Rental car customers say they are receiving electric vehicles that they did not sign up for, with little to no warning from the rental companies. In some cases, it causes major headaches if they lack experience driving or charging an electric car or can't locate chargers along their travel route.
The Washington Examiner spoke to several people who booked generic or standard rental cars online through major U.S. rental companies — Hertz, Avis, and Budget — but were given electric vehicles instead. It's also a topic of complaint on review sites and social media.
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When Richard H., a software company owner from Oregon, touched down in Minneapolis for a work trip in June, he grabbed his luggage and proceeded to head to the airport Hertz terminal, where his prebooked car was waiting.
Richard, a president’s circle member at Hertz, had selected the generic vehicle online and was only slightly surprised when he saw he’d been assigned a Chevy Bolt rather than a traditional gas-powered car. Driving an electric can come with a bit of a learning curve, but as the owner of a plug-in hybrid himself, he was no stranger to the charging infrastructure or the many subscription-based apps by which drivers can find nearby compatible chargers.
He felt confident in his knowledge of the electric vehicle landscape as he pulled out of the airport lot.
But by the time he returned the car just four days later, the car was nearly out of power, and he was singing a very different tune.
Recounting the experience in an interview months later, Richard says he was struck by the total lack of available charging capacity. His hotel had chargers, but they were only for Teslas. And while one customer site he traveled to did have compatible chargers, they were restricted to employees with preregistered company accounts. Little quirks like this compounded over the course of the trip, going from a minor hassle to a real problem that sent him to multiple locations, each miles out of his way.
“I have ChargePoint, I have EVConnect, I have EVgo, I have Blink, I have PlugShare all on my phone already,” Richard told the Washington Examiner in an interview, rattling off names of various electric vehicle charging apps so quickly that to those unfamiliar with the lingo he may well have been speaking a different language.
But with his battery dwindling and more work sites to visit, Richard tracked down the nearest compatible charging station, some 20 miles away in the city of St. Cloud, and decided to make the trek.
There, he was prompted to download a new subscription app specific to the state of Minnesota and the only one accepted by that station. Surprised, he said he complied and created the account, paid the requisite $15 sign-up fee, and waited.
“The charger,” he said, “did not work.”
Neither did the next one he tried. Or the one after that.
By the time he reached the city of Alexandria, roughly an hour’s drive from St. Cloud, his options were dwindling.
Eventually, he was able to track down a single free-use charger outside a nearby Chevy dealership. By the time he pulled in, the dealership was closing, and it was getting dark. But the charger worked.
And while sitting in an empty car lot at dusk might not have been the evening Richard had envisioned, it turned out to be the right decision, he said. By the time he pulled up to the Minneapolis airport to return the rented vehicle, it was down to just 12% battery, far below Hertz's required 70% return rate.
“So many different places I tried to charge were either broken or unavailable to me or made for a different vehicle,” he said. “And I ended up having to camp out in front of a car dealership for three hours at night.”
Richard isn't alone in his experience. U.S. rental companies have embraced ambitious electric vehicle adoption plans in recent years, reflecting both the efforts of U.S. auto manufacturers who have scrambled to electrify their own fleets and the hopes of the Biden administration as it targets its 50% electric vehicle adoption goal by 2030.
But one effect has been that some customers have been surprised to discover that their rental is an electric vehicle. Some drivers said they were given a hard time when they attempted to swap out the electric vehicle for a gas-powered car at the airport locations. One driver waited for two hours for a nonelectric vehicle to become available. Another was told the only gas-powered car on the lot was a large minivan, which he accepted.
Rental car companies do not disclose the exact number of electric vehicles in their fleets nor the number of chargers they have available at a given location, making it difficult to ascertain the extent of the problem. User experience also depends heavily on the location of the rental, the type of electric vehicle rented, and the availability of nearby chargers in a given city, including fast charger availability.
But somewhere in the mad dash toward electrification, it seems as though rental car companies, or at least some of the drivers that utilize their services, are at risk of falling through the cracks.
