I Rented a Tesla for a 1,600-Mile Road Trip. I’ll Think Twice Next Time.

Have you ever forgotten your phone charger on a trip and spent the rest of the time worrying about how to charge it? Now imagine your phone is a car and you’re using it to drive across four states.

That pretty much sums up my experience driving a Tesla Model 3 with my wife and cat that we rented from Hertz. In total, I traveled1,663 miles over 10 days from my home in Brooklyn to visit family and friends in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, over the holidays. The car worked fine, but I spent a lot of energy figuring out where the next charge would come from. In all, I visited 13 charging stations (16 if you count the three that either didn’t work or weren’t compatible with the Tesla), waiting an hour for a full charge in the most extreme case.

I wish I could say I did this for a cause like saving the environment, but the truth was less noble. The rental was hundreds of dollars cheaper than anything else available. That seems to be the case for many right now: Two of my colleagues at Barron’s who recently rented vehicles saw similar discounts on EVs.

Hertz earlier in January said it would sell 20,000 of its electric vehicles, or approximately one-third of its global EV fleet, and reinvest a portion of the proceeds to purchase more internal combustion engine vehicles to meet demand. In other words, not enough people are renting EVs, opting instead for gasoline-powered vehicles.

After the announcement, Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told CNBC there are still customers who want EVs, just not at the level of demand that Hertz anticipated. “We’re in the business of giving customers choice. We’re including in that choice electric vehicles,” he said.

Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.

After my experience renting an EV, I can understand people’s hesitation. Here’s what I learned from my trip—and my advice to others.

Check If Your Destination Has a Charger—and See if Hertz Has Equipment

This might seem obvious, but it affected me more than I realized. You’re going to want to charge your EV overnight, especially in cold weather.

Why? Similar to a phone battery, you will lose charge in the cold weather. On the coldest night in Cleveland, when temperatures dipped into the low-30s, I lost about seven percentage points of battery life to cold weather. The car wasn’t on and it was parked in my in-law’s attached garage. The battery just lost part of its charge to the weather.

Some hotels offer chargers to guests. Call ahead to make sure they work, see how many there are, and whether they’re compatible with your EV. If the hotel’s charger doesn’t work with a Tesla, you can use an adapter that allows non-Tesla chargers to be used with a Tesla vehicle. Check that your vehicle has an adapter before you drive off the Hertz lot.

While Hertz’s website never explicitly says it will provide you with an adapter, its materials suggest that you will have one in your vehicle. One Hertz video showed me how to use and equip the adapter. But when I searched for the adapter while at a non-Tesla charger, I couldn’t find it in the vehicle.

When I reached out to Hertz’s customer service, a representative told me the company changed its policy of providing adapters “due to too many chargers getting stolen/going missing” and that the company “cannot guarantee adapters will be included with the vehicles” but I could check a local Hertz for spares.

You can also charge at home—even with a 120-volt outlet—but this requires a kit that Hertz doesn’t mention at all. Your charge will be very slow—about 3 miles of range added per hour—but you won’t lose battery to the cold while plugged in and you’ll gain some extra range while you sleep.

A note on Hertz’s customer service. Hertz says it has an EV Customer Support Team in its app, but I couldn’t find a way to contact it. Instead, I called the general customer service line, which repeatedly hung up on me while on hold. Then I took to Twitter and messaged Hertz, which is how I got the response above.

When asked for comment, Hertz said that customers should use Hertz.com/myEV and their Electric Vehicle Blog for tips and articles and that it would continue implementing educational tools and policies to enhance EV customers’ experiences. Hertz referred anyone with questions about EVs to its Roadside Assistance team, which can be reached at 800-654-5060. Hertz says those team members are trained to help customers with EVs.

You’ll Charge More Often Than You Think

When I debated renting the car, I calculated that I’d only need to stop once for a charge on my drive to Cleveland. The math was simple: The Model 3 has a range of 260 miles, Hertz’s website said. If the vehicle was at 100% when I picked it up, I could get more than halfway on that charge and then fill up to go the remaining 200 miles. I’d end the trip with 60 miles still left on the battery. Probably slightly less since I planned to heat the car, listen to music, and use the windshield wipers.

My math was way off. I got about 160-170 miles out of each charge, which resulted in stopping a total of three times on the 460-mile trip to Cleveland. Tesla’s navigation system helped me find the chargers, and there were plenty along this route.

