9 ms·

I'm not sure why you think charging anxiety couldn't have been one of the factors. TFA calls it out as one. Charging is one of the main concerns with ownership

by rurp 3y ago

I'm not sure why you think charging anxiety couldn't have been one of the factors. TFA calls it out as one. Charging is one of the main concerns with ownership and that would be even more of a challenge with a rental car in an unfamiliar area.

czbond 3y ago
I believe charging anxiety was. The base case for car rentals is generally "time bound, busy itinerary" of some sort.... think business trips, holidays, etc. Few want to spend that precious time becoming familiar with that cities charging network if charging is new to them. I recently rented a Mach-E over Christmas in a large Metro, and stayed in a populous suburb. Charging & the states of chargers was no fun and really added a cognitive load. However, I did realize I enjoyed EV's for some point in the future - somewhat curing range anxiety of my normal life routine.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  TBH, I've experienced it where it can go either way. I've rented gas cars and ended up at a hotel with nice L2 stations. The EV would have been easier! :) But I've also rented EVs in metros with decent fast charging, but none at the hotel. It was fun, but charging was a notable downside.
- mcguire 3y ago
  How many hotels have sufficient charging capacity to charge EVs while people sleep? A lot of hotels around here have 110v outlets in their parking lots for fishermen to charge their bass boats but I haven't heard that a similar ethic applies to EVs. :-)
  - wishfish 3y ago
    Here's something purely anecdotal: recently stayed in a motel in very rural Arkansas. In the morning, I noticed a Chevy Bolt (or similar) plugged in with an extension cord. Asked the clerk about it. She said it was a relatively rare situation but they didn't have a problem with someone using their outside outlet. I suppose I can't extrapolate this situation to everyone, but I have a feeling if you provide your own cord, most motels won't have a problem with you charging. Especially since it'll be uncommon. If everyone had EVs, then they might start putting a fee on it.
    - mcguire 3y ago
      Bass fishing is a major part of tourism in NE Alabama, so most hotels have many 110v outlets near the parking lots to support the boats' trolling motor batteries, and I don't believe they charge (ahem) for access. But introducing a lot of new infrastructure would cost.
  - creer 3y ago
    I was surprised during a ride in a friends' Tesla. We needed a few more miles. They let their phone guide them to a convenient pile of superchargers. Plugged in. We checked messages and chatted for a few minutes. Then continued. Remarkably painless. This future is probably not yet evenly distributed around the world. Sure. But fast charging might eventually come to something. Eventually.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    I have never seen a hotel with more than two EV chargers and that was a very high end spot near Seattle. Most hotels, if they have an EV charger at all, will only have one. If there are 100 guests you'd better hope they are all petrol-heads.
gnicholas 3y ago
Absolutely. My local paper's environmental columnist recently rented an EV and chronicled the experience. [1] There were so many compromises involved, largely related to charging/range. For example, she had to walk in the cold (Maine) from her hotel to her car, which she was charging overnight elsewhere. She also had to skip part of her trip due to lack of range. The columnist concludes the sacrifices were worth it, given her dedication to environmentalism. The vast, vast majority of people would not choose her experience to be a little greener. 1: https://www.almanacnews.com/blogs/a-new-shade-of-green/2024/03/24/i-rented-an-ev-in-maine-for-a-few-days-in-march-howd-it-go/ https://www.almanacnews.com/blogs/a-new-shade-of-green/2024/...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DFHippie 3y ago
  My brother lives in Maine and has two electric cars. I have one and travel in Maine a few times a year. It's a particularly bad state for charging. I'm not sure why that is.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I imagine the temperature doesn't help. Compared to CA (where the columnist is from), the average temp is probably 20° colder, which could cut 15% off the range.
    - samatman 3y ago
      This is unlikely to be the central factor, given that Norway, one of the few inhabited places which is colder than Maine, has the highest rate of electric car ownership in the world. That's in spite of the range issue, and is due to the Norwegian government carrot-and-sticking heavily towards electric. Maine has no such incentives, and is sparsely populated, which doesn't play to the strengths of electric cars.
      - 3y ago
achow 3y ago
Right. The key takeaway for me, they being wall street people - customer empathy was missing. 101 of salesmanship - understanding of customers needs, desires and then selling solutions for those. Here their customers were out of town weary travelers wanting to have a hassle free quick ride to a hotel or a meeting; have not used EVs before (perhaps never intend to), now have to focus on a new problem - how to learn a new skill of handling EV, how to plan for charging during their multi day trips.. etc.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  Stealing a recent comment from reddit on someone's Hertz EV experience. It's a Solterra (Subaru's first EV in collaboration with Toyota) which made it even worse than the Teslas, but I think a good illustration of this idea that you can just roll out EVs to rental customers and act like it's the same as a gas car: > Hertz gave me a Subaru Solterra for a one way trip from Temecula to Vegas because it was their last car. Couldn't tell me how to start it or anything because they just got it the day before... and they didn't bother plugging it in so it had 20 miles of range. Couldn't tell me where to charge it so I wasted much of it driving around the mall looking for the charger. > Four hours later I had enough charge to get to Barstow. Or so I thought. Had to charge in Victorville. Then get a hotel room because it was midnight. Put it on a fast charger in the morning and a full charge should have gotten me all the way back. Hit Baker and I knew it wouldn't. > My five hour drive ended up taking 25 hours. > Fuck Hertz. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1bi99tk/hertz_ceo_out_following_electric_car_horror_show/kviyoe9/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1bi99tk/hertz_ceo_out...
  - monknomo 3y ago
    My god, not having enough on site fast chargers for both charging the fleet and reassuring renters that if nothing else they can come back to the airport and top up is really stupid
    - sandworm101 3y ago
      >> My god, not having enough on site fast chargers for both charging the fleet and reassuring renters Take a look at a major airport. They could average a hundred rental cars arriving, with peaks into the hundreds. Even assuming every can arrives at a half-charge, the power requirements would be immense. At 50kwH per car, charging up 100 cars every hour would require, at an absolute minimum, a 5000kw/5mW connection.
