While the trip to Texas was weeks ago, there was a notable part of the story that I didn’t tell. As I was booking our travel, I noted the option to rent an electric vehicle. Jp and I both drive hybrid cars, and I love the idea of an all-electric vehicle, but I’ve been skeptical about managing charging, particularly when we travel. So, I decided that renting an EV was a great way to learn what it’s like.

I took a look at the rental company’s specific EV options. They offered a slightly more expensive option that was marked as longer range. I researched the mileage that the sample vehicles listed could achieve on a charge and opted for the longer-range option.

A few weeks before the trip I was chatting with my coach and asked if she might be able to pick up our packets. She said there was a form that we would need to fill out so I went to the race site to find it. Instead of finding the form, I found a policy that said runners must pick upp their own packets, no exception. Given that rule and the expo hours I changed our flights (we had a change in Atlanta) to get us to Dallas much earlier. It also came with a very “delightful” early morning departure time, but being sure we could get our packets and run the race seemed worth it.

Even with the flight changes, we arrived in Dallas with a fairly tight time frame to get to the race expo in Austin. We had rented with Budget, so we took the shuttle to the rental car center. When we arrived, the Budget counter was closed, and a sign directed us to the Avis counter. The guy at the counter was quick to process us since we’d signed up for the Budget Fastbreak program. When he offered us a choice of cars, but none of them were what i expected. I asked which had the highest range and he said they were all similar. He recommended the Ford Mach-e so that’s what we took

What we quickly learned is that the car did not have the range to get us between the cities on our trip without stopping to charge. So we did some googling and saw that there was a Buc-ees on the route that had EV charging. That seemed like a great place to stop and spend a little time as Jp had tried to describe Buc-ees to me but I had yet to experience it. When we got there, we saw the ev charging stations right away and noticed that they were all Tesla. We pulled in and tried to plug in only to learn that there are a multitude of plug types used by different evs, so you can’t just charge any car at any charger. Some very nice Telsa owners who were there tried to help us and told us that there are plug converters that you can use, but that wasn’t something we had access to. We then did some research to find out exactly what kind of plug we had so that we could find a charging station that would work for us. The nice Telsa owners mentioned a couple of apps and said there were often stations at Wal-Marts. We did our research and discovered that we had two bad options: we could continue on the way to Austin but risk running out of charge before we got to the next charger (it was going to be very close) or we could go back an hour and be certain. We went back.

From that experience we were able to do more advanced research to understand where we could charge our rental along our routes and plan accordingly. What we learned is that those plans often involved us sitting at the far end of a Wal-Mart parking lot waiting to charge. Our night in Austin that included the joy of the parking lot security system periodically telling us that we were trespassing and that the police had been contacted. In the Houston and Dallas it meant finding parking ramps that had chargers. In general those city ramps had slow chargers so we parked before going to our hotel and went back and moved the car away from the charger after our evening basketball games (both of with the Celtics won – go C’s!).

While all of that went reasonably well, there were two other significant learnings in this process. The first, is that you always need a plan B. When we were driving to Dallas from Houston we carefully planned where to stop and navigated accordingly. However, when we got to the Wal-Mart parking lot in the middle of nowhere we ran into a problem. The charging units weren’t working. They looked fine. But when we connected to them we got errors and couldn’t charge. We called the support line for the company and the rep tried to help us but we literally tried every unit there (4 of them) to no avail. And to add insult to injury? It was pouring rain. And we had timed this stop for Jp to do a phone interview from the car while we were charging. So my soaking wet and extremely frustrated husband tried to put on a good face and do his interview while I went into the smallest and saddest Wal-Mart I have seen to kill time. Once he was done we had to find our plan B and go there. Once again it involved back tracking. Given this experience my recommendation is to chose a town that has more than one set of chargers, just in case one of them isn’t working.

The second lesson was specific to the rental experience. Part of what we learned about charging EVs is that you can use a fast-charger to get to about 80% but that beyond that it’s a slow charge. It occured to us that this meant there was virtually no way to return the rental with a full charge. Our documents simply said to return the car with the same fuel level that it had when we picked it up. It had been fully charged. I contacted Budget to ask about our options and had a very long, very painful exchange with a service rep. Initially he just said we had to return it at the same level. I explained how that wouldn’t be feasible but he didn’t seem to care. Eventually I asked him what I would be charged if I didn’t return it full. He said I’d be charged for a full tank. I asked what the rate would be as they can normally tell you the rate per gallon for fuel. He said I’d be charged the fuel rate. And I said that made no sense since the car doesn’t take fuel. How would they determine how many gallons would equal a full tank. It went on like this. Back and forth. Zero progress. Both of us growing crabby. Finally he told me that as long as we returned the car with the battery at least 70% charged there would be no fee. Finally! That I could work with. We got the charged up to over 90% that night and left the garage the next morning hoping we’d be ok. All we did was drive from the hotel to the airport and we were able to return it at more than 70%. We were not charged any additional fees.

We left this experience with two conclusions. First, we don’t think the infrastructure is there yet to do road trips in EVs. If you want to have your own and use it for around town and short trips, I think that’s great and would probably work well. Having a charger at home would make a big difference. But trying to travel and coordinate the stops is still inconvenient and somewhat risky – especially in the land of big oil. Second, the rental companies haven’t really figured out renting EVs. It was clear that both the desk agent and support agent had little training or knowlege of the challenges associated with an EV and therfore provided us little to know meaningful support.

I would still love to have an EV. And we may get an EV or plug-in hybrid the next time we are in a market for a car. But until the infrastructure is better we will not be an all EV household.