expiredserra | Staff posted Aug 17, 2023 05:10 PM
Item 1 of 3
Item 1 of 3
expiredserra | Staff posted Aug 17, 2023 05:10 PM
Hertz Electric Car Rentals: Reserve 2 or More Days,
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One tip - if you call the number on the back of any Visa credit card you have, they have pre-negotiated a flat rate of $80 for a tow up to 5 miles: https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/...enefit.pdf
The icing on the cake is how they still charged us for the entire rental period and they charged us for roadside assistance. Over $1,000 for 10 miles of driving. Plus the tow truck that ended up costing $200 out of pocket (which was a bargain)
All they offered us was a coupon for a free day on our next rental. Nothing else. Plus it was almost impossible to find an agent who would respond by voice.
* Your best bet is to blast them in tweets and they will finally get back to you and offer you, while nothing worth while unless you rent often.
However, charging at public chargers is about the same price as gas when you compare equivalent vehicles, i.e. F-150 Lightning to F-150 ecoboost. You're paying just as much and getting less convenience, and that's not an SD.
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For one-
Cocoa to Vero is only 64 miles- Seems dubious you're using >40% of your range in 64 miles without towing something?
For another-
AFTER Melbourne you pass multiple other superchargers long before Vero anyway so there's no reason to stop as soon as Melbourne, nor go all the way to Vero, to charge even if the under 10% estimate were true.... Sebastian probably would've been your optimal stop- arriving under 20% charge but above 10%.
And then you'd only need to stop maybe 10 minutes. Which as I say was your other issue.
Two 10 minute charging stops (and again there's plenty of chargers all up and down your route- and they especially get much denser from St Lucie down) would add significantly more total driving range to your car than ONE stop for 1 hour charging to 100% would.
Hertz should certainly try and offer this fundamental bit of education to EV renters though- would've saved you a ton of time it seems.
Maybe Hertz is just renting out lemons?.
it's certainly possible your car had an issue (or maybe your charger did- did they include one with the car and you were using that?) but that's not at all typical.
Even on a normal 120v plug you should get back 3-4 miles per hour of charging... and on a 240v charger (like you'd find at most hotels or public J1772 stations in parking garages) more like 20-30 miles an hour of range.
There's a reason most car companies have adopted the Tesla charging standard at this point--- alternative fast charging networks are notoriously terrible and unreliable.
Yeah some folks have mentioned not getting em full-- that's on Hertz and I agree is annoying. But the bigger problem is the fact you weren't charging correctly (going to 100% each time- which is a huge mistake)
So there's a few problems here.
For one-
Cocoa to Vero is only 64 miles- Seems dubious you're using >40% of your range in 64 miles without towing something?
For another-
AFTER Melbourne you pass multiple other superchargers long before Vero anyway so there's no reason to stop as soon as Melbourne, nor go all the way to Vero, to charge even if the under 10% estimate were true.... Sebastian probably would've been your optimal stop- arriving under 20% charge but above 10%.
And then you'd only need to stop maybe 10 minutes. Which as I say was your other issue.
Two 10 minute charging stops (and again there's plenty of chargers all up and down your route- and they especially get much denser from St Lucie down) would add significantly more total driving range to your car than ONE stop for 1 hour charging to 100% would.
Hertz should certainly try and offer this fundamental bit of education to EV renters though- would've saved you a ton of time it seems.
it's certainly possible your car had an issue (or maybe your charger did- did they include one with the car and you were using that?) but that's not at all typical.
Even on a normal 120v plug you should get back 3-4 miles per hour of charging... and on a 240v charger (like you'd find at most hotels or public J1772 stations in parking garages) more like 20-30 miles an hour of range.
There's a reason most car companies have adopted the Tesla charging standard at this point--- alternative fast charging networks are notoriously terrible and unreliable.
2) Never had to search for charging. It's all built right into the nav of the Tesla. I have to "search" for charging as much as you have to "search" for gas.
3) Congrats, you have a 30 gallon bladder, since you don't take "bio breaks".
Superchargers have their own sourced power- they're not going to charge slower because someone down the block is running his air conditioning.
There WAS a thing on the OLDER versions of superchargers where each pair of chargers shared a source- so the rate did slow some if both were occupied- but still pretty fast.... and the newer superchargers (which is the vast majority of them anymore) don't split power like that anyway.
Superchargers have their own dedicated power- For that matter so does my house. My home car charger doesn't "slow down" if my neighbor takes a hot shower either.
There are a few parts of the country with garbage grid supply that have had brown-outs occasionally, but that's an exception not a rule- and isn't an issue inherent to EVs... further they typically have those during the highest AC demand parts of the day.... which is exactly NOT when people typically charge EVs (those are usually charged overnight when grid demand is low)
But it also doesn't need to since we're not 100% EVs.
The grid can easily support that by the time we get anywhere near close to it though.
The engineering explained guy already debunked the specific FUD you're peddling here a while ago--- citing actual grid capacity, required power for 100% EVs, historical-over-decades rate of grid supply increase, and other counties who've already gone through this with much higher EV rates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfyG6F
Why does anyone still use Hertz?