jandrese 3y ago
In theory if the people used the in-car travel planning features it shouldn't have been a problem, but if Hertz wasn't telling them about that then you could have a very stressful experience.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > In theory if the people used the in-car travel planning features it shouldn't have been a problem, This is just a different way of saying "If people put in more work this wouldn't be a problem", but you're ignoring the context - people who rent cars are often in a hurry, need transport now and need to get someone now. This all indicates that they are busy, and your suggestion is that they should work harder to get the same result?
  - jandrese 3y ago
    The systems aren't hard to use, quite the opposite, but they can't help if you don't use them. I think if Hertz spent even 5 minutes explaining to people how the in-car navigation worked and emphasizing how important it is this experiment have been a success. The car will work out the charging stops for you, tell you how long you need to be there (hint: not long), and do all of the stressful planning steps automatically. It's not just Tesla either. All major EVs come with route planning. If you have range anxiety you're using it wrong. This isn't even the driver's fault, how can they know about these features if nobody tells them? I don't even fully blame Hertz for this. Tesla should be marketing the route planning nationwide. Show people how life with EVs actually is instead of leaving them in the dark and letting them think that owning an EV means a roll of the dice every time you get behind the wheel where you might not find a friendly plug in time and be stranded on the side with no way to jerrycan more miles.
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      > The systems aren't hard to use, quite the opposite, but they can't help if you don't use them. I'm not claiming that the systems are hard to use, I'm saying that it's an additional friction over ICE cars, in which you don't need to put in extra work to learn a piece of software, you don't need to wait for the rental assistant to explain how it works and you don't need to plan refuelling stops to coincide with rest times. As a renter, I give them my booking number, my drivers license and my credit card, then jump in and head straight to my destination. All the other stuff that the Tesla's required may be easy, but we go from 2 steps (pay and drive) to 5 or more steps. TBH, if Hertz had wanted this to be a success, the biggest thing they could have done was made sure that the cars were always fully charged before the customer drove off. Route-planning is kinda irrelevant when you're doubling the friction required to rent a car.
giantrobot 3y ago
My partner just travelled to middle of nowhere Illinois. At the airport car rental they were trying to offer EVs instead of an ICE. That was not in any way a viable option since the destination town not only wouldn't have charging stations there's no guarantee the car could be charged anywhere. If you buy an EV you hopefully do so knowing full well the vehicle's constraints. You've figured out those constraints aren't a deal breaker for your known use cases. When being offered as a rental most people have no idea what the constraints of the vehicle are nor can they make informed decisions about them. So having anxiety about any of those, including charging, makes complete sense. A rental car should be as flexible as possible, not have a care and feeding schedule like you're buying a Mogwai.
- hinkley 3y ago
  We had someone plug their rental EV into a 15 amp outside circuit on our house on a friday night. We thought it said that it would be charged by 10 am the next day so we just drove them to their rental. Next morning when they showed up at 11 am we discovered that the charger hadn't said 10 am Saturday. No, it said 10 am Monday.
hinkley 3y ago
My friend's friend got an electric vehicle they didn't ask for an it made their entire visit a giant pain because they brought negative energy everywhere with them. I had been planning to get an electric but now I'm looking at PHEVs. And I still need to get the wiring for my house fixed. There's an outlet but it was meant for some early gen electric vehicle and literally nothing uses that plug anymore (and now the wiring is probably not adequate gauge)
- gnicholas 3y ago
  We use 110 to charge our PHEV (which admittedly has a very small battery). I would like to get a PHEV for our next vehicle, but the price premium makes it very unattractive for us. Some vehicles are $12k more for PHEV, and given how little we drive it would never be worth it. It's nice not tanking up often, but the extra cost (and extra car insurance) isn't worth it for us.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  Outlets are standardized and not specific to EVs. If you mean the charge plug, that's different. Assuming you're in the US/Canada or other country with 100-120v service, a standard wall socket is sufficient for many full EV users and plenty enough for a PHEV which has a much smaller battery. Think about how much time your car spends sitting in your driveway/garage...and if you don't get a full charge, so what? The engine kicks in. The wiring gauge is good for a certain current. That affects what sort of plug is installed in the wall, as they're keyed according to current limits. The EVSE can be programmed to not exceed the appropriate current, which is 80% of the breaker's rating. If it was wired for an EV, it's almost certainly not 100-120v but 208 or higher, in which case even if it's a 15A circuit, that's definitely enough for a PHEV and sufficient for charging all but the largest EVs practically overnight. A 208v, 15A circuit is good for 2.5kW. If you get home at 7PM and go to work at 7AM, you'll be able to charge 25kWhr each night, roughly. Average EV efficiency is about .35kWh/mile, so that's sufficient for 70 miles of driving.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    You'll probably have 240V in North America in a residential detached/duplex/row home. It's low/high-rise apartment buildings/condominiums where you'll see 208V.
amluto 3y ago
I drive an EV and I’m still a bit unconvinced about renting one. If my total expected mileage is practical without charging and I expect the car to start adequately charged, fine. It’s like a free tank of gas. If not, I can’t charge at home. Charging at a hotel is a PITA. Charging first thing in the morning in cold weather without heated parking is slooooow even at a Supercharger. And I really don’t want to deal with the utter mess of charger networks and their ridiculous membership cards. And the usual rental model of strongly encouraging customers to return the car with a full tank of gas doesn’t really make sense for EVs.
xenadu02 3y ago
I'm not saying it was no factor whatsoever but if you listen to the Hertz investor call they describe the reason for backtracking and they certainly don't cite charging as the primary reason.

