Christopher Mims took the cheapest electric car in America into the worst place to charge one. The car was a 2027 Chevy Bolt, which starts at $28,995. The route ran from Nashville to New Orleans, through the states with the fewest chargers per person. He charged six times and paid $140.04 for about 927 miles. Along the way he met a pecan farmer who teaches her grandkids to hunt alligators with a shotgun. The car was the easy part.
Readers dared him to do it, he writes in his Keywords column. He’d spent years taking fancy EVs on long trips. This time the car was modest and the route was mean. Mississippi and Louisiana have the fewest EV chargers per person in the country. The Bolt’s official EPA range is 262 miles. At 75 miles an hour on the highway, Mims found it was closer to 200. Once, Google Maps told him the car couldn’t make the next charger. So he rerouted through a town called Hope, Arkansas.
The receipt is the fun part. Four of his six stops were Tesla (TSLA) fast chargers, because General Motors (GM) has a deal to use them and the Bolt has a Tesla-style plug. The bill went straight to the card GM had on file. No app, no swipe. Prices ran from $0.46 a kilowatt-hour, the unit on your power bill, in Jackson, Tennessee, to $0.67 at an Electrify America stop in Alexandria, Louisiana. The cheapest stop was a Rivian charger in Baton Rouge, at $12.63. Add it all up and the trip cost $140.04 in electricity. Divide by 927 miles and that’s about 15 cents a mile.
The charging desert is shrinking
Public fast-charging plugs in the country have passed 80,000, Mims reports, with close to 20,000 more going in every year. New EV sales are down about 40% from last year, partly because the federal tax credits ended. Used EV sales are up 21%, and so are used prices. The car’s software did a lot of the work. Android Automotive, from Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL), runs the dash. Google Maps planned the stops, and the car warmed its battery as each one came near. That cut charging time by about a third. In a Target parking lot, Mims met a traveler from Maine who’d rented an EV by accident in Atlanta. He pulled in with just 6 miles of range to spare. Mims showed him a trip-planning app, and he made it to Dallas.
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This is cash flow (M5), and the number that matters is cost per mile over the whole time you own the car. The sticker is one line on that bill. Fuel is another, and $140.04 for 927 miles is a cheap tank. Then come insurance, tires, repairs, and the big one, what the car is worth when you sell it. Mims says the right EV can be the cheapest car to own, especially used, and the used market agrees with him. Two holdings sit inside this story. Tesla is held at weight in 13 books and Alphabet in 28. Nothing added to either. A road trip doesn’t change the case for either of them.
If a car purchase sits in your plan for the next year or two, do the per-mile math first. Run it on the two or three cars you’d actually buy. This week, check one number. Pull last year’s fuel spending off your card statements and divide it by the miles you drove. That’s your fuel cost per mile today, and it’s the first number any new car has to beat. Nobody shops for an umbrella in the rain.