[video] I Drove America’s Cheapest EV Through a Charging Desert I’ve spent a few years torture-testing fancy new electric vehicles on 1,000+ mile journeys to unlikely locations, from mountains to Montréal, to see if they’re suitable for the Great American Road Trip. And they were.

So readers challenged me to do something trickier: take a more modest electric car on the least EV-friendly route I could find.

I took a 2027 Chevy Bolt—America’s most affordable EV—on a trip from Nashville to New Orleans, through several U.S. states with the fewest public EV chargers per person.

EV devotees know that even a few years ago, taking a car with 200-ish miles of range and a fast-charging time of a half-hour or more into unknown territory was a great way to get stuck at a charger for hours, or be stranded on the side of the road. Yet even this trip turned out to be only a little less convenient than it would have been in a gas vehicle.

Even as Americans have pulled back from buying new EVs, the country’s fast-charging infrastructure is growing at a blistering pace. Sales of new EVs may be down about 40% compared with last year, due in part to the expiration of federal tax credits, but the U.S. now has more than 80,000 public fast-charging plugs—and is adding nearly 20,000 a year.

And the EV retreat might prove temporary. High fuel prices are driving Americans to buy EVs—but used, not new. Sales of used EVs are up 21% from a year ago, according to wholesale auto marketplace Manheim, and their prices are up too.

The base model 2027 Chevrolet Bolt is a crossover SUV with modest dimensions—think vintage RAV4—and a starting price to match, $28,995. Not bad considering the average price of a new car in the U.S. is approaching $50,000.

The car GM lent me was slightly nicer than that base model. The two are identical in range and charging speed, but the one I had included GM’s Super Cruise driving-assist feature.

The Bolt would make a good city car, even for long commutes, but it isn’t a highway star. In choosing it for this road trip, I deliberately violated the first rule of EV shopping: Pick one that matches your driving pattern.

Fortunately, the Bolt’s smarter software makes up for its smaller battery. There’s no Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. The car’s infotainment system is built on Google’s Android Automotive OS, which allows the car’s native apps, including Google Maps, to have deeper integration with its electronics and instruments.

Effectively, the Bolt is a smartphone on wheels. When you pick a destination in the Google Maps app running on the car’s infotainment system, it factors in your charging stops—scouting the fewest and fastest options for an optimal ride. It also knew when I was nearing my charging station, so it warmed up its battery for maximum charging speeds. This cut the time spent at charging stops by about a third.

From my starting point in Nashville, Tenn., down to Little Rock, Ark., the Bolt’s nimble handling made for a smooth ride and afforded me time for sightseeing. (Whatever your feelings about Bill Clinton, his presidential library is a nostalgia-inducing paean to the 1990s.) Then I hit my first snag. The Bolt’s range at 75 miles an hour is a lot less than its range when going 60.

So my loaner car’s real-world highway range was closer to 200 miles than its EPA range (which combines city and highway miles) of 262. At the rate I was burning electrons, Google Maps told me the car couldn’t make it across the foreboding charging desert between my last stop in Arkansas and the next available one, east of Jackson, Miss.

So I had to reroute toward Shreveport, La., with a stop in a little town called Hope, Ark.

Mississippi and Louisiana share the dubious distinction of having the fewest EV chargers per person in the U.S. The difference: Louisiana at least has a reasonable distribution of fast chargers along its primary highways. In a Target parking lot in Bossier City, La., I encountered Jeff Cheetham, whose unlikely story illustrates the good and the bad of EVs in America today.

Cheetham had driven out of a car-rental facility in Atlanta with the wrong vehicle, only later realizing it was electric and not gas.

Bad: He knew nothing about EVs. Worse: He was headed all the way to Dallas. He had been white-knuckling it in a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 for about 600 miles before our accidental rendezvous.

He would type “EV chargers near me” into his phone’s web browser, only to discover that the destinations either didn’t have chargers at all, or were Tesla ones incompatible with the Ioniq’s plug. “I had 6 miles of range left when I rolled into the charging station where we met,” Cheetham told me.

“I was praying.”While his harrowing tale is evidence that taking an EV on a road trip still requires more expertise than it should, the fact that he wasn’t calling a tow truck from the highway illustrates how dense America’s EV fast-charging network has become.

I helped Cheetham download the EV road-trip planning app ABRP. (Another good option is Chargeway.) When we spoke again later, he’d gotten all the way to Dallas without further issues.

From Shreveport to New Orleans, the most notable thing that happened was meeting a pecan farmer who told me she taught her grandchildren to hunt alligators with a shotgun.

In other words, the fact that I was driving an EV receded to the background. I’d mostly stopped at Tesla fast chargers: GM has deals with Tesla and other network operators, and the Bolt has a Tesla-style plug. You don’t have to download an app or even swipe a credit card—the session is charged to whatever card GM has on file for you.

At the one stop where I had to use a plug adapter, everything still worked fine. At another stop, operated by Rivian, I had to use my credit card, but it was hardly an inconvenience.

Owning an EV and using it as you would a gas vehicle is now mundane, though you might have to learn a few new things, as my colleague Dawn Gilbertson discovered with her recent rental-car travails.

Since the right EVs can actually be the most affordable cars overall, shoppers whose budgets are squeezed from every direction by inflation might consider them, especially used ones.

Even Cheetham, who lives in Maine and owns a hybrid vehicle—and who described the first half of his EV road trip as a “baptism by fire”—agrees. “After my trip,” he told me, “I would consider an EV in the future.”