This was my recent experience. I was offered an EV car as a rental upgrade in a major city because the local rental place didn't have an EV charger. I figured what the hell because it was a relaxed holiday vacation. Turns out that was a hilariously bad idea.
Ended up spending at least 5-6 hours of my week vacation trying to avoid the EV going to 0% battery. Half of that time was spent on Google Maps - trying to find chargers with the right plug, ones that aren't broken, ones that were available, downloading various apps, etc. Then when I did find a charger I sat in the parking lot waiting for it to juice up.
All of that effort and I still could only give myself the miles back that I spent finding chargers, it was even funnier when the cold weather took miles away. Finally ended up luckily finding one at a local movie theater and asked family to shuttle me back and forth because of how long it took to charge.
Not a knock on EV's really, mostly the charging infrastructure and the rental experience.
These considerations are why I think we'll eventually move to battery swapping, when the market is mature enough to have standards for batteries. When there are as many battery swapping stations as there are gas stations now, the problem will be greatly diminished.
On long trips stopping for 20-30 mins every few hours is ~normal anyway. Stretch my legs, use a restroom, have a drink, get back on the road.
Newer cars charge even faster. I don't think battery swapping is going to be important in the end.
Nio Inc. has videos of the process, and that's what you'd expect (and I assume what tesla tried at one time), you drive to a booth, the car gets locked in and the battery is replaced automatically, then you drive out.
This map has real time stats on battery swap. Unfortunately it's only available in Chinese. NIO has done 35 million battery swap to date and you can see where the swap stations are located. Not quite as accessible as your gas stations but not far off especially in the large cities.
Wake me up when I need nothing more than the payment card I already carry.
> The stations are primarily deployed in three regions: Asia Pacific (over 2,000), North America (over 2,000), and Europe (over 1,000).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Supercharger
Some supercharger stations also work with other cars. I used them over Christmas with my Kia. Surprisingly they were faster and cheaper than anything else in the area.
I'm sure they are the best, those Tesla stations, you're just gonna have to go out of your way for them, around here at least. Hope you got the right card. Or your leasing company. Or your car rental. Etc.
https://www.motortrend.com/features/tesla-nacs-charging-port...
Edit Although I should add, even if they work, they may not support the full power charging. My Kia works, but nowhere near 250kWh.
It really is! My port is on the front centre and depending on how others have parked, it's quite tricky to get the angle required to be close enough.
But these are just niggles. We absolutely need standard hardware.
And even if they had then here top, they'd be useless to me, because Teslas are too large for me.
https://www.tesla.com/en_eu/findus
Model 3 is a normal sized compact car, but if you live in Italy or on an island, it could be too big.
The Tesla Model 3 is a Medium car by NHTSA standards and a Compact by EPA standards.
However, in the EU Euro Car Segment standard, the Model 3 is a D-segment or "large car".
Musk is inextricably tied to Teslas brand.
All good when he was ‘space Howard Hughes (pre-hypochondriac shut-in)’, since that brand resonated with people with money who were going for the ‘better future’ image.
Now his antics remind everyone of their asshole racist uncle that they can’t stand. Not a good brand association, as asshole racists uncles aren’t as popular with those with a lot of money.
But since Tesla is leading the bottom in reliability scores, it's still quite unlikely I'm getting one.
There aren't claims, these are physical constraints. For heavy vehicles such as trucks and busses (and trains) there might be a market, provided the H2 is an otherwise unused byproduct of some process and needn't be produced, but for the majority of personal mobility major breakthroughs are required to make it competitive.
So much denial in the anti h2 crowd.
I'm not anti H2, why would I? I'm not part of any crowd. I just did part of my physics training on the subject.
20 years ago, while there were more H2 vehicles on the road, nobody in the H2 storage fields thought it would last. On a basc level, the physics of getting electrons out of a material is better than getting protons out. And then there is an already preexisting infrastructure for free.
