Select Hertz Locations are offering 1 Free Day of Electric Vehicle Rental when you Reserve a Minimum of 2 Rental Days and apply promo code 211174 during booking valid at participating Hertz locations only. Book by and pick up through September 6.
Thanks to Deal Hunter serra for sharing this deal.
Note: 24-hour advance reservation and minimum 2-day rental required.
Reserve for at least two days and pay for one less day. Applies to base rental rate for EVs only. Taxes and fees excluded. Minimum 2-day rental required, twenty-seven (27) day maximum. This offer is available at participating Hertz locations in the U.S. Promotion Code 211174 must be provided at time of reservation or offer is void. Offer has no cash value, and may not be used with other discounts, promotions or special rates. Offer valid for vehicle pickup from now β 9/6/2023 at participating locations. Subject to availability, blackout periods and additional restrictions. Click here for full terms and conditions
This collaborative space allows users to contribute additional information, tips, and insights to enhance the original deal post. Feel free to share your knowledge and help fellow shoppers make informed decisions.
Select Hertz Locations are offering 1 Free Day of Electric Vehicle Rental when you Reserve a Minimum of 2 Rental Days and apply promo code 211174 during booking valid at participating Hertz locations only. Book by and pick up through September 6.
Thanks to Deal Hunter serra for sharing this deal.
Note: 24-hour advance reservation and minimum 2-day rental required.
Reserve for at least two days and pay for one less day. Applies to base rental rate for EVs only. Taxes and fees excluded. Minimum 2-day rental required, twenty-seven (27) day maximum. This offer is available at participating Hertz locations in the U.S. Promotion Code 211174 must be provided at time of reservation or offer is void. Offer has no cash value, and may not be used with other discounts, promotions or special rates. Offer valid for vehicle pickup from now β 9/6/2023 at participating locations. Subject to availability, blackout periods and additional restrictions. Click here for full terms and conditions
Sorry you had to deal with that. Unfortunately, spares are becoming less common in ICE cars as well, so this situation can be hard to avoid.
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
I used them for the first time this summer. We had a tire completely blow out in the first ten miles. Luckily it was just my wife, two kids, and two dogs in a fully packed van. We called and they apologized profusely. They put us in touch with their roadside assistance who said it would be 3.5 hours for a tow. No spare. Thankfully a state trooper pulled over and got us quicker assistance. We got towed back to the airport we rented from, only to find out that they closed and went home with us stranded a few miles away. No new rental available.
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.
Actually the opposite. I think they make a lot of sense if you park in your garage at home with a charger. With my electric rates at home, charging an F-150 lightning would be half the price of fueling my current 2.7L gas F-150. You still have to justify the initial purchase price, but if you drive enough going electric can absolutely make financial sense and you're saving time charging at home vs wasting time at the gas station.
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.
I tried Hertz once. I "reserved" a car, paid $20 to Uber to the location, they had no car to give me. Never again. They actually said "we might have one tomorrow." Are you kidding??
It was a round trip, I took 95, and I was driving around in the places I visited too.
Ok, if you took 95 your claim you had to "hunt" for chargers is nonsensical- there's TONS of superchargers all up and down that section of 95. You can't go more than 30-40 miles without passing one right off the interstate, and near the major cities there's multiple ones within a few miles of each other.
Quote
from mattmag89
:
Hertz gave it to me 70% charged
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)
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from mattmag89
:
, and it was down to 50% by the time I got to 95 in Cocoa (33 miles). By Melbourne the nav said I could either stop to charge or I'd get to the next charger in Vero Beach with less than 10%.
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.
Quote
from mattmag89
:
I tried overnight charging but each morning the car had a "charging slowed due to overheating" message and only added 20-ish miles.
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.
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from ruffrhyno
:
Agreed. When I would stop to charge I would occasionally meet people who were fumbling around trying to figure out how to charge their EV rentals, and it would always be an issue (either battery is almost completely discharged, or they can't figure out the payment process; usually due to the non-Tesla companies).
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.
Sounds like you probably don't believe in EVs as a whole, so having them as rentals is just the cherry on top.
EVs are a scam. They only meet their estimated under ideal conditions (not in the cold or heat where they might not eve charge), public chargers rarely work or work sub-optimally (as seen by studies and real world experience) and they start off as substantially carbon negative due to the manufacturing process when compared to ICE cars. Also keep in mind that batteries currently cannot be recycled and if one catches fire it will burn your house down due to lithium batteries burning without oxygen. All of this makes EV cars at this time just a toy and not ready for prime time.