by rurp 3y ago

czbond 3y ago

I believe charging anxiety was. The base case for car rentals is generally "time bound, busy itinerary" of some sort.... think business trips, holidays, etc. Few want to spend that precious time becoming familiar with that cities charging network if charging is new to them. I recently rented a Mach-E over Christmas in a large Metro, and stayed in a populous suburb. Charging & the states of chargers was no fun and really added a cognitive load. However, I did realize I enjoyed EV's for some point in the future - somewhat curing range anxiety of my normal life routine.

_ea1k 3y ago
TBH, I've experienced it where it can go either way. I've rented gas cars and ended up at a hotel with nice L2 stations. The EV would have been easier! :) But I've also rented EVs in metros with decent fast charging, but none at the hotel. It was fun, but charging was a notable downside.
mcguire 3y ago
How many hotels have sufficient charging capacity to charge EVs while people sleep? A lot of hotels around here have 110v outlets in their parking lots for fishermen to charge their bass boats but I haven't heard that a similar ethic applies to EVs. :-)
- wishfish 3y ago
  Here's something purely anecdotal: recently stayed in a motel in very rural Arkansas. In the morning, I noticed a Chevy Bolt (or similar) plugged in with an extension cord. Asked the clerk about it. She said it was a relatively rare situation but they didn't have a problem with someone using their outside outlet. I suppose I can't extrapolate this situation to everyone, but I have a feeling if you provide your own cord, most motels won't have a problem with you charging. Especially since it'll be uncommon. If everyone had EVs, then they might start putting a fee on it.
  - mcguire 3y ago
    Bass fishing is a major part of tourism in NE Alabama, so most hotels have many 110v outlets near the parking lots to support the boats' trolling motor batteries, and I don't believe they charge (ahem) for access. But introducing a lot of new infrastructure would cost.
- creer 3y ago
  I was surprised during a ride in a friends' Tesla. We needed a few more miles. They let their phone guide them to a convenient pile of superchargers. Plugged in. We checked messages and chatted for a few minutes. Then continued. Remarkably painless. This future is probably not yet evenly distributed around the world. Sure. But fast charging might eventually come to something. Eventually.
- brewdad 3y ago
  I have never seen a hotel with more than two EV chargers and that was a very high end spot near Seattle. Most hotels, if they have an EV charger at all, will only have one. If there are 100 guests you'd better hope they are all petrol-heads.

