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It's weird to me that you have to get 60% of the way through the article before it unveils the seemingly obvious problem with Teslas, or really any EVs, as rent

It's weird to me that you have to get 60% of the way through the article before it unveils the seemingly obvious problem with Teslas, or really any EVs, as rental cars...charging. One of the major appeals of an EV is that you can charge it at home, a benefit that you don't have when you're traveling. And for now at least, hunting down a gas station in an unfamiliar area is easier and more comfortable for most people than hunting down a charging spot.

pornel 3y ago
That is not true for Tesla which automatically routes via charging stations when necessary. Tesla has an exceptionally good implementation that even re-routes drivers when chargers are busy, and they have top notch reliability. There’s no hunting involved, you go where the nav tells you.
- hmottestad 3y ago
  In Norway we have more chargers in the big cities and fewer out in the country side or up in the mountains. This means that if you rented an electric car for your Easter holidays and drove up to the mountains like a lot of other people do then you would be routed to a charger with 20 cars in line to charge in front of you.
- gnfargbl 3y ago
  ...and also means that (a) your battery will be heated ready for a fast charge when you arrive, (b) the charger will likely actually be in operation, and (c) you can start charging your car as soon as you plug in without messing around with apps or cards. Here in the UK at least, you still don't reliably get (b) or (c) with non-Tesla chargers. Though that is seemingly starting to change.
- alibarber 3y ago
  But it still takes time, more so than a petrol car - and when you rent a car, that's exactly what you are paying for. It's fine if that time is while you are asleep, or at your destination - but the last thing I wanted to do when returning the car before a flight would be to wait for ~30 mins for the thing to charge up, no matter where the app would direct me to. Logically you'd have a supercharger at the car rental depot to try and relieve this problem, but alas, the last time I was renting a car, and was considering an electric one from Hertz, this was not an option.
  - inciampati 3y ago
    One fun thing about returning the car less than fully charged is that the cost of recharge is just labor. I think they billed me $15-25 for it when I left a car without fully charging it.
- rainsford 3y ago
  It's not so much that chargers are hard to find, whether Tesla or otherwise, it's that they're less common and may or may not be convenient to where you're staying or where you're driving while you're on your trip. If I was going to travel somewhere and rent an EV, I'd at least look on Google maps first to see where the chargers were, something I've never felt the need to do when renting a gas car. This isn't an insurmountable problem, but most people don't like any additional uncertainty when traveling and that extra little bit of friction is probably enough to make travelers want gas powered cars. But I can also see that changing over time as more chargers come on line and especially if hotels start becoming reliable charging destinations. If I could rent an EV and charge at my hotel, that's way more convenient than looking for a gas station.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    When I road trip with my EV, I prioritize hotels with chargers. While it's getting better, there really is no guarantee a hotel has a charger or that it's functional.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      I travel a fair amount to mid-sized and smaller towns in the midwest. I've never seen an EV charger at a hotel. And in larger cities, hotel parking is often by valet.
      - cogman10 3y ago
        I'm in the West and it's surprisingly easy to find hotels with chargers. Granted, they tend to be hotels like the Hilton or Marriott. Some states are generally just better about it as well. Nevada, in particular, has pretty excellent charge infrastructure in remote locations.
    - gambiting 3y ago
      Or that even if it has a charger and it is functional that it won't be already in use or blocked by a regular car. I've had all of those happen before and it really is a crappy idea to rely on chargers in hotels. The only one this has worked at really well was a very posh hotel in Yorkshire that had a valet, I asked if they can charge my car and they did, the car was fully charged the following morning when they brought it out - but that's a place where the entire charging situation is managed by the hotel, so they knew how to do this and I didn't have to worry about it. I guess once you throw enough money at a problem it's "easy".
- jostmey 3y ago
  I’m guessing the problem here is that Hertz didn’t have chargers. I rented and EV was allowed to return the car with 10% battery. The rental, I assume, had a charger on site. It was a super great experience. I would not use hertz if I had to charge the car upon return, and I say this is a Tesla owner knowing how the charging navigation works
- linsomniac 3y ago
  >Tesla which automatically routes via charging stations That's only true in certain situations: longer trips with superchargers. If you are renting a Tesla for a trip across the country, you're probably golden. If you're renting it for bopping around a city, it's not going to work as you propose. Even if there's a convenient Supercharger, you're likely to be doing enough short trips that you never trigger it to hit a supercharger. On longer trips though: the Supercharger experience has been exceptional. For reference: I've had a Tesla since 2016. Just last weekend I was in "the big city" coming home, and turned on navigation and it told me "You don't have enough charge to make it", and I had to do "navigate to supercharger" instead.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    I don’t want an exceptional experience recharging a car. I want a mundane experience. Just like a gas station is.
    - brnt 3y ago
