Hertz forced me to take a Kia Niro EV as my rental. "We have no other vehicles left, it is a higher class vehicle than the compact you reserved". Like hell it was! Never again!
I had plans that involved driving 8 hours each way. Electrify America chargers were all broken. Luckily, CircleK chargers "worked", slowly. An hour and 30 min to go from 10% to 90%. Had to charge twice each way. Time I will never get back.
After this experience, I talked to Hertz. There is evidently no way to note "no EV ever" on a reservation. I am avoiding hertz from now on (and dollar/thrifty that they own). Enterprise allows you to note "NO EV" on a rental reservation, and honors it.
Until EVs can charge at every corner and in 3 minutes, no thanks! I have places to be, and those places are not "90 minutes on a deserted CircleK parking lot"
EVs should definitely not be rentals, especially in countries with poor charging infrastructure. The use cases between renting and daily ownership are vastly different and EVs simply don't suit most rental use cases. I see quite a lot of understandable anti-EV comments due to rentals but it's rare to find an EV owner who goes back to ICE. EVs don't need to charge in 3 minutes, they need to charge where you park them, which is easy for owners but very difficult for a short term renter.
Yeap, EVs are great when you can charge at home and your journeys are all short enough to return home each night to recharge.
This is what I do. Love it. Never ever going back to ICE.
Those very few times I have to make longer journeys and need to charge? Have found a few fast chargers on routes I take that I try and use, but its majorly inconvenient and stressful compared to ICE. A big downside.
So great for being our personal car for local journeys. Bad for long journeys.
> Hertz forced me to take a Kia Niro EV as my rental.
> I had plans that involved driving 8 hours each way.
That's a Hertz problem not an EV problem. The car was patently unsuited to your particular needs on that one trip. Daily commuting doesn't involve 16-hour round trips.
You can either use that non-representative experience to reinforce your pre-existing anti-EV ideology. Or reflect on your EV hate rationally.
I think you don't want to see it, but if you were willing to do so, here's the point: each usage is different! Each way a person uses a car has different consequences and implications.
My charging takes less than 1 minute, really. I arrive at home at 4:30, it takes 20 seconds to plug the car and then 20 more seconds to unplug it the next morning.
And what about all the 12 hours between that? Well, I am living my life, I am not charging a car! The car is doing the whole work of charging itself, alone.
That's several orders of magnitude better than going to a gas station.
Pro tip, don’t charge to 90 or 100% on a DC fast charger. There’s a significant slowdown past 80%.
Bummer about the broken EA chargers. PlugShare has been really great for finding working chargers. People leave reviews and notes on how well the chargers are working and tips about using them.
I think once all cars are NACS and can use Tesla stations too the charging situation will be much better.
I deliberately rented a Kia Niro EV on my last work trip for the novelty of driving an electric car since probably 2016. I even insisted when they tried to switch me to another vehicle.
Boy, it sucked. Even with a Type 2 charger at work, and maybe 2 miles between the office and my hotel, charging was a huge hassle. And with an ICE vehicle I can refuel before dropping it back off at the airport in about 5 minutes. It's just not practical to recharge my EV after driving 1.5 hours to catch my flight.
The only other noteworthy experience was making an adjustment in a parking space and having 2 or 3 alarms going off concurrently without any indication of what they meant. (Excluding the proximity sensor, if memory serves.)
I had plans that involved driving 8 hours each way. Electrify America chargers were all broken. Luckily, CircleK chargers "worked", slowly. An hour and 30 min to go from 10% to 90%. Had to charge twice each way. Time I will never get back.
After this experience, I talked to Hertz. There is evidently no way to note "no EV ever" on a reservation. I am avoiding hertz from now on (and dollar/thrifty that they own). Enterprise allows you to note "NO EV" on a rental reservation, and honors it.
Until EVs can charge at every corner and in 3 minutes, no thanks! I have places to be, and those places are not "90 minutes on a deserted CircleK parking lot"