The air around electric vehicle chargers has twice the level of dangerous fine particles than regular urban air, a new study found.
Charging up your EV today? Don’t stand too close to it.
The air around electric vehicle chargers fast charging cars had twice the level of dangerous fine particles than regular urban air, a new study found.
Researchers from UCLA measured 50 chargers across the Los Angeles metropolitan area, most of them Tesla Superchargers, and found that they had levels of fine particulate matter between 15 to 20 micrograms per cubic meter.
That’s far higher than the average the typical urban background in L.A. which is 7 to 8 micrograms per cubic meter, and higher even than gas stations, which typically clock in around 12 micrograms per cubic meter, according to the study.
The World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines were exceeded by about half of the chargers in the study.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.Why is this a problem?
Well, aside from breathing in unhealthy air from a much-ballyhooed healthy technology, we also just built thousands of high-speed charging stations all over the United States.
There are 11,400 high-speed charging stations in the country, Bloomberg extrapolated from U.S. Department of energy data, with more than 700 built in the second quarter of 2025 alone and hundreds more planned by 2026.
