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Comment by JasserInicide | Hacker News Reader

Visiting family over the holidays last year, I picked Avis's cheapest grab-bag tier and they gave me a Chevy EUV. Was my first time driving an electric vehicle. The fact that I had to look up what a charging network is, find a charging port near me, download the app for it, enter in my CC information into it (which failed 3 separate times), hook it up to the charging port overnight (only for it not to work), and end up driving back to Avis on literal fumes was un-fucking-believable. This shit should have been as easy as, if not easier, than filling up a car with gasoline. The whole user experience was a complete and utter farce.

Thankfully Avis didn't charge me for fuel; the lady at the desk said when I brought it back "yeah no one knows how to fill them up". After being neutral on EVs, this permanently soured my opinion on them. I will never touch another one as long as I can fight it.

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If you have your own garage, or even driveway with a charger, a Tesla is amazing. And their super charger network on highways is amazing, no logins, apps, credit cards, not even a screen on the device. Just pop it into the car, wait 10 or 15 minutes for 150 miles range then drive to the next one.

It's a shame the rental cars are giving EVs a bad name.

I do really feel your frustration, but at the same time, the network and ease of use of gas refueling has just had so much more time to grow and become ingrained in society. You likely learned how to refuel a car before you could drive. There's been almost a century of gas station franchising and growth and regulations and laws written around them.

All that is shrunk enormously for electric fueling. So yeah it's gonna be inconvenient. I don't see how they can fast forward so many decades, but yeah they def could improve things.

I do really feel your frustration, but at the same time, the network and ease of use of gas refueling has just had so much more time to grow and become ingrained in society.

Irrelevant. If you're taking on the incumbent you better have done your homework and made the experience as frictionless as possible. There's no technological reason recharging an EV has to be as difficult as it is, but companies are completely addicted to building a walled garden around you and selling your data.

I agree that the need for companies to "capture" you as a user, with apps, sign ups, etc. is a lot of unnecessary friction.

But gas stations and gas refueling had the advantage of coming up in a world before that was possible. So BP, Exxon, etc. never built all that stuff and now that they have a product they sell without doing that, they can't wall everyone in. If gas refueling was invented now, they would.

I guess I'm just saying it's a nascent industry with less volume, less usage, and fewer companies and competition. No wonder it's not as smooth as a process with much larger and competitive economy of scale

Why did you accept if you had no clue how to refil?

because of a totally reasonable expectation that if the company is renting you something, it actually works. don't blame the victim here, that's lazy thinking.

That's like renting a manual car thinking how hard can it be after only ever driving automatic.

Sure, it should be easier to charge things, rent a tesla and problem solved, does route planning and no hassle charging at superchargers. Rent a chevy bolt and... yeah... ask the renting company how to charge at least and where they recommend or choose something else.

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