The biggest issue is the need to build out an entirely new fueling infrastructure with a highly explosive fuel. EVs can piggyback off of the existing electrical grid.
To replace fossil fuel transport will require an entirely new infrastructure regardless - if it's electric the existing grid will essentially have to be built out by a substantial factor.
A hybrid future is entirely feasible with long established city to city truck transport routes using hydrogen from dedicated planned end points and mid points along with lighter EV vehicles and non standard route EV trucking.
Maybe it took too long, but we've got a single standard for high powered charging going forward, and I think J1772 is universal for PHEVs and slow charging of EVs. Eventually, people running charging networks will figure out how to keep their machines working and add card readers. My favorite broken charger is the wireless ones --- someone has run off with the cable, but hey the advertising display still works.
The bigger issue is scaling down cracking stations so you can use stranded electricity from solar and wind to generate the H2.
It’s like saying, “It’s easy to ship fragile glass sculptures. You just smash them into little bits and put the bits in an envelope, I don’t see why people use all that styrofoam.”
You’re obviously not a New Yorker
It's not a problem. At all.
Likewise, “It’s possible to ship and store H2” is not the same thing as “it’s not a problem to ship and store H2”.
It's not a problem. At all.
And nobody said "preventing" adoption, since that's easy to misinterpret.
It's reducing adoption a lot, compared to what it would be if hydrogen was as easy to store as butane or kerosene.
Not to mention the technical challenges (assume we can handle) of the low volume density, low temperature..
There may well be, we don’t really know because we haven’t been looking for it at any scale.
But outside of that, these things will improve, although your numbers are a bit out there.
One person in this thread, was talking about cars, with no knowledge or understand that 3 separate manufacturers have h2 products on the market. Not 3 cars. 3 manufacturers. Another was discussing things as if it's an insurmountable task, that having h2 in cars is "really hard", yet these cars are being sold and used all over the world, with loads of adoption in Japan.
People make up weird claims about efficiency. About storage. About where h2 comes from. On and on and on. It's so ... absurd.
This isn't a 'my team your team' thing, yet it seems like, especially americans, are wired this way. "It's not thing $x, thus evil! wrong!! We must, absolutely must destroy any hope of this other thing existing.
h2 is the future for many application and usage spaces, and I can see batteries the same way too. It's not either or, and made up claims won't help the green movement at all.
In contrast, an electric car uses electricity to charge a 99% efficient battery, and discharge to the 90% engine. So, 89% efficiency - much, much better.
For such people, and there's a lot of these people, h2 is less work (quicker fill up) than electric charging.
Right now, electric cars are targeting the wealthy. Wealthy people tend to have houses. That could certainly change, but even if it starts to target those with less fiscal fortitude, many such live in apartments with no charging infrastructure.
What then?
It can supply energy slowly, perhaps at dozens-of-amps.
The only time when an EV gets into hundreds of amps territory is when it is doing real work: Work like accelerating, or going uphill (or both).
Maintaining a speed on a straight stretch of highway is not a huge burden in terms of work, and that is where I think that a trailer-mounted battery might shine brightest.
The car's internal battery can take the brunt of rapid acceleration tasks and get filled back up over time, just like it already does in normal charge-daily EV use.
So to put some of this into real terms:
20A at 355V is 7,100 Watts, or about 9.5 horsepower. That's a ton of real work.
100A at 355V is 35,500 Watts, or about 47 horsepower. Way more than plenty to keep a portly EV heading down the highway.
The connection for the trailer APU doesn't need to handle the peak current draw of hundreds of amps. It just needs to be able to (slowly) pick up some slack and thus provide greater range.
Like the BMW i3 with the gas-fired range extender: The EV drivetrain could consume a ton more peak power than the built-in genset could produce, and that's OK.
It's not like people are using these in endurance racing or something. Most real-world driving is pretty mundane, with only occasional instances of rapid acceleration.
You still need standardisation between all manufactureres for it to work.
