We are back from summer vacation and the first task was to return the rental car. I have driven a Tesla Model S since 2018, before the enshittification of Elon Musk. Since Tesla decided, illegally and without provocation, to disable all high-speed charging on my Tesla (a story for another time), it isn’t suitable for road trips. I decided to rent a non-Tesla EV to see what the experience was like.
Not good.
The Kia Niro was a fine car, with most of the same features as the Model S if considerably less luxurious. The rental agency delivered it to me with less than 60% charge, so we had to stop early in our trip to charge. I was using A Better Route Planner (ABRP), which is a necessary app for any EV road trip, but I couldn’t get it to properly integrate with the car and I didn’t have a holder, so had to rely on hybrid navigation using the car’s built-in nav in parallel with ABRP. Our first charger stop took us to a station with three chargers. Two were in use, and the third was broken. Then we realized that the car had navigated to a different charger than ABRP, so we followed ABRP and got to a working charger (though at 80¢/kWh, I wouldn’t exactly recommend it).
The way home was going to require two charging stops. The first went fine. The second was at a very busy gas station with Amazon delivery vans careening through the lot or parked in all the handicapped spaces and several of the EV-charging-only stalls. I pulled into one of the open ones, went through the process of starting charging (different for different brands of chargers; this one required a credit card before plugging in). But when I plugged in it kept saying that I needed to plug in. I unplugged and re-plugged a couple of times. No dice. So I thought I’d quickly move over to the next stall, but the Kia wasn’t having it: “the charge door is open.” So I had to get back out of the car, insert the two hard-to-align plastic caps over the charge socket, and close the door. Move the car 6’ to the left (while being honked at by an Amazon driver who was apparently worried I was going to block his next move) and go through the charging process again. This time it worked. So now we’d charged three times and found two broken chargers.
Back to returning the car. It was at about 14% charge, and I was supposed to return it at 50%. I consulted ABRP. The car rental agency was only about 5 miles away, but ABRP wanted me to travel over 9 miles on notoriously congested roads to get to a charger, then 9 miles back, then go to the agency. That seemed… excessive, particularly because I happened to know of a level 3 fast DC charger less than 2 miles away. I went there instead, only to find that, since the last time I had checked it out, they’d gone to a system where you must download their app to use the charger. So I downloaded the app over mobile. Then it asked that I create an account. What a colossal pain: how could any merchant think that was a good user experience? Having created the account, I asked to charge and was informed by the app that there was no charger at my location… while displaying a map showing my vehicle parked at their charger. Sorry, Volta, but you’ve lost me as a customer for life. If you’re going to force people to use your app, you need to at least try it out once to make sure it works.
Then the car itself was telling me that there was a high-speed charger at a McDonald’s two blocks down the street. It’s an 6-lane street, very busy, and navigating those two blocks was kind of a nightmare. When I got there, however, there was no McDonald’s and no charger. Oh, but there was a McDonald’s on the other side of the almost-freeway. Getting there involved going half a mile down the street, making a U-turn at a traffic light, traveling half a mile back. And there was the charger! With the connector cut off! I was ready to give up and just return the car uncharged, when I spotted another charger in the same lot. I maneuvered over to it, but it was simply dead. Blank screen and unresponsive to any key presses.
I was back in the car when, headed to the rental agency, the car told me I was about to pass another fast charger. What the heck. Then the nav system sent me on a big loop where I ended up back where I was when I started navigating to the charger. I forced out of the loop by just driving in a straight line until the directions changed (I pretty much knew where it was headed anyway), but when I got to the charger, it was (1) in use and (2) wasn’t the fast charger advertised, but a level 2 charger that would have taken four or five hours to charge the car.
I gave up and just returned the car. I’d eat whatever exorbitant rate they mandated for charging the car. The Hertz agent, though, was very friendly and since the car hadn’t been “fully” (80%) charged when I picked it up, he said he wouldn’t charge me for charging. Yay!
At the end of it all, I enjoyed the car but wouldn’t want to rely on it for road trips. The built-in nav system was worse than useless. Using ABRP worked a lot better, but would need some kind of better integration between my phone and the car’s entertainment system. I didn’t put any real effort into making that happen. Even with ABRP, though, the EV charging infrastructure has a long way to go before the experience is as seamless as Tesla’s (until, of course, they make it impossible to fast-charge your car at all… you have been warned).
So, out of a total of 6 attempts at charging, we encountered 3 broken or otherwise unusable chargers. Not a good percentage.
On the island, I’ll be able to drive anywhere and back on a single (100% solar powered!) charge so the lack of fast-charge capability won’t have much of an impact. But if I were buying a car for the mainland, unless I could rely on charging at home and could live with the limited range, I’m afraid I’d have to go back to a petroleum-fueled vehicle — and I’m a hard-core EV fan who’s been driving electric since 2018.
—2p