      Whenever EV drivers describe their 'charging experiences', all I hear is ordeals, whether they think it was positive or negative. It could be so simple: side payment card and done, with the only worry being the power output. (Still a worry that gasoline doesn't have, but OK, I understand that that's a fact of this infrastructure.) I'm not going to be interested until I am not required to install random proprietary apps on my phone to charge, but I can just use my payment card.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        So much this. Requiring an app (be it on a phone or on the car) to use a charger instead of just accepting a credit/debit card is a huge problem.
      - rpmisms 3y ago
        And that's Tesla. I don't even have to use a payment card, I just pull up and plug in. No drama, no fuss.
      - 3y ago
- blinding-streak 3y ago
  Gas stations are ubiquitous. Charging stations are not. You don't need to use any brain power to fill up a gas tank. I've never driven an EV before. When I'm on vacation or business trip, not sure I'd be in the mindset of learning how to find a charging station and charging a car for the first time in my life.
  - dagw 3y ago
    learning how to find a charging station and charging a car I'm traveling to a foreign country and renting a car in a few weeks and this is the main reason I don't want to rent an EV. I know I can work out how gas stations work there, I have no idea if can work out how to charge a car (Do I need an app? will that app work on a foreign phone? Do I need a local address/credit card to create an account with that app etc. etc.)
  - adolph 3y ago
    No problem, just put a cheap gas generator in the back seat: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1094356_how-to-recharge-any-electric-car-anywhere-any-time-video https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1094356_how-to-recharge...
- bluGill 3y ago
  If you are using Tesla's map. If you have paper directions because GPS doesn't get you there (happens all too often to some destinations) you won't have that. If you have already made the trip 3 times this week (common on a business trip) you know the route and may not use GPS anymore. Gas stations are all over. I have high confidence in most places that when I notice the gas gauge is getting low I will see a gas station in about 10 minutes without a any detours. By contrast EV chargers exist but you will not see every 10 minutes no matter where you go.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  I like to use nav as little as I possibly can. On road trips I usually look at the route once in the morning, then turn it off and don't look at it again the whole day. Feeling tethered to the nav sounds like a total drag.
- mrgoldenbrown 3y ago
  If you own a Tesla you might know that and even trust it. As a potential renter, I don't know that and will still need to make sure there are chargers near where I am headed.
api 3y ago
There was a giant federal subsidy for charging infrastructure in the infrastructure bill that passed a few years ago. I wonder how that's going... https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-chargers-billions-00129996 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger... A few months old, but I doubt that much has changed. I think I heard a few came online, so that's over $1B per charger. Maybe they are made out of solid gold and sculpted by hand. The problem as usual is that we can't build things anymore. This is a civilization scale existential risk problem at this point. It's not just EV chargers. I wonder how many decades (plural) the Baltimore bridge will take to replace? Edit: I still don't fully understand why we can't build things anymore. It's tempting to say regulation but the EU has a lot more regulation than we do and they at least seem capable of building things when they feel like it. Neither China nor Russia are paragons of free market liberalism, and they are able to build things. India is known for batshit crazy levels of bureaucracy and they can build things. We have some private companies that can execute, of course, but overall our society seems to excel at rent extraction and delaying things for more rent extraction.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    What you're describing is misaligned incentives, not a fundamental and unique failure of a society. The question is why our incentives are setup such that greed, exploitation, etc. are favored over other traits. Of course we will always have some level of people doing what they think is right even if it goes against the incentives in place. A system can't be stable when it depends on that though, if we want society acting less greedy we'll only get there by changing the game rather than being angry that people are figuring out the rules already set and trying to win.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- 3y ago
beastman82 3y ago
Have you read a recipe on the Internet? The first half is all filler. Not sure why but it's a plague
- rainsford 3y ago
  Recipe blogs were the first thing I thought of! At least most of those have a link at the top to jump right to the recipe.
- vlan0 3y ago
  >Not sure why but it's a plague Perceived SEO
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    true-ish, but also because lots of scrolling means you can throw tons of ads before you reach actual recipe measurements
- rchowe 3y ago
  Recipes aren't copyrightable, so websites add some filler that is copyrightable to the start.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
    So just copy the part that is without copyright somewhere else.
  - yowzadave 3y ago
    Why would anyone want to steal the filler? I had assumed people did this for some inscrutable SEO reason
    - ghaff 3y ago
      A barebones recipe is a complete commodity on the Internet and aside from maybe some ratings you have no idea if you should make it or not. The life history on some sites can definitely go too far but mostly I appreciate some of the backstory about why they made certain choices in a recipe and what else they tried.
rekoil 3y ago
Yeah, what they needed was for there to be enough chargers at every conceivable location their customers might stay the night at, otherwise it's just a nuisance to the customer. If all hotels had as many charging spots as they did hotel rooms then no issue, but as soon as they don't then customers end up needing to spend a bunch of time at charging stations unnecessarily. That might still be a problem if they're driving farther than half the range of the EVs, but it's extra troublesome if they can't even get a full charge overnight, or if they're picking the vehicles up not fully charged.

