It’s been a rough couple of weeks for electric vehicles. Stellantis announced this week that it’s suspending production of its all-electric Fiat 500. Volvo has ditched plans to sell only electric cars by 2030. Late last month, Ford put its plans for an electric three-row SUV on indefinite hold and announced it’d be slashing its E.V. budget to roughly $12 billion. Mercedes and Volkswagen have slow-rolled their electrification plans too.

Automakers say one reason they’re slowing down is that consumers don’t want to buy E.V.s because they worry there isn’t enough charging infrastructure. One recent study found that just four U.S. states—Delaware, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Connecticut—have an “adequate” ratio of E.V.s to E.V. chargers, meaning one charger for every nine or 10 fully electric cars. A survey on California’s E.V. charging network recently found that public chargers there are struggling to pay back capital and operating costs, stymied by the fact that not enough people are using them. The number of E.V. chargers in the U.S. has doubled since Biden took office, but there are still just 192,000 of them.

E.V. sales in the U.S., though, are still rising. In the second........

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