gnicholas 3y ago

Absolutely. My local paper's environmental columnist recently rented an EV and chronicled the experience. [1] There were so many compromises involved, largely related to charging/range. For example, she had to walk in the cold (Maine) from her hotel to her car, which she was charging overnight elsewhere. She also had to skip part of her trip due to lack of range. The columnist concludes the sacrifices were worth it, given her dedication to environmentalism. The vast, vast majority of people would not choose her experience to be a little greener. 1: https://www.almanacnews.com/blogs/a-new-shade-of-green/2024/03/24/i-rented-an-ev-in-maine-for-a-few-days-in-march-howd-it-go/ https://www.almanacnews.com/blogs/a-new-shade-of-green/2024/...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DFHippie 3y ago
My brother lives in Maine and has two electric cars. I have one and travel in Maine a few times a year. It's a particularly bad state for charging. I'm not sure why that is.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I imagine the temperature doesn't help. Compared to CA (where the columnist is from), the average temp is probably 20° colder, which could cut 15% off the range.
  - samatman 3y ago
    This is unlikely to be the central factor, given that Norway, one of the few inhabited places which is colder than Maine, has the highest rate of electric car ownership in the world. That's in spite of the range issue, and is due to the Norwegian government carrot-and-sticking heavily towards electric. Maine has no such incentives, and is sparsely populated, which doesn't play to the strengths of electric cars.
    - 3y ago

achow 3y ago

Right. The key takeaway for me, they being wall street people - customer empathy was missing. 101 of salesmanship - understanding of customers needs, desires and then selling solutions for those. Here their customers were out of town weary travelers wanting to have a hassle free quick ride to a hotel or a meeting; have not used EVs before (perhaps never intend to), now have to focus on a new problem - how to learn a new skill of handling EV, how to plan for charging during their multi day trips.. etc.

wlesieutre 3y ago
Stealing a recent comment from reddit on someone's Hertz EV experience. It's a Solterra (Subaru's first EV in collaboration with Toyota) which made it even worse than the Teslas, but I think a good illustration of this idea that you can just roll out EVs to rental customers and act like it's the same as a gas car: > Hertz gave me a Subaru Solterra for a one way trip from Temecula to Vegas because it was their last car. Couldn't tell me how to start it or anything because they just got it the day before... and they didn't bother plugging it in so it had 20 miles of range. Couldn't tell me where to charge it so I wasted much of it driving around the mall looking for the charger. > Four hours later I had enough charge to get to Barstow. Or so I thought. Had to charge in Victorville. Then get a hotel room because it was midnight. Put it on a fast charger in the morning and a full charge should have gotten me all the way back. Hit Baker and I knew it wouldn't. > My five hour drive ended up taking 25 hours. > Fuck Hertz. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1bi99tk/hertz_ceo_out_following_electric_car_horror_show/kviyoe9/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1bi99tk/hertz_ceo_out...
- monknomo 3y ago
  My god, not having enough on site fast chargers for both charging the fleet and reassuring renters that if nothing else they can come back to the airport and top up is really stupid
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    >> My god, not having enough on site fast chargers for both charging the fleet and reassuring renters Take a look at a major airport. They could average a hundred rental cars arriving, with peaks into the hundreds. Even assuming every can arrives at a half-charge, the power requirements would be immense. At 50kwH per car, charging up 100 cars every hour would require, at an absolute minimum, a 5000kw/5mW connection.

jandrese 3y ago

In theory if the people used the in-car travel planning features it shouldn't have been a problem, but if Hertz wasn't telling them about that then you could have a very stressful experience.