pornel 3y ago

That is not true for Tesla which automatically routes via charging stations when necessary. Tesla has an exceptionally good implementation that even re-routes drivers when chargers are busy, and they have top notch reliability. There’s no hunting involved, you go where the nav tells you.

hmottestad 3y ago
In Norway we have more chargers in the big cities and fewer out in the country side or up in the mountains. This means that if you rented an electric car for your Easter holidays and drove up to the mountains like a lot of other people do then you would be routed to a charger with 20 cars in line to charge in front of you.
gnfargbl 3y ago
...and also means that (a) your battery will be heated ready for a fast charge when you arrive, (b) the charger will likely actually be in operation, and (c) you can start charging your car as soon as you plug in without messing around with apps or cards. Here in the UK at least, you still don't reliably get (b) or (c) with non-Tesla chargers. Though that is seemingly starting to change.
alibarber 3y ago
But it still takes time, more so than a petrol car - and when you rent a car, that's exactly what you are paying for. It's fine if that time is while you are asleep, or at your destination - but the last thing I wanted to do when returning the car before a flight would be to wait for ~30 mins for the thing to charge up, no matter where the app would direct me to. Logically you'd have a supercharger at the car rental depot to try and relieve this problem, but alas, the last time I was renting a car, and was considering an electric one from Hertz, this was not an option.
- inciampati 3y ago
  One fun thing about returning the car less than fully charged is that the cost of recharge is just labor. I think they billed me $15-25 for it when I left a car without fully charging it.
rainsford 3y ago
It's not so much that chargers are hard to find, whether Tesla or otherwise, it's that they're less common and may or may not be convenient to where you're staying or where you're driving while you're on your trip. If I was going to travel somewhere and rent an EV, I'd at least look on Google maps first to see where the chargers were, something I've never felt the need to do when renting a gas car. This isn't an insurmountable problem, but most people don't like any additional uncertainty when traveling and that extra little bit of friction is probably enough to make travelers want gas powered cars. But I can also see that changing over time as more chargers come on line and especially if hotels start becoming reliable charging destinations. If I could rent an EV and charge at my hotel, that's way more convenient than looking for a gas station.
- cogman10 3y ago
  When I road trip with my EV, I prioritize hotels with chargers. While it's getting better, there really is no guarantee a hotel has a charger or that it's functional.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    I travel a fair amount to mid-sized and smaller towns in the midwest. I've never seen an EV charger at a hotel. And in larger cities, hotel parking is often by valet.
    - cogman10 3y ago
      I'm in the West and it's surprisingly easy to find hotels with chargers. Granted, they tend to be hotels like the Hilton or Marriott. Some states are generally just better about it as well. Nevada, in particular, has pretty excellent charge infrastructure in remote locations.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    Or that even if it has a charger and it is functional that it won't be already in use or blocked by a regular car. I've had all of those happen before and it really is a crappy idea to rely on chargers in hotels. The only one this has worked at really well was a very posh hotel in Yorkshire that had a valet, I asked if they can charge my car and they did, the car was fully charged the following morning when they brought it out - but that's a place where the entire charging situation is managed by the hotel, so they knew how to do this and I didn't have to worry about it. I guess once you throw enough money at a problem it's "easy".
jostmey 3y ago
I’m guessing the problem here is that Hertz didn’t have chargers. I rented and EV was allowed to return the car with 10% battery. The rental, I assume, had a charger on site. It was a super great experience. I would not use hertz if I had to charge the car upon return, and I say this is a Tesla owner knowing how the charging navigation works
linsomniac 3y ago
>Tesla which automatically routes via charging stations That's only true in certain situations: longer trips with superchargers. If you are renting a Tesla for a trip across the country, you're probably golden. If you're renting it for bopping around a city, it's not going to work as you propose. Even if there's a convenient Supercharger, you're likely to be doing enough short trips that you never trigger it to hit a supercharger. On longer trips though: the Supercharger experience has been exceptional. For reference: I've had a Tesla since 2016. Just last weekend I was in "the big city" coming home, and turned on navigation and it told me "You don't have enough charge to make it", and I had to do "navigate to supercharger" instead.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  I don’t want an exceptional experience recharging a car. I want a mundane experience. Just like a gas station is.
  - brnt 3y ago
    Whenever EV drivers describe their 'charging experiences', all I hear is ordeals, whether they think it was positive or negative. It could be so simple: side payment card and done, with the only worry being the power output. (Still a worry that gasoline doesn't have, but OK, I understand that that's a fact of this infrastructure.) I'm not going to be interested until I am not required to install random proprietary apps on my phone to charge, but I can just use my payment card.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      So much this. Requiring an app (be it on a phone or on the car) to use a charger instead of just accepting a credit/debit card is a huge problem.
    - rpmisms 3y ago
      And that's Tesla. I don't even have to use a payment card, I just pull up and plug in. No drama, no fuss.
    - 3y ago
blinding-streak 3y ago
Gas stations are ubiquitous. Charging stations are not. You don't need to use any brain power to fill up a gas tank. I've never driven an EV before. When I'm on vacation or business trip, not sure I'd be in the mindset of learning how to find a charging station and charging a car for the first time in my life.
- dagw 3y ago
  learning how to find a charging station and charging a car I'm traveling to a foreign country and renting a car in a few weeks and this is the main reason I don't want to rent an EV. I know I can work out how gas stations work there, I have no idea if can work out how to charge a car (Do I need an app? will that app work on a foreign phone? Do I need a local address/credit card to create an account with that app etc. etc.)
- adolph 3y ago
  No problem, just put a cheap gas generator in the back seat: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1094356_how-to-recharge-any-electric-car-anywhere-any-time-video https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1094356_how-to-recharge...
bluGill 3y ago
If you are using Tesla's map. If you have paper directions because GPS doesn't get you there (happens all too often to some destinations) you won't have that. If you have already made the trip 3 times this week (common on a business trip) you know the route and may not use GPS anymore. Gas stations are all over. I have high confidence in most places that when I notice the gas gauge is getting low I will see a gas station in about 10 minutes without a any detours. By contrast EV chargers exist but you will not see every 10 minutes no matter where you go.
lupusreal 3y ago
I like to use nav as little as I possibly can. On road trips I usually look at the route once in the morning, then turn it off and don't look at it again the whole day. Feeling tethered to the nav sounds like a total drag.
mrgoldenbrown 3y ago
If you own a Tesla you might know that and even trust it. As a potential renter, I don't know that and will still need to make sure there are chargers near where I am headed.