“This is something nobody's ever really had to deal with before, so we're learning," Greg Scott, the head of public affairs for the American Rental Car Association, or ACRA, said in an interview. "But it's going to take a little while to work out the kinks.”
Primary hurdles
Hertz and Avis each acknowledged obstacles they face in embracing electrification. That's due in part to the high maintenance costs for electric vehicles, which cost roughly twice as much as gas-powered vehicles, but also to a lack of knowledge from renters, many of whom have never operated an electric vehicle before.
“Make no mistake: We are developing a clear understanding of the key levers needed to deliver a more profitable EV rental fleet in a world that is moving toward electrification,” Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told investors during a quarterly earnings call last month.
“Transitions of this magnitude are not easy, and there are important factors, including charging infrastructure, the pace of [original equipment manufacturer]
production, and the growth of the EV aftermarket, that we simply cannot control," he added.
Rental companies and trade groups have acknowledged the gap between consumer enthusiasm and demand for the vehicles.
There are also many factors outside the vehicle that can deter drivers from renting an electric car.
The first is the lack of publicly available charging infrastructure: According to data from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, there are just 100,000 public nonproprietary charging outlets in the United States, or a ratio of roughly 29 electric vehicles per public charger.
While this may be less of a problem for electric vehicle owners, who overwhelmingly rely on in-house charging, the lack of public infrastructure has proved to be a major thorn in the side of renters, especially those who are driving in new or unfamiliar areas. Some drivers who own electric vehicles themselves said they would not rent in certain areas, depending on the type of trip they were planning and the availability of chargers.
Even more critically, rental agencies themselves lack the charging infrastructure needed to power up rental vehicles at airports, which is where the majority of cars are returned.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $7.5 billion in funds to build out high-speed charging stations, but that effort will take time, and the chargers it will fund will do little to meet the needs of rental companies, whose airport locations often house thousands of vehicles at a time, according to ACRA.
This lack of infrastructure has prompted major companies to update their terms and conditions for electric vehicle rentals.
Avis, for example, prohibits one-way rentals for electric vehicles and prohibits returning them to a different company location, citing what it describes as its “unique infrastructure needs."
If the driver cannot return the electric vehicle to its original location, its contract states, "all costs incurred in transporting your EV back to the renting location will be assessed to you." Additionally, the driver "will be assessed a fee for Avis’ loss of use of the EV between the time that you should have returned the EV to the renting location and the time that it is returned to the renting location" for a maximum of 30 days.
All major companies — Hertz, Enterprise, Budget, and Avis — charge drivers who return vehicles with less than 70%-80% charge, said Scott, whose agency represents rental companies with a combined 1.8 million vehicles in their fleet.
"The airports are not ready for EVs or a substantial amount of EVs in their rental space," he told the Washington Examiner.
Rental car companies are “going through a sort of pause right now” as they consider issues of demand and drivability, he added. “[They're wondering]: Is there demand for these vehicles from consumers? Do the consumers feel comfortable with them?"
"And if the answer to those questions is no, what do we have to do to change their minds and make them more attractive to consumers?” he said.
Looking ahead
Charging infrastructure is a key frustration for drivers, and not just for rentals. An August survey by the firm J.D. Power found that consumer satisfaction with public Level 2 chargers was down by 16 points on a 1,000-point scale, falling to 617, the lowest level since the survey began in 2021.
The survey also found that roughly 20% of electric vehicle drivers who rely on public charging stations reported equipment failures or malfunctions during the first quarter of the year.
As U.S. manufacturers begin to adopt Tesla’s NAC charger, a widely available and reliable option for electric vehicles, charging problems like the kind Richard encountered in Minneapolis will eventually, hopefully, be rendered obsolete.
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For ACRA, one key goal is building out electric vehicle charging infrastructure in airport rental sites, where 50% of car rentals take place and around the airports themselves.
"At every airport in America, when you're returning a car, there are generally five or six gas stations to pick from to fill up your car," Scott said. But this is not the case for electric vehicles. In fact, he noted, there is virtually no charging infrastructure outside airports anywhere in the U.S. that is open to the public.