours to sit in a library parking lot on a Saturday. I have laundry. I have a dog. I have a life.

The public charging infrastructure in Chicago is a mess. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not a failure of will. It’s a failure of logistics. The chargers break constantly. The ones that work are often ICEd by pickup trucks. The ones that aren’t ICEd are in weird spots—behind a CVS, next to a dumpster, in a parking garage that charges $8 to enter even if you’re just plugging in. I’ve called three different customer service numbers for broken chargers. Each time, the rep said “we’ll send a technician.” Each time, the charger was still broken two weeks later.

I did the math for my column, but I also did the math for myself. Over 12 months of ownership, I’ve driven about 9,800 miles. Total charging costs: $1,247. Total time spent charging away from home: 87 hours. That’s nearly four full days of my life spent in parking lots, staring at screens, waiting for electrons. My friend with the Corolla spends about $1,260 a year on gas. He fills up in five minutes. He never thinks about it. He never worries if the gas station will have working pumps. He never wonders if someone will block the pump with a Camry.

I’m not saying EVs are a scam. I’m not saying I regret my purchase. I’m saying the cost-savings story is a lie if you don’t own a home with a charger. And even if you do, the math only works if your utility rates are low. Illinois has some of the highest residential electricity rates in the Midwest. My friends in California tell me they pay $0.35 per kWh at home. That’s not cheap. That’s not saving. That’s just shifting the cost from a pump to a plug.

The real savings come if you have solar panels. Or if your employer offers free charging. Or if you live in a city with municipal chargers that cost a dime per hour. I don’t have any of those. I have a garage outlet that delivers a trickle and a wallet that’s lighter than it was with my Honda.

I learned something sitting in that Jewel-Osco parking lot at 11 PM. The EV revolution isn’t a revolution for everyone. It’s a revolution for people with driveways, with garages, with 240-volt outlets, with solar panels, with employers who care, with landlords who upgrade. It’s a revolution for the already comfortable. For the rest of us, it’s a trade. You save a little money, maybe. You spend a lot of time, definitely. You trade the smell of gasoline for the smell of a Target parking lot at midnight.

Would I tell a friend to buy an EV today? I’d ask them one question first: Where do you park at night? If they say “in a garage with a 240-volt outlet,” I’d say go for it. If they say “on the street” or “in a shared lot” or “in a garage built when Taft was president,” I’d tell them to keep their Corolla. Wait a few years. Let the infrastructure catch up. Let the chargers multiply. Let the prices drop. Your wallet will thank you. And so will your Thursday nights.