Gogoro currently do more than 400,000 battery swaps / day, primarily in Taiwan, but are expanding into other Asian countries.
My point is it can’t be much more of a hazard.
I used a gasoline stove for a while and it is bonkers how hard that thing is to light. You can spill the gas or do all sorts of things—the only thing I could do to get a fire out of it was to follow the instructions, exactly, and keep the stove perfectly level. I later learned that gasoline only burns if you keep the gasoline / air mixture within a narrow range. I know that gasoline is implicated in a lot of fires, but it’s also just so damn common and people are careless with it.
Powerful batteries scare me more, to be honest. Not a lot more, just a little. Not trying to fearmonger here. It’s just that I love those sparks and that fire, and have spent time playing with batteries and playing with gasoline or other flammable substances. If you short a battery, it will basically dump as much energy as it can, as fast as it can. It’s easier to accidentally short a battery.
Properly stored & maintained batteries are fine. I just get a little nervous holding a wrench, sometimes.
There may be safety concerns (e.g. if I understand it correctly, the swapping process is fully automated and the car locks the doors and takes over steering, so I'm not sure how this deals with emergency scenarios where the driver might need to leave the car or intervene) but as far as the driver is concerned they never touch the battery so the risk of accidents from improper wiring is significantly reduced.
She asks me to deal with the batteries in the TV remote.
Imagine in 1995 saying emails will never replace sending around documents at the office, just because there wasn't any infra yet. Wait a bit, or even help !
It annoys me to get and send pdfs in text messages, but that seems to be how the world works now.
Do you mean PDFs for correspondence such as bills or invoices? That is not common for me.
I still use email pretty frequently even if communications are at least somewhat fragmented across SMS, Facebook, Slack, etc.
With EVs it's always going to require a tow, which is a nightmare experience I don't recommend to anyone.
But why not knock on them? They had a lot of promise and a lot of hype when they were being touted as simpler and cheaper and just overall better. Somehow they ended up being more expensive, unless we're talking about Chinese brands, more costly to insure, a longer time to charge than a corresponding IC car and incompatible charging networks. I think they can handle a bit of criticism, it's a big industry, and it can deal with some minor criticism from an orange hacker forum.
The Chinese brands' pricing seems to be at least in part due to subsidies: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-launches-anti-subsid...
At least that's what the EU says.
> But why not knock on them?
I would agree that the discussion on EVs is a bit misguided in general. It always is EVs or ICE cars and EVs must be the winner otherwise you are "confused" or "out of your mind". In reality, both can coexist and have a place for what they are really good at.
> The anti-subsidy investigation covers battery-powered cars from China, so also includes non-Chinese brands made there, such as Tesla (TSLA.O), Renault (RENA.PA) and BMW (BMWG.DE). It is also unusual in that it is brought by the European Commission itself, rather than in response to an industry complaint.
This does seem like more of a political play rather than China actually trying to flood western markets, especially considering that western EV producers are also being subsidized and that the Chinese domestic market is sufficiently large by itself.
Agreed. That's why I added "At least that's what the EU says."
The EU is clearly whining because the Chinese local market imploded, so they are now exporting more of their cars into the EU markets.
Yet, articles like the linked one make it unclear to me what part of EV production is really subsidized and what part is not. I think it would be advisable to be cautious about claims that they are already cheaper than ICE cars. At least, that's how I am looking at it currently.
I think it's disingenuous to downplay EU's response as "whining". The automotive industry is a strategic sector, not only in terms of economy but also directly and indirectly in defense. Shifting demand from the internal market to the output of a rival and potential threat means spending their own cash financing a rival to place it in a controlling position.
There were certainly mistakes (e.g., not supervising VW properly when they went full DGAF on the electricify america rollout).
The parent is saying they still believe in the analysis that electric will work, they just spent their whole comment criticizing their EV experience.
The car finds chargers on it's own. It shows you exactly what's available at each charger. Hardly anything is ever broken.
