After more than a year with our 2011 Nissan Leaf, we finally got the opportunity last week to charge it using one of the first public Level 3 quick-chargers installed in Chicago. We purchased our Leaf with a dedicated quick-charge port (then a $700 option, now standard on the SL trim level), but with the exception of an experimental mobile unit from Real Power that visited us last summer, the high-voltage quick chargers that were part of the promise of making life with an electric vehicle easier, failed to appear.
Delays resulted mainly because manufacturers struggled to get the hardware certified and networked to manage billing. It was a day of firsts for us, because this was also the first time we paid to charge an EV publicly. Level 2, or 240-volt, public charging has been free for us until now.