Ok, if you took 95 your claim you had to "hunt" for chargers is nonsensical- there's TONS of superchargers all up and down that section of 95. You can't go more than 30-40 miles without passing one right off the interstate, and near the major cities there's multiple ones within a few miles of each other.
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.
Even then you need enough power to drive the charging stations. If there is too much draw from other places they will not charge at a fast rate. My power company wants to know if you install a point of presence electric water heater because the grid is not built for it, just like the rest of the country. The fact is that the current electric grid cannot possibly support EVs at every household, even if you could get enough power there are not enough raw materials to make the batteries for the cars.
1) Recharge times are not 45 minutes. We never stopped for more than 15 minutes. 15 minutes always got us another 200 miles of range in the Y. Always, no exceptions.
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".
Never had to search for gas since there was a gas station right next to the condo. Filled up once after about 375 miles (about 4 minutes) and again right before we returned it to the rental after another 300 miles (about three minutes). Point being, we didn't want to spend our vacation charging a car. EVs are supposed to make your life more easy, and they do not.
Even then you need enough power to drive the charging stations
All the ones I mentioned were right off I-95- roughly just as close as a gas station would be to the highway. And since there's a station every 30ish miles on that route (and even closer in some parts) you never have any concern, at all, about needing "enough power to get to the station"
Quote
from nightowl2k2
:
. If there is too much draw from other places they will not charge at a fast rate.
...what?
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.
Quote
from nightowl2k2
:
My power company wants to know if you install a point of presence electric water heater because the grid is not built for it, just like the rest of the country.
Again-- what?
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)
Quote
from nightowl2k2
:
The fact is that the current electric grid cannot possibly support EVs at every household, .
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.
Unlike fossil fuels, which release harmful emissions into the atmosphere that are not recovered for reuse, materials in a Tesla lithium-ion battery are recoverable and recyclable... None of our scrapped lithium-ion batteries go to landfilling, and 100% are recycled.
There are entire companies springing up around the world specifically to provide even more recycling capacity for these batteries, which [B[absolutely can be recycled[/B] for other car makers as well.
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)
Quote
from nightowl2k2
:
and if one catches fire it will burn your house down due to lithium batteries burning without oxygen. All of this makes EV cars at this time just a toy and not ready for prime time.
EVs catch on fire roughly sixty times less often than gasoline cars. And over 100 times less often than hybrids.
I would definitely agree that you would be a complete idiot to rent an EV for a long road trip. There's a reason why these are being discounted so heavily.
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.
Last edited by misterchimpy August 21, 2023 at 10:47 AM.
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
The car has hundreds of miles of range- why would you need them closer than 30 miles apart?
Quote
from misterchimpy
:
. 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.
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.
Quote
from misterchimpy
:
Not to mention the very real potential that some or many of the chargers might be broken or down for maintenance or in use.
Again, this IS a problem with non-Teslas... which is why I'd only ever suggest renting a Tesla, where the entire network has a 99.95% uptime, and there's so many of them even if you were in the 0.05% you'd be fine just going on to the next one.
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.
Quote
from misterchimpy
:
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.
You wouldn't need to stop for 45 minutes multiple times if charging properly (ie you're not charging to 100%, see earlier posts, like, just earlier the same day you posted, for why)
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.
Quote
from misterchimpy
:
I could easily refuel, use the bathroom, etc even at 2 am and then be back on the road in 15 minutes.
So... exactly the same as when I take a trip in my Tesla and stop at a Sheetz do the the same, and the car has plenty of range after those same 15 minutes.
Quote
from misterchimpy
:
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),
Again- that is not remotely true
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)
They are finally recognizing that you will spend one day of your vacation hunting for charging stations and then waiting for your car to charge once you find one (if you find one) .
The nice thing about electric rentals is they can also burn your house down like what happened to my friend when his went up in flames while charging in the garage. Thankfully all were fine besides some smoke inhalation, but their house was destroyed. I'm sure that's really green for the earth having to replace a house, car, and almost die in a fire to save a tank of gas.
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I rented a Polestar 2 π this weekend it's my rental car π of choice but its fugly AF π€£ the hotel I stayed at had a charging π station in front but the stupid tesla drivers hogged π it when there were open tesla chargers around the corner πͺ so I poured sugar π― down their charge port πͺ« that'll show them π€‘
Plenty of chargers πaround LAX no worries about locating one drove the polestar from Santa Monica ποΈ to Riverside to Santa Ana to Pasedena with power β‘οΈto spare
Last edited by SKV4m August 22, 2023 at 12:27 AM.
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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 πaround LAX no worries about locating one drove the polestar from Santa Monica ποΈ to Riverside to Santa Ana to Pasedena with power β‘οΈto spare
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