There’s no hunting involved, you go where the nav tells you.
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.
Some states are generally just better about it as well. Nevada, in particular, has pretty excellent charge infrastructure in remote locations.
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.
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.
Gas: I'm driving West across the state of Colorado, I'm on I-70 in the mountains, with 2 other vehicles, they get dramatically longer range than I do. I can see 1-2 miles most of the time. My car tells me it's range, but I have no idea where the upcoming petro stations are, I just know that they're going to be "pretty frequent". So at 50 miles I start looking for a station. I pull off, I might have to wait, but usually no more than a few minutes, usually not. I have to mess around with the credit card reader. It's the better part of $100.
Tesla: I tell the car my destination and it tells me where I'm going to stop to charge and for how long. I pull up, I might have to wait but usually not. I plug in. It's free.
Which one is the ordeal?
Meanwhile, to be fair, you don't need satnav to get to a gas station -- I-70 has signs a mile or two before every exit telling you which gas stations there are, just like the rest of the interstate system. I'd like to see another blue sign with charging stations, and which businesses you can relax in while you charge!
I'm in agreement that I think they are terrible for most rental car needs.
But, back to the point, where's the ordeal in the Tesla experience?
In a very distant past the only worry might've been if I had enough cash currency of the country I was currently in.
Excluding Costco, I’ve waited at a gas station maybe 5 times in 15 years of driving across the US and in the world.
I understand that but you won't get there by expecting it day one. These things take time.
It's amazing to me the Tesla was able to roll out the best and most ubiquitous charging network in the US despite being a newcomer in a field that had absolutely no guarantee of catching on any time soon.
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.
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.
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.)
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1094356_how-to-recharge...
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.
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.
Perceived SEO
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.
Now some will rightly point out that there are faster ways of doing the above like using modules with modular certification, but you need to pay $$$ for this.
Folks don't see UL, PTCRB and carrier approvals as "regulations" because they are not government mandated. However, they are just as detrimental to innovation as anything that is driven by government.
As a developer of technology products, I also see more and more that US customers are terrified of custom hardware, or even anything physical - they just want to create cloud-based software systems that site in a datacenter that they do not own, running on virtual servers. They are often quite happy to give loads of margin over to folks selling and installing off-the-shelf hardware solutions that are often sub-optimal in terms of functionality, just so they can stay away from the scary physical stuff.
Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations. Then you have 17 states that have not yet issued proposals.
The remaining 2.5 billion is allocated for DoE, which will allocate funding based on proposals it receives.
The other half of this is often we do not want. Many things that you think we should want to build are not important to the people in charge, and so they don't do anything. What matters to congress isn't that we build something it is that we use a lot of consultants and union jobs to build it - both those groups donate a lot to campaigns. (I call this corruption - you decide what you think). Note that congress doesn't care care what gets built in the end of it serves a useful purpose, just that we use a lot of consultants and union labor to build it. Blow up the costs by building a massive monument - this looks great at the ribbon cutting so congress loves it never mind that the costs mean we can't build very much.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-s-75-billion-i...
Then there's state regs with some states (like Ohio) already well along before the bill passed.
And you have to plan the network and manufacturers have to ramp up.
We can build it fine, eventually.
Dictatorships perform exceedingly well in executing top-down schemes.
In the lands of the free that is the US and most of the western world, we can pass laws and dangle bags of cash to entice society, but the executive can't do much beyond begging for everyone to please spend the cash before the legislature comes to ask questions.
Meanwhile over in the land of the dictators, if the dictator wants five bajillion chargers by tomorrow then bah gawd you will build five bajillion chargers by tomorrow because you won't exist tomorrow if you don't.
I didn't say this very well, but this is genuinely a well studied area in Political Science.
While I don't want to live under a dictatorship, I'd argue that a dictator will only be as good as the system that put them into power. A huge issue we have today in the US is that our political system is so broken and corrupt that the only people willing to work their way to the top are ones we likely wouldn't want to have power. It may be a democracy of sorts, but if the system is broken the leadership will match regardless of how many/few are in charge.
Building things is easier with cheaper labor, fewer environmental and safety concerns, and fewer property rights, all of which the US does not have anymore.
Autocracy certainly makes it easier to build some types of things like trains, but EV chargers do not require autocratic land appropriation. Hell it'd be pretty easy to sell stores and restaurants on allowing them in their parking lots because customers are likely to come inside and shop or grab a meal while the car is charging. This is why you can very often find chargers in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
People are generally happy with the cost and qualities of their gas vehicles, or hybrid vehicles. If I was buying a car right now, I’d be looking at gas or hybrid too. They are proven to work and maintain value for a couple decades now. I’ll let others beta test EVs for another decade. I certainly would not rent one.
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.