How Does America’s Cheapest EV Hold Up on a Road Trip?

[00:00:03] Welcome to WSJ Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, October 22nd. I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal. Electric vehicles may not be exactly flying out of dealership lots right now, but the tech has come a long way in the last few years, both for the cars themselves and the chargers they need to juice up. So how does America's most affordable EV hold up to a road trip across the southeast U.S.? WSJ Tech columnist Christopher Mims tried it out himself, and he joins us now to tell us what it was like.

[00:00:32] Christopher, so longtime listeners of the WSJ family of podcasts might remember this, but the first time you and I actually ever worked together on a story was back in 2023 on the Future of Everything podcast. And that was when you took a road trip in a Lucid Air Grand Touring, which had one of the longest ranges of any EV on the market at the time. Do you remember what that trip was like?

[00:00:52] Yeah, that trip was magic because the Lucid Air Grand Touring has a range of more than 500 miles, and the head of Lucid was the guy who designed the Tesla Model S. So it is just a magnificent vehicle. It's like a spaceship from the future. It had such an incredible range that I did not end up having to stop to charge. I would just drive all day and then charge it overnight. And on that trip, you were driving from New York City to Montreal and back, right?

[00:01:21] Yeah. And Montreal was an EV charging paradise because tons of street parking there just has chargers sitting right there. It's what people are trying to make happen in New York City specifically now and in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in the U.S. But the car's software for finding chargers was pretty meh at the time. I mean, frankly, the navigation system in it was not that great in general.

[00:01:46] So it felt like the charging infrastructure still had some evolving to do and the car's software and its ability to plot a route for me definitely needed to evolve. So since then, you've turned this road trip column into an annual thing. What's changed over the past three years when it comes to EVs and charging? America's fast charging infrastructure has absolutely exploded.

[00:02:12] So two-ish years ago, there were 40,000 fast charging plugs in the U.S. Today, there are estimated to be twice that number. There are so many of them that I am encountering folks at charging stations who tell me things like, yeah, I just bought this car. I figured if other people can make this work, I'll make it work. And yeah, I work near here or whatever. However, it's becoming more like that gas station level of convenience. And indeed, these chargers are showing up at gas stations.

[00:02:41] I mean, specifically truck stops now are a great place to charge your EV. But Walmart has committed to rolling out hundreds of charging stations. And Tesla has continued to build out its network and to make it available to non-Teslas. Okay. Yeah. That's a pretty big difference from back then. This year, though, for your latest column, you've opted for, let's say, a less fancy car this time around than the Lucid Air. What was the 2027 Chevy Bolt like?

[00:03:10] So just for reference here, you could buy four of these vehicles for the price of one Lucid Air Grand Touring. And the build quality reflects it a little bit. You know, it's what we would now call a compact crossover SUV. It's like a vintage RAV4 in dimensions. But it handles great because it's an electric car with a powerful electric motor and has that nice acceleration and low center of gravity. It has a relatively small battery. It charges relatively slowly. So, you know, in a fast charging EV, you could be out there in 15 minutes.

[00:03:38] And this thing, it's at least a half hour to get it to 80%. And it's an hour to get it to 100%. And the range on the highway then is only going to be just over 200 miles in combined driving conditions. Like where you're mostly driving in the city, it's a lot more. It's 260 or so miles. But it meant that this is a car that could be a great commuter car. It could be great even if you live in the suburbs and you're a super commuter.

[00:04:01] It's not as great at these long-distance road trips as vehicles with much larger batteries and faster charging. But that was the whole point of this trip. It's like, let's take America's cheapest EV, $29,000 delivered, and let's take it through the most unlikely place in America to take it, which is the charging desert that is the Deep South.

[00:04:22] So if you look at states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, they are in the bottom of the rankings for chargers per person. And Mississippi and Louisiana specifically are number 49 and number 50 at the bottom of the rankings. There are Tesla fast chargers. But these states have the fewest number of chargers per person.