EVs are far easier and more convenient than gas cars. It's the non Tesla infrastructure that just sucks.
EVs certainly have some advantages, but for most of the world's population "convenience" isn't one of them.
If you live in a house with a garage where you can install a charger and you use your car mostly as a runabout, it's great.
The majority of the western world lives in cities with street parking and fewer chargers than vehicles, though, and in that situation it's far more convenient to spend five minutes at the gas station on your way to the office than it is to find a spot to charge your car for three hours which may or may not be anywhere close to where you actually need to go.
All you have to do is look at the census. 2/3rds of households have a garage or carport. If you add to this the number of people with private parking, that's like 80+% of people who can have chargers subsidized by the state.
It's always important to look at numbers before you get trapped in your bubble.
The irony. I didn't realise that the UK (and in fact a large portion of Europe) wasn't part of the western world.
Speaking of bubbles, I wrote "majority of the western world," which admittedly surprisingly stretches beyond America.
Two-thirds of households in, say, Berlin absolutely do not have carports, garages, or private parking.
The US followed suite and has also forced support for CCS when applying for subsidy programs to grow Tesla's charging network.
https://qz.com/the-white-house-is-trying-to-persuade-tesla-t...
I don't think EVs were ever sold as cheaper or overall better. I recall they were marketed as cheaper to run on short commutes, but at the expense of having a large upfront price, having shorter autonomies, and requiring relatively high logistics and route planning.
There's also the environmental and geopolitical angle, but it was always clear that potential customers were expected to pay a premium for that privilege. In fact, many countries even put together hefty subsidy programs to make EVs more competitive.
- Even though I was staying in their house there was no way I could charge it without buying an expensive cable, or risking some cheap crap from Amazon (blow up the house or the rental car perhaps?)
- Every damn thing needs an app (and an account and registration - fun if you don't actually live in the country in question). Seriously just put up a charger and a contactless payment reader. Imagine if every petrol pump needed an app to start? May as well go back to having to put pound coins in a meter...
- Oh and it was expensive anyway at 85p/KWh at public recharging points. So 78kWh * 0.85 = 66GBP ($84) per charge, say 230 miles to be generous. I gave the petrol rental back with 600 miles extra on the clock and put a bit over 50 quid in petrol in it.
This actually isn't true. It is law in the UK that every public charger must have a contactless reader on it. Many of them have apps but you don't need to use them.
Your point about the price is very valid though. With the exception of Tesla Superchargers they are extremely expensive. For some reason Supercharger prices range from 12-35p. The Supercharger network in the UK is pretty good, but driving anything other than a Tesla is a nightmare.
--- start quote ---
The regulation also requires that ad-hoc charging payments can be made via cards or contactless devices, without requiring a subscription. That should make it possible to pull over to any charging station from any network and charge your EV without first hunting for the correct app or signing up for a subscription. Operators are required to clearly list prices at their installed recharging points via “electronic means,” including wait times and availability.
--- end quote ---
It will take time for all chargers to convert though.
Not a realistic suggestion for anyone not living in London.
You seem to be confusing home/destination chargers and rapid chargers - which is a common mistake for non-EV drivers to make. Unlike petrol, electricity comes to you.
Well, or they went to https://ionity.eu/en/network/network-status or https://www.zap-map.com/live/ looked at Manchester and it listed only one Ionity charger, "Manchester East".
Of course, very few people that live in Greater Manchester would use a really fast charger like those there whilst in Greater Manchester. Maybe if you're a taxi driver, or caught short somehow? This is the confusion I was talking about.
It's still one location. If I live in Trafford is easily a 45 minute drive, much worse at peak times.
> very few people that live in Greater Manchester would use a really fast charger
Because obviously we all have driveways and we can leave the car there overnight. Fuck 'em terraces scum. /s
EU is going to require all chargers to just work with credit cards: https://www.theverge.com/23806690/eu-ev-fast-charger-60km-la...