api 3y ago

There was a giant federal subsidy for charging infrastructure in the infrastructure bill that passed a few years ago. I wonder how that's going... https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-chargers-billions-00129996 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger... A few months old, but I doubt that much has changed. I think I heard a few came online, so that's over $1B per charger. Maybe they are made out of solid gold and sculpted by hand. The problem as usual is that we can't build things anymore. This is a civilization scale existential risk problem at this point. It's not just EV chargers. I wonder how many decades (plural) the Baltimore bridge will take to replace? Edit: I still don't fully understand why we can't build things anymore. It's tempting to say regulation but the EU has a lot more regulation than we do and they at least seem capable of building things when they feel like it. Neither China nor Russia are paragons of free market liberalism, and they are able to build things. India is known for batshit crazy levels of bureaucracy and they can build things. We have some private companies that can execute, of course, but overall our society seems to excel at rent extraction and delaying things for more rent extraction.

kevingadd 3y ago
[flagged]
- _heimdall 3y ago
  What you're describing is misaligned incentives, not a fundamental and unique failure of a society. The question is why our incentives are setup such that greed, exploitation, etc. are favored over other traits. Of course we will always have some level of people doing what they think is right even if it goes against the incentives in place. A system can't be stable when it depends on that though, if we want society acting less greedy we'll only get there by changing the game rather than being angry that people are figuring out the rules already set and trying to win.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
3y ago

beastman82 3y ago

Have you read a recipe on the Internet? The first half is all filler. Not sure why but it's a plague

rainsford 3y ago
Recipe blogs were the first thing I thought of! At least most of those have a link at the top to jump right to the recipe.
vlan0 3y ago
>Not sure why but it's a plague Perceived SEO
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  true-ish, but also because lots of scrolling means you can throw tons of ads before you reach actual recipe measurements
rchowe 3y ago
Recipes aren't copyrightable, so websites add some filler that is copyrightable to the start.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
  So just copy the part that is without copyright somewhere else.
- yowzadave 3y ago
  Why would anyone want to steal the filler? I had assumed people did this for some inscrutable SEO reason
  - ghaff 3y ago
    A barebones recipe is a complete commodity on the Internet and aside from maybe some ratings you have no idea if you should make it or not. The life history on some sites can definitely go too far but mostly I appreciate some of the backstory about why they made certain choices in a recipe and what else they tried.

rekoil 3y ago

Yeah, what they needed was for there to be enough chargers at every conceivable location their customers might stay the night at, otherwise it's just a nuisance to the customer. If all hotels had as many charging spots as they did hotel rooms then no issue, but as soon as they don't then customers end up needing to spend a bunch of time at charging stations unnecessarily. That might still be a problem if they're driving farther than half the range of the EVs, but it's extra troublesome if they can't even get a full charge overnight, or if they're picking the vehicles up not fully charged.