What I failed to realize is that ranges on EVs are estimates based on a blend of city and highway, and they don’t account for cold weather. EVs eat through a charge faster on highways, and the cold weather doesn’t help, either. Driving under 70 MPH would have saved me about 10% in battery life on my trip, the Tesla navigation system in my car told me, and I lost another 5% to heating the cabin, defrosting my windows, and something called “battery conditioning,” which Tesla says brings the battery to an optimal temperature in cold weather before charging.

Range Anxiety Is Real

I stopped four times on my way from Cleveland back to New York City, one extra time just to be sure I had enough of a charge to last any gridlock, time spent finding a parking spot, and other obstacles I might encounter. That charge turned out to be mostly a waste of money—I had plenty to navigate the city’s traffic.

But that fear of not having enough battery, often referred to as range anxiety, plagued me throughout my trip. It didn’t help that this was my first time traveling in an EV.

Throughout my trip, I was always questioning whether Tesla’s navigation system was correctly calculating when and where to charge. Many times I noticed its math was off by five to seven percentage points and I’d end my trip with less battery than what it had originally estimated.

Anytime I visited friends or saw family, I searched to see if there was a charger nearby to “top off” my electric tank while I met some friends for coffee or shopped. That never really worked out. Chargers are rarely near your destination. Downtown Cleveland, where my brother lives, had no Superchargers, for example.

On my trip to Columbus to see friends, I thought I found a charger in a parking garage less than a five-minute walk from the Airbnb we were staying at. I grabbed my parking ticket, pulled up to the spots with the chargers, and hopped out. To my dismay, the chargers were broken. So I drove 15 minutes to a different parking garage with a Supercharger and used the time spent charging to grab dinner nearby.

Charging Takes a Lot of Time–and Safety Can Be an Issue

Each charge took anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, with the average being somewhere roughly around 45 minutes. This added an hour and a half extra drive time on our trips to and back from Cleveland. And while we could eat, stretch, use the restroom, and grab a coffee during the charge time, these activities hardly ever took as long as the charge itself. A lot of time was spent sitting in the Tesla waiting for a full charge.

The Tesla I rented didn’t have entertainment apps installed like Netflix, which seems to be a popular way to pass the time while waiting for a charge.

Often, I’d take the opportunity to grab a coffee at a nearby Starbucks or a meal. Sometimes the meal was close like the Clearfield, Pa., Burger King with Superchargers in its parking lot. More often, it required a bit more of a hike. In Bloomsburg, Pa., there was a 0.3-mile walk to a Starbucks that involved crossing a busy 35-mph road without sidewalks or crosswalks.

Due to my range anxiety and a lack of chargers near my wife’s family in Painesville, Ohio, my wife and I decided to stop for a charge at 1 a.m. on New Year’s Eve. We sat alone for about 30 minutes at an empty charging station in a deserted strip mall in Cleveland just to get our battery up to a more comfortable level.

Don’t Expect to Save Money on Fuel

I opted to rent the Tesla because it cost less than the other vehicles available. But that’s where the savings ended.

In total, I paid $179.72 to charge the vehicle plus a $25 charging fee for not returning it to Hertz at 95% full and $4 in parking garage fees for chargers in Columbus.

You don’t pay along the way. The first time my wife and I stopped at a Supercharger station on our journey, we noticed there was nowhere to pay. The vehicle bills Hertz and you can see the price on the vehicle’s screen at the end of the charge.

Hertz then bills you for the charging costs when you return the vehicle, at no extra cost. Tesla Superchargers charge a premium for fueling up, which contributed to higher prices.

If you are in an area where you have many charging options, you can use the navigation system to compare the prices of chargers. We were seldom in such a situation.

By the way, that Hertz fee for not returning the car charged enough was unavoidable. I live more than 10 minutes from the airport and I couldn’t find a charger near the Hertz at LaGuardia airport that didn’t charge parking garage fees. Plus, I didn’t want to spend another 45 minutes at a charger. But here’s a tip to save you $10: Sign up for Hertz Gold Plus Rewards, otherwise that fee is $35.

Using FuelEconomy.gov, I ran some calculations for what I would have paid in gasoline if I had gone with a Toyota Corolla or a Volkswagen Jetta, two vehicles available at the time. I probably would have saved about $20, avoided the low charge fee from Hertz, and dodged some parking garage costs.

But then I would have never gotten to spend all this time at chargers in places I never would’ve stopped at otherwise.

Write to Matthew Bemer at [email protected]