Electric vehicles registered in the US

Here is a thing that happened: between 2011 and 2022, Americans bought electric vehicles and Americans built charging stations in almost perfect synchronisation, as though the nation had suddenly developed a collective instinct for self-consistency. One might expect these to be wildly mismatched—either thousands of lonely charging stations waiting for vehicles that never came, or vehicles clustering hopefully around a barren landscape—but no. The correlation sits at 0.969, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians nervous. It suggests not coincidence but coordination, though probably no one coordinated anything.

The likeliest explanation is wonderfully mundane: both trends followed the same cultural and economic currents, the way driftwood and seaweed wash ashore together without any agreement between them. Tesla's Model S launched in 2012 and became genuinely desirable, which pulled consumer interest forward; simultaneously, policy incentives (tax credits, state mandates) and venture capital flowed toward charging infrastructure. Between 2011 and 2022, EV registrations grew from roughly 17,000 to over 630,000 annually—a 37-fold increase—while charging stations grew from fewer than 5,000 to nearly 50,000. What we're really watching is an entire ecosystem responding to the same economic gravity well, and that ecosystem happened to be oddly well-balanced, perhaps because early adopters and infrastructure planners were reading the same optimistic headlines.

The correlation tells us something true but not what we think it tells us: it's not that cars and chargers speak to each other, but that they both listen to the same invisible orchestra. We wanted to believe the system was being built thoughtfully, perhaps even intelligently, and the numbers seem to support that story. But correlation, as everyone likes to say after they've already been fooled, is not causation. It's just two strangers in a lift going the same direction.