The growth of electric vehicle (EV) sales has slowed in the United States this year, with an estimated 346,309 EVs sold in the third quarter, accounting for nearly 9 percent of the total car sales, according to the latest data released by Cox Automotive, a market research firm.

In 2023, 1.4 million plug-in electric vehicles were sold in the country, more than 9 percent of all car sales that year and an increase of over 50 percent from 2022, according to Argonne National Laboratory, a federally funded research center.

"Some of the slowdown in EV sales this year can be chalked up to drivers who hesitate to trade in their gas-powered cars because of concerns about EV charging infrastructure, which has grown more slowly than EV sales," reported The New York Times on Monday about the development.

Broken chargers have been a problem: one in five ports does not work when motorists pull up, according to recent research led by a Harvard Business School fellow.

In total, over 200,000 public chargers are spread across about 74,000 stations in the United States, but more than a million public chargers will be needed by 2030 to keep up with EV sales, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have estimated.