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Published: August 18, 2026 — An automotive injury law firm picked an unusual way to get press: a "study" claiming New Jersey is the most inconvenient state for electric-car owners. The Law Bear report has been circulating through news feeds, LinkedIn threads, and email newsletters ever since. But when the numbers are checked against official registration data, state charging records, and actual driver behavior, the ranking falls apart. Here's where the anti-EV narrative collides with reality.
The last 18 months have produced a steady stream of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around electric vehicles from the usual sources: oil majors funding slick commercials, conservative think tanks publishing selective "analyses," and a few legacy automakers hedging their bets. Now, smaller operators have joined the game. Law Bear, a personal-injury practice, discovered that an alarming EV headline generates attention — and attention generates client leads.
The pitch arrived as a ready-made story: Law Bear had identified "the most inconvenient states for driving EVs," and New Jersey ranked worst. It's a provocative claim, especially since New Jersey is one of the fastest-growing EV markets in the Northeast. But on closer inspection, the study's numbers don't even match available records.
Let's start with the basic accounting. New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission reported 206,271 battery-electric vehicles among the state's 6,431,666 registered vehicles in 2025. EVs now represent 3.5% of the state's fleet and 11.96% of its new-car sales.
Public charging infrastructure has kept pace. As of August 2026, the state has 1,883 public charging stations with 6,255 ports, which works out to roughly 110 EVs per station and 33 EVs per port. The Law Bear study claimed 74 vehicles per station and 22 per port — a gap that shows just how loose its figures were. But either way, the ratio only looks bad until you apply the same logic to gasoline.
New Jersey has roughly 2,462 gas stations serving about 6.2 million internal-combustion vehicles. That's about 2,500 vehicles competing for each gas station, even before counting pumps. With a typical station hosting eight to twelve dispensers, the per-pump competition for gas ranges from roughly 200 to 300 vehicles. EV drivers, by comparison, face about 33 cars per charging port. The "inconvenient" state's combustion drivers are six to ten times more likely to wait in line.
The ranking's fundamental error is the assumption that EV owners depend on public chargers. Most don't. Data from New Jersey's ChargeUp program shows 13,846 residential charging rebates have been issued, and another 604 rebates have supported multi-unit dwelling systems, adding 1,713 private ports in apartment and condo buildings. These totals don't include units installed without rebates, which constitute a majority of the state's home chargers.
Home charging also changes the economics. Commercial Level 3 fast chargers across New Jersey charge between $0.42 and $0.50 per kWh, while residential rates, especially on time-of-use plans, run about half that. A driver who plugs in overnight in Clifton or Cherry Hill isn't navigating a charger queue. They're paying less per mile than they ever did at the pump.
Law Bear's analysis turns to the Tax Foundation for much of its policy and tax data. That choice deserves scrutiny. Media Bias Fact Check classifies the Tax Foundation as "Right-Center," noting it routinely uses loaded language to advance conservative causes. The Foundation has accepted funding from Koch-affiliated donors, Exxon-Mobil, and other fossil-fuel-linked interests — documented facts absent from Law Bear's report.
None of this is proof that every conclusion is false. It's proof that the incentives behind the study deserve a place in the conversation. When a report's answer conveniently matches its funders' dreams, the question "who paid for the data?" is not pedantic. It's journalism.
The ranking treats a single snapshot as forever. In reality, New Jersey's charging network is expanding rapidly. Federal NEVI funding has begun to produce new DC fast-charger sites along designated alternative fuel corridors, with the first projects coming online in 2025 and 2026. PSE&G's make-ready infrastructure programs are trimming the cost of commercial charger installation, and major private operators are adding high-output stations around shopping centers, travel plazas, and highway stops.
The charging capacity added to New Jersey in the last 18 months exceeds the combined growth of several previous years. None of that appears in a static "inconvenience" ranking.
It would be a mistake to dismiss all EV criticism. Public fast-charger reliability is a genuine problem. Independent audits continue to find broken screens, dead connectors, and payment failures at some networks. Holiday-weekend wait times can run long, and interoperable payment across multiple apps remains clunky. These are real operational frictions worth fixing through federal uptime rules, utility investment, and next-generation hardware.
But operational friction is not the same as strategic failure. Every new technology faces growing pains; the question is whether the pain is being addressed. New Jersey is building, regulating, and subsidizing its way into better charging. That is not the behavior of a state where EV ownership is impossible.
Psychology offers a useful frame for the intensity of anti-EV messaging: the extinction burst. When a behavior abruptly stops yielding rewards, it often flares violently before fading. Something similar is happening in the internal-combustion economy. Battery costs have fallen toward once-unthinkable lows, renewables undercut new gas plants on levelized-cost terms, and Norway's frigid winters and record EV market share prove that cold and "inconvenience" are not the blockers critics pretend they are. NTSB data continues to show battery-electric fires are far rarer per mile traveled than internal-combustion fires.
The surge in anti-EV propaganda reflects a dying business model's final attempts to delay the demolition of its revenue. Every "worst state" list, every cherry-picked statistic, every misleading half-truth is a small anchor thrown into the current of the transition. It doesn't stop the tide; it just briefly makes noise.
New Jersey's EV owners are charging at home, spending less on fuel, and watching infrastructure expand faster than ever. A law firm's self-serving study doesn't change their math — and neither does the wider anti-EV noise machine. The fleets are turning over, the chargers are multiplying, and the era of internal combustion is ending in a tantrum rather than a farewell. In the Garden State, that fact is increasingly hard to ignore.