[00:04:45] And so in a vehicle with relatively low range, it could potentially be tricky to get through them on a road trip. And, you know, it's not that hard to cross the Rockies or cross the country anymore. But driving through this part of America, that's trickier in an EV. How would you feel about taking a long-distance road trip in an electric vehicle? If you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment. Coming up. So how did Christopher's southern road trip go? That's after the break.

[00:05:26] Welcome back. We've been talking about how much EV charging infrastructure has improved over the past few years. So, Christopher, what were you expecting when you first set out from Nashville? I was hoping that I was not going to have to call a tow truck. But I was expecting that it was going to be fine because, in part, the software in these vehicles is better than ever. So specifically GM, they've taken a lot of flack for not having Apple CarPlay or its Android equivalent in their vehicle.

[00:05:54] But what they have instead is what's called Android Automotive OS. So it's like the car is a smartphone itself rather than being a smartphone accessory. And so when I got the car, I logged into my own Google Maps account. It had my complete search history, which was great because when I was trying to find routes on my phone, I would toggle over to the car and they'd be right there on the car's screen. And it also means that it's deeply integrated with the car's electronics. So the navigation system knows the car's state of charge.

[00:06:24] It knows where chargers are and it can plot a route that'll take the least amount of time with the fewest stops or the least total charging time. Now, obviously, Tesla owners are rolling their eyes. They've had this for years. But the fact that this is coming to non-Teslas is a big deal. So then speaking of the battery, what was the experience actually like then of taking this car through a charging desert? It was totally fine.

[00:06:45] The one disappointment was that because a charger in Vicksburg, Mississippi was broken, I did not end up being able to go through Mississippi. I had to reroute through Shreveport and down to Louisiana, which was disappointing. And it just illustrates the way Mississippi is largely a charging desert. They've gotten $50 million in federal funding to fix that. They just haven't built those chargers yet.

[00:07:10] But from the last fast charging stop in Arkansas to the next one that I could get to east of Jackson, Mississippi, it was just outside the vehicle's range. So in that way, the trip illustrated, I think, my more skeptical reader's point, which is that sometimes you do have to make compromises when you're taking EV on a road trip. And this was one of them. Yeah, but no moments where you were kind of like white knuckling it while watching the battery tick down. That's something to be said for how far the technology and the infrastructures come along.

[00:07:38] Yeah, I think these cars are now, I don't want to say idiot proof because that's pejorative. I mean, look, this technology is unfamiliar to most people, but they've gotten to a point where you can just hand the keys to somebody and be like, look, just do what the car tells you to and they'll be fine. And that really is kind of a breakthrough because before this, you'd have to be like, OK, download this app, download Chargeway or ABRP. And this is how you're going to search for the locations and how you're going to plot your trip. And this is the data you got to put in. And oh, by the way, like watch out for this.

[00:08:08] It was just too much. I have been in the situation where I've handed the keys to my EV to somebody who is a complete newbie. And, you know, it hasn't gone well for them. But the software in the cars has evolved now where they're going to take care of that for you. And that's huge. So going back to that trip from a couple of years ago in the Lucid, how was that experience compared to this one?

[00:08:30] That experience felt scarier because I just didn't know with the same level of confidence that I was going to encounter working fast chargers the way I did on this trip. I mean, I had zero charging problems on this trip. That is the first time that has ever happened to me on any EV road trip. I rolled up. I plugged in the car.

[00:08:57] I did not have to swipe a credit card or download an app or anything because, of course, GM also has this integration where you just plug in and the car is your account. It just charges the credit card you have on file with GM. And chargers weren't broken. They weren't slow. Although it just illustrated how much of having a good or a bad experience with EVs these days is about the charging infrastructure now more than the vehicles.

[00:09:22] The vehicles, even the cheapest EV in America, is more than adequate for daily use and for a road trip. The vehicles are no longer the issue. That was WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by me, Danny Lewis. Jessica Tunkel and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Chris Zinsley is the deputy editor.

[00:09:52] Lital Mollad is our senior director of shows. And Samantha Hennig is the Wall Street Journal's head of multimedia. We'll be back Monday morning with a new episode. Thanks for listening.