lelanthran 3y ago
> In theory if the people used the in-car travel planning features it shouldn't have been a problem, This is just a different way of saying "If people put in more work this wouldn't be a problem", but you're ignoring the context - people who rent cars are often in a hurry, need transport now and need to get someone now. This all indicates that they are busy, and your suggestion is that they should work harder to get the same result?
- jandrese 3y ago
  The systems aren't hard to use, quite the opposite, but they can't help if you don't use them. I think if Hertz spent even 5 minutes explaining to people how the in-car navigation worked and emphasizing how important it is this experiment have been a success. The car will work out the charging stops for you, tell you how long you need to be there (hint: not long), and do all of the stressful planning steps automatically. It's not just Tesla either. All major EVs come with route planning. If you have range anxiety you're using it wrong. This isn't even the driver's fault, how can they know about these features if nobody tells them? I don't even fully blame Hertz for this. Tesla should be marketing the route planning nationwide. Show people how life with EVs actually is instead of leaving them in the dark and letting them think that owning an EV means a roll of the dice every time you get behind the wheel where you might not find a friendly plug in time and be stranded on the side with no way to jerrycan more miles.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > The systems aren't hard to use, quite the opposite, but they can't help if you don't use them. I'm not claiming that the systems are hard to use, I'm saying that it's an additional friction over ICE cars, in which you don't need to put in extra work to learn a piece of software, you don't need to wait for the rental assistant to explain how it works and you don't need to plan refuelling stops to coincide with rest times. As a renter, I give them my booking number, my drivers license and my credit card, then jump in and head straight to my destination. All the other stuff that the Tesla's required may be easy, but we go from 2 steps (pay and drive) to 5 or more steps. TBH, if Hertz had wanted this to be a success, the biggest thing they could have done was made sure that the cars were always fully charged before the customer drove off. Route-planning is kinda irrelevant when you're doubling the friction required to rent a car.

giantrobot 3y ago

My partner just travelled to middle of nowhere Illinois. At the airport car rental they were trying to offer EVs instead of an ICE. That was not in any way a viable option since the destination town not only wouldn't have charging stations there's no guarantee the car could be charged anywhere. If you buy an EV you hopefully do so knowing full well the vehicle's constraints. You've figured out those constraints aren't a deal breaker for your known use cases. When being offered as a rental most people have no idea what the constraints of the vehicle are nor can they make informed decisions about them. So having anxiety about any of those, including charging, makes complete sense. A rental car should be as flexible as possible, not have a care and feeding schedule like you're buying a Mogwai.

hinkley 3y ago
We had someone plug their rental EV into a 15 amp outside circuit on our house on a friday night. We thought it said that it would be charged by 10 am the next day so we just drove them to their rental. Next morning when they showed up at 11 am we discovered that the charger hadn't said 10 am Saturday. No, it said 10 am Monday.

hinkley 3y ago

My friend's friend got an electric vehicle they didn't ask for an it made their entire visit a giant pain because they brought negative energy everywhere with them. I had been planning to get an electric but now I'm looking at PHEVs. And I still need to get the wiring for my house fixed. There's an outlet but it was meant for some early gen electric vehicle and literally nothing uses that plug anymore (and now the wiring is probably not adequate gauge)

gnicholas 3y ago
We use 110 to charge our PHEV (which admittedly has a very small battery). I would like to get a PHEV for our next vehicle, but the price premium makes it very unattractive for us. Some vehicles are $12k more for PHEV, and given how little we drive it would never be worth it. It's nice not tanking up often, but the extra cost (and extra car insurance) isn't worth it for us.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
Outlets are standardized and not specific to EVs. If you mean the charge plug, that's different. Assuming you're in the US/Canada or other country with 100-120v service, a standard wall socket is sufficient for many full EV users and plenty enough for a PHEV which has a much smaller battery. Think about how much time your car spends sitting in your driveway/garage...and if you don't get a full charge, so what? The engine kicks in. The wiring gauge is good for a certain current. That affects what sort of plug is installed in the wall, as they're keyed according to current limits. The EVSE can be programmed to not exceed the appropriate current, which is 80% of the breaker's rating. If it was wired for an EV, it's almost certainly not 100-120v but 208 or higher, in which case even if it's a 15A circuit, that's definitely enough for a PHEV and sufficient for charging all but the largest EVs practically overnight. A 208v, 15A circuit is good for 2.5kW. If you get home at 7PM and go to work at 7AM, you'll be able to charge 25kWhr each night, roughly. Average EV efficiency is about .35kWh/mile, so that's sufficient for 70 miles of driving.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  You'll probably have 240V in North America in a residential detached/duplex/row home. It's low/high-rise apartment buildings/condominiums where you'll see 208V.

amluto 3y ago

I drive an EV and I’m still a bit unconvinced about renting one. If my total expected mileage is practical without charging and I expect the car to start adequately charged, fine. It’s like a free tank of gas. If not, I can’t charge at home. Charging at a hotel is a PITA. Charging first thing in the morning in cold weather without heated parking is slooooow even at a Supercharger. And I really don’t want to deal with the utter mess of charger networks and their ridiculous membership cards. And the usual rental model of strongly encouraging customers to return the car with a full tank of gas doesn’t really make sense for EVs.

xenadu02 3y ago

I'm not saying it was no factor whatsoever but if you listen to the Hertz investor call they describe the reason for backtracking and they certainly don't cite charging as the primary reason.