I bought a used 2022 Model 3 Long Range with 10,000 miles on it. Four years of covering hospitals and clinics across this state later, the odometer reads over 110,000 and I've been to service twice. The savings are real. So is the reason I still plan my week around where the chargers are.
I did not set out to be an EV person. I set out to stop spending a fortune on gas. My territory is the state of Mississippi — all of it — and a healthcare sales job means the miles are not optional. You go where the accounts are, and in this state the accounts are spread from the Gulf Coast to the Delta to the northeast corner, with a lot of two-lane road in between.
A friend of mine had a 2022 Model 3 Long Range with about 10,000 miles on it. I knew the car and I knew how it had been treated, which is worth more than any listing description. I bought it. That was 100,000 miles ago. The odometer is north of 110,000 now, and it is still the car I get into every Monday morning.
Two. That is the whole list. Two trips to service in 100,000 miles of hard, unglamorous, work-truck-style use — highway speed most of the day, Mississippi summer heat, and a car that is almost never empty and almost never parked for long. Neither visit stranded me and neither one made me question the decision.
For context on what that replaces: a gas car doing the same job would have gone through somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen oil changes, a set or two of brakes, belts, filters, and the assorted maintenance a service advisor finds when a car with an engine in it comes in at 100,000 miles. My brakes are barely worn because the car slows itself down. My maintenance has been tires and cabin filters.
I am not going to tell you the battery is exactly what it was in 2022 — it isn't, and anybody who tells you their high-mileage pack is untouched is selling something. What I will tell you is that the degradation has been gradual and predictable, and it has never once changed how I plan a day.
Here is the part that made this a business decision rather than a hobby. I charge at home overnight, which is where the overwhelming majority of my electricity comes from. At my rate, that works out to roughly three and a half cents a mile. The gas sedan I would otherwise be driving — call it 30 miles per gallon at Mississippi pump prices — runs somewhere close to ten.
| Cost basis | Efficiency | Energy price | Cost per mile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 Model 3 Long Range (home charging) | ~4 mi/kWh | ~$0.14/kWh residential | ~3.5¢ |
| Comparable gas sedan | 30 mpg | ~$2.85/gal | ~9.5¢ |
Spread that six-cent gap over 100,000 miles and you are talking about roughly $6,000 in fuel I did not buy, before you count the oil changes and the brake jobs that never happened. Call the all-in number something like $8,000. On a used car that cost me well under what a new gas sedan would have, that is not a rounding error — that is a meaningful chunk of what the car cost in the first place.
One honest caveat: those numbers are home-charging numbers. When I am on the road and paying public fast-charging rates, my cost per mile can be triple that. Which brings me to the part of this I am less happy about.
I want to be careful here, because the people who hate EVs will take this paragraph and run with it. So let me be precise: the car is not the problem. The charging network in my state is thin, and it is thin in a specific way that matters to someone who works for a living.
Along the interstates, I am mostly fine. I-55, I-20, I-59, I-10 — those corridors have real fast charging, and on those days the car is effortless. The problem is that my job is not an interstate job. My accounts are in county-seat towns and regional hospitals that sit thirty, fifty, seventy miles off the nearest interstate. That is where the map goes empty. And where there is something on the map, it is too often a single low-power unit at a dealership or a municipal building — fine for topping up over lunch, useless when you need 150 miles back in twenty minutes to make an afternoon appointment.
What that means in practice is that I plan around it. I have a mental list of reliable stops. I know which ones have had a stall down for months. I have driven past a closer charger to reach one I trust. That is a manageable amount of friction for someone like me who has done it for four years and has home charging to fall back on. It is a completely unreasonable amount of friction to expect from a driver who is thinking about buying their first EV and lives in Greenwood or Laurel or Corinth.
Mississippi is in line for roughly $50 million in federal NEVI funding over five years, with the standard structure — the state covers most of the cost, the winning bidder covers 20%, and each station has to put down four DC fast chargers at 150 kilowatts apiece. MDOT designated seven alternative fuel corridors back in 2022 to serve as the backbone, and the department has said drivers should start seeing new stations in the 2026 to 2027 window.
That is the right kind of hardware. Four ports at 150 kW is a station you can actually build a trip around, and it is a long way up from most of what exists here today. My ask is not complicated: get it built, and then look past the interstate. The corridor map is the floor, not the ceiling. The towns that would benefit most from a working fast charger are the ones nobody is going to build one in without a reason to.
And once it is in the ground, keep it running. A charger that is down is worse than no charger at all, because a driver planned around it. Uptime is the whole ballgame in a state where the next option might be forty miles away.
One hundred thousand miles of Mississippi in a used electric car, two service visits, and thousands of dollars I did not hand to a gas station. If you drive for a living in this state and you have a place to plug in at home, the math is not close.
But I am the easy case. I had a friend's well-kept car, I had a garage, and I had four years to learn where the chargers are. The next hundred thousand Mississippians are not going to have any of that. What they will have is a map — and right now, that map has too much empty space in the middle of it.