Taking a city car with maybe 60 miles of range on a 240-mile interstate trip sounds like a bad idea, and for the final two miles it was. In a video from Out of Spec BITS, host Lacy drives a 2016 Chevrolet Spark EV from the Baltimore area to a track in North Carolina, a run complicated by one specific quirk: she says the Spark has an interoperability bug that stops it charging at most DC fast chargers, which leaves ChargePoint stations as the dependable option. With a friend filming and navigating, she plans the whole route around those stations. The trip goes better than she expects, right up until a closed highway exit adds a few unplanned miles near the end and the car runs out of charge within sight of the destination. A friend tows the last stretch to the gate, ending an otherwise smooth run on the back of a tow strap.
The Spark EV is a useful reminder that range anxiety is often really charger-access anxiety. The car in the video is nearly a decade old with a small battery, yet the road trip mostly works because the route was planned around chargers that actually talk to it. That is the same logic behind newer EVs adopting the North American Charging Standard and gaining access to wider networks: compatibility, not raw battery size, is what makes a long trip painless. For anyone shopping the used market, where early short-range EVs are now genuinely cheap, the lesson is to check which networks a given car works with before writing off its low range as a dealbreaker. A short-range EV with reliable charging access can do more than its spec sheet suggests, as long as you respect the math on every leg. It is also a reminder that older EVs can carry quirks newer buyers never think about, from charger compatibility to tired batteries, and those quirks are worth researching before money changes hands.
Across the drive, Lacy reports efficiency in the region of 4.7 to 5 miles per kilowatt-hour, strong numbers that helped the small battery stretch further than the dashboard estimate implied. Most of the charging stops, she notes, were at car dealerships, which charged quickly but offered limited amenities and tended to close in the evening, a real consideration for anyone arriving late at night. To squeeze out the final legs she describes easing off the pace and turning the air conditioning off, the kind of hypermiling tricks that make a small battery work. The undoing was not the car or the chargers but a closed exit that added roughly five miles the remaining buffer could not cover. On the return leg she switches to a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 she had just bought used, and reports a relaxed drive at about 3.7 miles per kilowatt-hour through rain, praising the cabin space, the smoother braking and the lane-centring after living with the tiny Spark, while noting the newer car's tech-heavy cabin will not be to every taste.
Bottom line: this is the most honest kind of EV content, the trip that almost goes perfectly and then does not. The Spark EV came out looking far more capable than its range suggests, and the real villain was a row of traffic cones, not the battery. If you are tempted by a cheap, short-range used EV, the video is a good gut check: plan around chargers that work with your specific car, leave a genuine buffer, and do not try to arrive at exactly zero. The margin you skip is the one the road takes back from you, usually at the worst possible moment.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.