{W} eary from a 5 a.m. flight, I made my way to Green International Airport’s rental-car counter to pick up a vehicle. It was my first time in Rhode Island, and already the lack of coffee and long line for a car were making me cranky.
While in line I overheard customers complaining that Dollar Car Rental, owned by the Hertz Corporation, was understocked and overbooked. I had reserved the “manager’s special” online, as it was both the cheapest and most available option, by a long shot. “You’re lucky,” the man at the counter said when it was finally my turn. “Today’s manager’s special is an electric vehicle!”
Having followed Andrew Stuttaford’s coverage of rental-car companies and their attempt to force EVs down the American consumer’s throat, I knew what this meant: Rhode Island visitors weren’t clamoring to rent the things, so the company was pawning them off to customers who made the mistake of trying to save money. I played the age card. Did Dollar really want a 22-year-old who had never driven an EV before operating one in an unfamiliar state? “You don’t have a choice.”
“Lucky” for me again, the man continued, he’d be happy to set me up in a Tesla Model 3, a user-friendly option with a range that would get me through the weekend without charging. Just in case, I asked whether there would be charging stations in Newport, where I was visiting. That’s where my luck ended. A weekend trip to Newport was apparently a short enough distance not to warrant a longer-range EV. He stuck me with a Chevrolet Bolt and gave me a QR code to scan for an “Electric Vehicle Quick-Start Guide and FAQs.” Not to worry, the man said — Newport was where the “rich politicians live” and would probably be full of charging stations.
Car renters for the most part want a vehicle to get them from point A to point B with as little hassle as possible. My Bolt wasn’t fully charged, even though the rental guy assured me that it would be. Consulting the FAQs, I learned that to extend the Bolt’s range I could forgo heat (which was untenable in Rhode Island in winter), drive slower, or sacrifice pickup power by putting the car in eco mode. The mere thought of being stranded on a highway made me so nervous that I checked the dashboard every ten minutes to make sure I hadn’t unwittingly drained the car’s battery.
EV horror stories aren’t hard to find. Tracy Mance of Guilderland, N.Y., was stranded in an EV rental at 2 a.m. on her way home from Boston’s Logan Airport. The two charging stations she stopped at were inoperable, and the airport agent “didn’t explain anything about EVs, how to charge one, what level it needed to be at when I returned it, or how much it would cost if it was charged after I returned it,” Mance wrote in her local newspaper. She eventually called for a tow, an added charge she now must dispute with the rental company.
A mother and daughter got locked in their rental Tesla in Chicago last year. They had reserved a gas-powered car, but the company was overbooked and had only EVs left to offer. Hertz failed to include a charging adapter with the car and also failed to inform the pair of the release button, should the car die and its doors lock. (The mother crawled out the back of the car after a tow-truck driver informed her of the button.)
Renting an EV rather than a gas-powered car is a far more complicated process. In addition to the QR code, I was given a pamphlet on how to operate an electric vehicle and a map of charging stations in the area. The cars can take hours to recharge, and rental companies bill you extra if the vehicle is brought back with less charge than it had at the time of pickup.
As the Dollar agent predicted, there were five stations in the politician-heavy, wealthy town of Newport. But entire swaths of the U.S., notably in the mountain states and the South, according to the Department of Energy’s map of EV-charging locations, are public-charging-port deserts. Nationwide, more than 4,000 public charging ports (out of 138,000), located in 50,000 charging stations, were inoperable in October, the DOE said. In November, the U.S. government allocated $100 million to replace some of them. (This is on top of the $5 billion President Joe Biden has already pledged with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program and the $2.5 billion approved by the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program to build up charging infrastructure.)
For many customers, myself included, the choice between a car that might be better for the environment and a car that’s more reliable and convenient is not a choice at all. Some car-rental companies are catching on.
Hertz planned to convert 25 percent of its fleet to electric by 2024. The company walked back that decision last week and admitted that its executives didn’t factor consumer demand into their green goals. Hertz is “responding to the reality, which is we’re trying to bring supply in line with demand,” CEO Stephen Scherr said last week. “The reality of EVs and Tesla’s being the best-selling car will, at some point, render them the best rental car. It’s not yet, so we may have been ahead of ourselves in the context of how quickly that will happen, but that will happen.”
Hertz’s reality check has now cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. Scherr called the decision “agile,” as though Hertz is responding to an unpredictable situation. Because, after all, who could’ve anticipated that the mad dash toward EVs would be of greater importance for ESG-conscious companies than for the customers themselves? (Well, Stuttaford did.) There were practical reasons why companies should not have invested so heavily in EV rentals: EVs are about twice as expensive to repair, uncomfortable and unfamiliar for older drivers and passengers, and less reliable. Companies also shouldn’t have predicted that travelers would value lower gas expenses above their time and convenience.
The next time you book a rental car, don’t assume you’ll be handed the keys to a gas-powered vehicle. Now that the industry is catching on to what their customers want, though, your chances of driving away from the airport in the car you actually reserved might be improving.