To me, the issue with renting an electric car is the news stories where they either don’t give you the car fully charged or they expect you to return it fully charged or at the same level of charge as when you receive it.
They should build recharging the car once into the price and only give the customer a fully charged vehicle.
In theory, I would love to try out an electric car and rent a Tesla. When I read the news stories about the hassles, I don’t want to add dealing with charging hassles to my busy trip.
To be fair, that's their model for gasoline as well.
Every car rental company I've used charges you $10 for every missing gallon when you return the car. But most don't actually refill it before they hand it off to the next customer.
Hertz's fees for recharging (if you return with less than 80%) are pretty reasonable in my experience. It's a bit more expensive than using a fast charger, but often worth it for the convenience.
My most recent car rental this month from thrifty at lax:
They definitely have several gas pumps on the premises. And car chargers. You are not getting a car without a full tank.
At the desk you are told to bring the car back filled to the same level or they will indeed charge you $10 a gallon. Alternatively, you can pay some extra fee upfront and not have to worry about bringing it back full. I didn't really pay attention to this offer but I suspect it could have been cheaper than the $50 of gas I had to put in at the end.
They don't assign you a car. You ordered a medium sedan? Those are in so and so section of the lot, head out there and jump into whatever car catches your eye. The keys are on the dash. If it's not full of gas, you hop out and get into the next car over.
I will ding them a bit for two of their shuttle busses driving past me at the airport. In the end I just hopped on an Avis bus without talking to the driver and walked the last few hundred meters from Avis to Thrifty.
I also strongly recommend not getting on a shuttle by terminal 1 at lax. You will sit in traffic in the airport for 30 minutes. Much faster to drag your bags across the road, across the middle of the airport and across the road again to the shuttle stop in terminal 7.
I think the model makes sense for gasoline, because gasoline is a fluctuating in price commodity, so if you had to include it in the price of the rental, the rental company would have profit or lose money based upon what you used and it’s price at the time of rental.
However with electric vehicles, you pay more upfront to have a lower operating cost. Most people purchasing an ev don’t worry about charging infrastructure, because they intend to just charge it in their garage. The rental car company knows how much the electricity will cost to fill up their vehicle as the price doesn’t fluctuate and the cost is way lower than gasoline, and they can easily add some chargers to their locations.
Also, electric vehicle chargers often require you to have an account and download an app and really just aren’t designed to be used by someone renting a car.
I think the business model simply makes way more sense if the rental car company deals with the first and last charge for an EV.
I get the impression that it's actually not that big of a savings compared to a gas vehicle. Charging a Tesla Model 3 can cost anywhere from 50% to 75% of the cost to go the same miles in an efficient gas-powered vehicle, depending on regional electricity pricing. When you factor in increased tire wear on the Tesla, it starts to really cut into the savings on operating costs.
> I think the business model simply makes way more sense if the rental car company deals with the first and last charge for an EV.
Totally agree with you there. I would be pretty pissed if I rented an EV and the battery was significantly less than 100% when I got it, and even more so if they demanded me to return it charged up. Suppose I don't have time to wait for it to charge before catching my flight. That's definitely something the rental place should be taking care of.
I rented gas cars probably hundreds of time at this point and I got car without full tank exactly once. It’s just not a thing. Every rental place has built in gas station and car is cleaned/refilled before every rental.
Yes but filling up gasoline is trivial where as charging an electric car is an infuriating task that has you sitting around waiting potentially 30 minutes for the car to be charged so you can get on with your trip. No patience for that shit after a long flight.
I typically rent a car to go between LA and the bay area. All modern gas cars can make that trip on one tank. An EV can not.
At this point someone usually pipes up with "well you were going to be stopping for an hour somewhere anyway". No I was not. I stopped for less than 5 minutes at a rest stop to pee. And I stopped at a gas station to buy a quarter tank because that's all the room I had. Price seemed right and the milage estimate said I wasn't going to make it without. Turns out I filled up only 3/4 of a tank in San Jose before drop off so that stop wasn't needed after all.
Yeah me and my wife rented an electric car once, and we'll never do it again. Recharging it before returning basically adds another hour to the return process (between the detour and the charge).
At least for now rental cars just don’t work as EV’s economically
the idea of a rental car is a cheap shitty car that I can trash without too much concern. The car goes to shit in a year or two and gets pawned off for nothing. This is fine because the car was the cheapest possible option for its price point anyways. Also using gas is much more convenient than EV charging although it is more expensive but this is offset by the car being cheap
An EV is cheap over the long run through cumulative savings but the purchase price is higher and they have to pass this off to consumers. The car still goes to shit in the same time but this is worse for the environment because the expensive part of the car hasn’t really degraded in value.
Overall the model just doesn’t make sense. EV’s are perfect as a daily driver for those with commutes that allow them to charge at home and gas cars are great for occasions where an EV doesn’t work. Most rental car scenarios don’t make sense for an EV IMO
In my experience the cars seldom go to shit but are usually nearly new and ok models depending on what you rent.
Economically the manufacturers often sell to rental agencies at less than the usual price to the public. This benefits the manufacturers as they get their cars test driven by people who may then buy one, and the agencies as they don't lose much when they sell.
I think EVs may not work as well economically due to depreciating faster over the first year.
It's very dependent on which car and where you are. A Tesla (any model) is best because their charging network is very reliable. And in most major US cities there will be many of them. In cities far from interstate highways, not so much.
Now days in the UK & Europe you can use most of the Tesla superchargers with any car. That will soon be the case in the USA too, especially now that NACS is becoming the charging plug standard.
Opening a supercharger location up so that it can be used by all vehicles is probably just a software switch / config file change in Europe. Tesla doesn't need hundreds of staff to do it!
They should build recharging the car once into the price and only give the customer a fully charged vehicle.
In theory, I would love to try out an electric car and rent a Tesla. When I read the news stories about the hassles, I don’t want to add dealing with charging hassles to my busy trip.