World EV Day: Driver Demand Is Rising.

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World EV Day was celebrated on September 9th with a clear signal: American drivers are opening up to electric vehicles. According to the newly released HERE-SBD EV Index 2026, 53% of US drivers say they’re more open to considering an EV than they were a year ago.

The data tells a nuanced story. US EV market share sits at 5.37% year-to-date, down slightly from 2025. But dig into driver sentiment and the trend line points up: 10% fewer non-EV drivers plan to buy another gas vehicle next time around, 8% more say they’d go electric if price and specs were equal, and 12% now see no barriers at all to EV adoption — double last year’s number.

Charging confidence is doing the heavy lifting

Gas prices still matter — 57% of drivers say fuel costs shape their EV interest, rising to nearly 8 in 10 among current EV owners. But charging itself is becoming the story. Drivers cited improving range and charging speed (35%), charging infrastructure (31%), and charging availability at home or work (29%) as key reasons they’re warming up to EVs. Meanwhile, concerns about charging availability and range dropped 14–15% since last year.

The infrastructure is catching up to the sentiment: the US added 31,600 public charge points over the survey period and grew total charge power 47%, from 14.1 GW to 20.7 GW. Positive perceptions of public charging availability jumped from 28% to 47%, and 60% of drivers now say they’re confident the country can build what’s needed for wider adoption.

Among people who already drive electric, the experience is winning them over: 85% rate public charging coverage as good or better, and 77% say they’d choose an EV again.

What this means if your business hasn’t caught up

Here’s the gap worth paying attention to: consumer confidence in EVs is climbing faster than infrastructure is expanding in a lot of places. That’s a window — and a warning — for businesses, municipalities, and property owners who haven’t added charging yet.

Drivers are telling researchers, in effect, that charging availability at the places they already go — work, retail, banks, apartments, municipal lots — is one of the top reasons they’d make the switch. Every business without charging is a missed touchpoint: lost dwell-time revenue, lost foot traffic to competitors who do have it, and a growing perception gap with customers who now expect it as a baseline amenity, not a bonus.

The states leading the HERE-SBD rankings — Delaware, D.C., New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut — aren’t leading by accident. They combined infrastructure investment with policy support and adoption, and the payoff is now showing up in both charger density and driver sentiment. That’s the model: infrastructure first, and confidence follows.

How Lynkwell and Nayax are closing the confidence gap

This is exactly the trust gap ViaLynk and Nayax are built to close. Reliability and ease of use are what turn a charging station into an amenity people actually use — and come back for.

• ViaLynk software gives property owners and hosts real-time visibility into station status, simple pricing controls, and remote diagnostics that keep ports online — directly addressing the “will it be available and working” concern that still holds some drivers back.
• Nayax’s payment infrastructure removes friction at the point of charge. Backed by a global payments platform trusted to process transactions securely across more than 120 countries — so drivers can pay the way they already trust, wherever they charge.
• Together, they’ve helped add over 2,000 charging ports to the ViaLynk network in the past 12 months — expanding exactly the kind of everyday-location charging (banks, municipalities, multifamily housing, campuses) that this year’s survey shows is driving the shift in consumer confidence.

As HERE’s Chief Product Officer Denise Doyle put it in the report, confidence in EV ownership is increasingly tied to confidence in the charging experience itself. That’s the piece businesses can control — and the piece Lynkwell and Nayax are built to deliver.

The takeaway

Drivers are more ready for electric than the sales numbers alone suggest. The businesses that get ahead of that shift — with reliable, well-supported charging — will be the ones capturing customers, employees, and community goodwill as the transition accelerates. The ones that wait may find themselves explaining, a year from now, why they didn’t.

Ready to add charging that builds confidence, not just capacity? Get started with Lynkwell