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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

Last year Hertz gave me a Chevy Bolt. This was my first EV ever. I thought it’s pretty crazy to let people rent EVs without any training. It took me a long time to figure out how to charge the thing and how to find chargers. And the charger I found was super slow and would have taken hours to fully recharge.

I assume things are better with a Tesla but if somebody reasonably tech savvy like me has problems, I can’t even imagine how difficult it will be for many less tech savvy and less tech interested people I know to deal with an EV.

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A few weeks ago I rented a Model 3 from Hertz in San Diego, and the car didn't come with an SAE J1772 Charging Adapter (this covers most level 2 stations). That's crazy. I was staying primarily at UCSD for cancer treatment, and there are a million level 2 chargers that I couldn't access without the SAE J1772 dongle. The Tesla my wife and I have always has a SAE J1772 dongle in the center console. I complained about the lack of this essential part.

I ran into this. Desk staff said they had initially provided travel chargers but that so many got stolen that they stopped.

Seems to me that this could have been fixed by making them optional and requiring a deposit, but when you read in the article that Hertz had major IT issues it seems safe to assume that they didn’t have the capacity to make such process changes quickly.

Hertz also had absurd policies like bring the EV back 100% charged. Which is basically impossible unless there is a DC fast charger adjacent to the rental car center.

As far as I saw, they required cars to come back 70% charged, or to the same level the car had when it went out.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to find the answer to this on a hypothetical hertz.fr RV rental.

They have a gas policy section, which says "Si vous avez loué un véhicule électrique, veuillez vous reporter à la section Véhicules électriques".

In other words, find and check the electric vehicle section. But they don't have a Véhicules électriques section...

Yes. This was the policy I saw when I considered renting an EV in Phoenix. We were only going to be there for 27 hours and our hotel did not have its Level 2 charger operational yet, so we opted for a gas car instead.

I rented a Bolt from Hertz last December and their policy at the time was:

“Return your EV at the same charge level as pick-up and pay $0. Or return your EV at any level for a $25 Recharge Fee.”

They were pretty lenient about the return charge — it was close to 100% to start and 80% when I returned it, but they didn’t charge me the $25. Even if they had, the EV rental rate was cheap enough that I would’ve still come out ahead vs. renting a gas car.

Our local Ikea rented out CNG vans to unsuspecting customers. And you had to return it with a full tank. That was fun :)

Wow. I used to drive CNG airport shuttles in Seattle, where there were two pumping stations in the entire county (one just off the airport, fortunately).

>> Newbie Tesla drivers who weren’t used to the car’s instantaneous acceleration and immediate braking were running into obstacles or getting rear-ended, sometimes even before they left the rental lot. Hertz’s Teslas got into accidents four times more often than the company’s other vehicles.

That statistic from the article shocked me.

Four times?!

> I thought it’s pretty crazy to let people rent EVs without any training.

They send you a bunch of "Explore your upcoming rental" emails when you rent a tesla, with video tutorials [1]. I've rented plug-in hybrids before and had pretty much the same experience as you, but for a tesla rental I watched the videos and all worked well.

https://www.hertz.com/us/en/vehicles/tesla/faq

My mother is the least tech-savvy person I know and she found it incredibly easy to intuitively use an EV (Volt). She also borrowed a friend's Tesla and had zero issues with it. Perhaps you are not as tech-savvy as you might think?

In fairness, the software is much easier to get up to speed on in the Tesla, especially as it relates to charging.

Often others require messing around with smartphone apps, often with very bad UI.

The ChargePoint app was the main killer. It told me several times that I am ready to charge but the charger wouldn’t unlock. Thankfully after a while a guy came by and told you need to do something in your wallet before it will work. Don’t remember the details.

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