--- start quote ---
he regulation also requires that ad-hoc charging payments can be made via cards or contactless devices, without requiring a subscription. That should make it possible to pull over to any charging station from any network and charge your EV without first hunting for the correct app or signing up for a subscription. Operators are required to clearly list prices at their installed recharging points via “electronic means,” including wait times and availability.
--- end quote ---
Wow. For rates like that it'd be worth making your own public charger. ;)
At first, it was hard since I've never owned a model 3. Even if you are a model 3 owner, you are probably used to using your phone as the key.
They give you a keycard.
anyway, I didn't know how to lock the doors. finally I figured out the lock symbol on the central display and locked the doors. But when I got out, they were unlocked again. The trick was to open the door first, press the lock icon, get out and close the doors.
The easy way to lock the doors... Well, you can google it and find out, it is not intuitive, but easy once you learn.
Now renting a car that can drive itself was wonderful. I had to put a lot of miles on and it helped.
Finding charging is easy -- it is all built into the display. You can navigate and it will integrate charging into your trip. I was already familiar with this, but if you're unfamiliar it might be something to learn. There ARE superchargers everywhere, and L2 chargers everywhere else.
I had to do level 2 charging (J1772) and it I had to call hertz to figure out where the adapter was. (It was in a bag in the footwell of the trunk). Once I had that I could charge at hotels.
Hertz did spam me with lots of "get to know the model 3 before your trip" stuff. I should have read it a bit.
I think the Tesla is nice if you don't need to go anywhere too far. For trips stick to gasoline.
Swapping a battery that weighs a ton and is part of the car structure is another story completely.
I think the more sensible solution is to have fast charging and a reliable network. 800 volt batteries and a good architecture enable incredible fast charging, and in the fjture it might be even faster. Combine that with cars with a lot of range, ex. 400+ miles and a 30m stop once 300 miles doesn't sound bad at all.
With battswap also being done at the lightweight end, eventually there will be convergence in the middle. But I think we have another decade or fifteen years to wait before standardization efforts have a chance and battswap can be vehicle manufacturer agnostic.
Battswap is an obvious way to lower the sticker price of vehicles, which is key to selling the next half billion of them.
Problem is, nobody wanted it. They would rather wait to charge than turn in their personal battery, and later come back for it.
Would you want it? Would you turn over your decent, brand new battery at some charging station?
What's interesting is that they did it differently with the cybertruck. You can buy an additional battery that I believe is swappable.
From what I can tell they showed it off to get some tax credits, then decided not to deploy it anywhere (but keep the money of course).
For instance, when I travel with my regular IC car, I don't plan or think too much about where to refuel, how I am going to drive there, etc. It's usually a last minute decision. Having to spend half an hour somewhere it's a bit more tricky, now the trip revolves around recharging, waiting, possibly combining with lunch or dinner, etc.
Came here and said EV was not cheaper to run for me, many people on here disagreed. I gave up
I see what you did there...
yeah, once you know it is easy.
It sounds like that would have solved literally all of your problems.
When I’m traveling for work and need a car, it’s usually for smaller quick trips where I wouldn’t even need to refill a tank of gas. For these types of trips, a single charge on an EV makes sense. But otherwise, I agree with you. EV rental doesn’t make much sense to me for long trips or vacation travel where you’ll be driving a lot in a place you don’t know.
That might make sense a lot of the time. But there's plenty of exceptions - for example winter time in cold climates can transform a single charge rental into several charges needed. Even with just a few short trips taken.
It you want to give people a poor opinion of EVs, dump them in a rental EV and tell them it needs to be returned with 80% charge and don't offer any support on how to do that.
When I'm traveling and I know that I'm going to have to do a week of heavy driving, I prefer an EV to save on gas. I've rented a Tesla Model 3 from Hertz a couple of times for this purpose: when I did the calculations, the cheaper per-mile cost of using superchargers more than made up for the difference in rental price vs. an economy rental (the addition of free destination chargers when i found them was a bonus). The general driving experience was obviously better than an economy rental, as well.