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That's exactly why so many legacy car makers are switching to Teslas charging standards.
Uptime of superchargers was 99.95% in 2022.
They're carbon-positive compared to gas cars in just months of going on the road, and get ever more so year after year they keep driving.
https://www.tesla.com/support/sus...-recycling
For example Redwood Materials which has recycling partnerships with Panasonic, Ford, Amazon, and Volvo all to recycle these batteries you claimed couldn't be recycled (which again just ain't so)
https://www.autoweek.co
25.1 fires per 100,000 EVs sold
1529.9 fires per 100,000 gasoline cars sold
3474.5 fires per 100,000 hybrid cars sold
I looked at renting one for a Boston to Buffalo(450 miles each way) trip in May. I researched the route ahead of time, and despite the route being nearly all on interstate highways, there were multiple long stretches(30 miles+) of no chargers at all. And some of the chargers were located at hotels, where you needed to be a guest to use them or required significant detours off of the highway. Pun intended, I was actually shocked at how bad it was.
Not to mention the very real potential that some or many of the chargers might be broken or down for maintenance or in use.
Additionally, I was going to do most of my driving at night, I would have had concerns about my safety if I had to recharge at an empty shopping center parking lot for 45 minutes at 1:30 am.
I ended up renting a gas powered Kia that got 40 mpg, so I only used about 30 gallons of gas for 1200 miles. And of course, there were many well lit and staffed rest stops along the interstate that I could easily refuel, use the bathroom, etc even at 2 am and then be back on the road in 15 minutes. Or you could rent a hybrid or plug in hybrid, which can get even better mileage.
With a 250 mile 'range'(which we know is often a best case scenario) and can be much lower in adverse conditions, I probably would have had to recharge 6 times(assuming 200 miles realistically) at 30-45 minutes each(optimistically), going EV seemed like it would have been insane, given the highly fuel efficient ICE alternative that was available.
EVs are fine for commuter cars, especially if you have charging at home and at work. And maybe someday if there is much longer range and the charging infrastructure is much much better. But that might be years.
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ele...?fuel=ELE
With AAA CDP:
$156 pay at counter, $36 daily rate.
$127 prepaid.
With 1 day free coupon
rate jumps to $55/day
$134 for pay at counter.
You seem to be confusing L3 DC fast chargers with L2 local/overnight chargers.
All L3 DC fast chargers (the kind you'd want to use in the middle of travel during a road trip are open to the general public (assuming your car matches the charging network... Superchargers for Teslas for example).
L2 overnight chargers are sometimes public, and sometimes only for things like hotel or air bnb guests.... these are useful if you you can stay at such a hotel without significant inconvenience but they're not really necessary unless you're planning to drive REALLY long distances in a single day and want to save yourself one extra 15 minute stop.
Disclaimer- If you did not rent a Tesla and instead got something like a Bolt with garbage fast charging- ignore all of the rest of this post it will not apply to your situation- yes, nobody should ever rent - or even own- one of those for a road trip involving any more than 200 miles a day of driving.
Unless you're driving the entire 450 miles in a single night you won't need to stop more than once anyway, and if you DO plan to do 450 in one night you can do that in two 10 minute stops.
250 miles of range--- Drive 200 miles and you stop with 50 miles left, for that same 15 minutes as your gas stop was- and you can now drive ANOTHER 200 miles and still have 50 miles of range left.
So if you plan to plug in wherever you're staying when you arrive technically you'd only need one stop- for about 15 minutes- to get you 450 total miles of range...though assuming you want more range AT your destination, and you didn't get a hotel with overnight charging, (and you're doing the whole 450 in one night) you'd just stop a second time for another 10-15 minutes.
Even in the second case that's 30 total minutes of charging one way not the hours of total charging you suggest
BTW, looking at your route- Boston to Buffalo along interstates, So I expect you mean I-90? There's tons of chargers in/around Boston of course, and you pass like 10 of them in the first 100 miles of the trip but no need to stop that early... you get your first "maybe consider stopping" at Lee- about 160 miles down the road from Boston... But with decent weather you're probably good to Guilderland (just about exactly 200 miles from Boston)....
So you stop there for your same 15 minutes you said you do in a gas car and get back on the road... You'll pass at least 3 more supercharger locations before considering stopping a second time (at about 145 miles down the road in Syracuse) or you've got Waterloo at 178 miles, or Victor at almost exactly 200.... Depending which you pick you're only 80 or 100 miles from Buffalo now, so a second 15 minute stop gets you there with PLENTY of range still on the car to drive around the town some... with Cheektowaga (less than 10 miles from central buffalo) having a supercharger location in case you're staying somewhere IN Buffalo you can't plug in at all while there.
BTW regarding the "desolation location" concern... the chargers in Waterloo are at a Casino and the Guilderland one across the street from a Hilton (that you don't need to be staying at to use)
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Plenty of chargers 🔋around LAX no worries about locating one drove the polestar from Santa Monica 🏖️ to Riverside to Santa Ana to Pasedena with power ⚡️to spare
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