Tourists need hotels with EV charging stations. It’s the rental car company’s job to create demand by partnering with hotels to make it easier for tourists to charge than it is hunt for gas stations. Rental car companies siding with fossil fuels is the problem. Tourists demand easy transportation not maximum emissions.
A hotel I stayed at in Florida had a charging station. With a grand total of one charger.
Most have none. So 1 is respectable. But many also have 2 or more. One i went to allowed me to use regular 120V.
Whoah… The whole 120v? They must have been feeling generous.
Well to be fair, plugging into some 120V will blow a fuse. That’s happened to me too.
I wonder if some of it is a selection bias in tourists who rent cars in the first place. People more accepting of EVs perhaps are already using public transport or bikes instead, because they don’t have an obsession with ICEs.
Got a petrol car for €60 for about a week. I did look up the equivalent electric. Maybe it’s an issue of supply and demand, but the for the same time it was about €200. Kind of a no brainer from the consumer point of view.
How much did you spend on gas for that week? In Europe, from what I’ve heard, you would break even at 2 or maybe 3 tanks of gas.
I rented EVs and ICEs for doing the same 1000km trip in Switzerland. Europcar offered to bring back the car empty, so one charge was included. The extra cost of the EV was offset by the fuel savings then, even when charging at expensive highway chargers. The difference was quite small tho
If you’re a tourist you also need to factor time into that. Since time is at a premium. 5 minutes at the gas station vs 20 minutes waiting to charge makes a lot more of a difference on a trip.
But we’re also talking about Europe vs. North America, where there is a good chance your destination is within a charge of wherever you’re staying, in which case just charging at or near your hotel costs basically nothing.
I assume a lot of visitors, like myself want a vehicle capable of going on the F roads. They would need something like Rivians for that not teslas.
Ford fiestas are fine on those roads, at least the rental ones are.
One reason, maybe the only one, I’d avoid renting an EV abroad would be that hereabouts lots of public chargers need an app and an account to use which is complete BS. I would not want to risk that in a strange country. Gas stations I’d expect to accept cash or credit card.
Of course, knowing the country has sane chargers would completely change that.
I mean when I traveled in the US my credit card wouldn’t be accepted at gas stations because I have a 4 digit zip code. There’s worse than creating an account.