I know it's not the case everywhere, but along my routes, I was able to find convenient superchargers in parking lots of stores that I wanted to visit (bubble tea, Target, etc), and the car was usually finished charging before i was finished in the store. The couple of times that i stopped at superchargers that didn't have a useful establishment nearby, i was able to appease the kids with the built-in video games.
When it was time to return the car, there was no run-around trying to find a gas station to fill up near the rental center: you can return the car with a quarter charge, and it's no problem, Hertz doesn't charge any additional charging fee.
It would have been nice if i didn't have to use key cards, and if i could use the app to, say, precondition the car. It also would have been nice if the videos saved by "sentry mode" were easier to batch clear. But these are quibbles; the rentals were absolutely worth it for me.
How could hertz not have known this? I think this was probably not a business decision but a management decision done so they can call the company green, basically virtue signalling when clearly it was a terrible business decision.
Sustainability is great but I feel like we’re making a lot of bad decisions to pretend like we are sustainable.
In the US, I have a PHEV but when I’m not at home, I don’t even bother to charge it because there are so few chargers, they’re slow, and the ones that exist are often broken.
Sure, at first sight you are not burning fossil fuel in your car so you are slowing down climate change. Plenty of studies show the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lower for an EV than an ICE vehicle. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l... Although perhaps a mere half is not what people would think at first when they just compare tailpipe emissions... and it depends on how carbon intensive is the electricity you are using for charging. And there's more than just emissions to consider.
1. Lithium mining needs water. The typical amount given is 500 000 gallons per one ton of lithium. Think of fracking.
2. Mining waste for base metals such as copper or nickel is 20-200 tonnes but rare earth minerals like platinum make a million tonne of waste per tonne extracted.
3. The lifetime of the battery which is the problematic component is significantly lower than the lifetime of a typical ICE car.
And more.
The solution is, of course, to reverse the dependence on the automobile. https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-m... this might be old but it is still relevant.
The methodolody used by IEA for that chart uses the 2021 global average grid carbon intensity to calculate its electricity generation. If you live in Iceland, Sweeden, UK, Vermont, or similar regions with highly decarbonised grids, the majority of the chart's Electricity co2e isn't generated for that vehicle.
You've got to consider your local average grid carbon intensity, and how that will change across the 20 year lifecycle of the vehicle.
All things considered, green energy is better than fossil and EVs are better than ICEs. Of course where we really need to go is reducing individual transport by expanding public transit infrastructure, electrified buses, trams and trains easily beat personal EVs when it comes to resource use per person.
FWIW a bigger concern than the increased energy demand from EVs is the load this puts on the grid infrastructure. But this is also very much true for rooftop PV.
I can imagine they wanted to have a rapid publicity stunt boarding the trend train of 'Hey! We are so cool and modern and mindful and everything, we have EVs!'. Only to be slapped by reality pretty soon afterwards. As it is ubiquitous with marketing bs.
If you have a private garage. I live in a (non-US) city where there's shared garages (those who do have a garage, a lot of them just park outside) which are old and not always have power sockets. And even if they do, I don't think you're entitled to use them to charge your car. And do EVs work with standard power sockets, or needs some special stuff? I've never driven an EV.
I don't know where outside the US you live but in some countries tenants have the right to install a charging station. Of course they're not exactly cheap, especially if the wiring isn't set up to handle that kind of load (from personal experience: charging your car while the washing machine is running on the same circuit in an old house is an easy way to trip the breaker).
Private charging stations can also be installed outdoors just fine and strangers stealing your power is not a problem either (the plug can't be removed if the car is locked and you can literally switch the charger off if you're not using it). Most public chargers don't have a roof so charging your car in the open isn't exactly odd.
Also in many countries even more rural areas now have charging stations. Often you can pay a flat fee per month to freely use charging stations on the same network or to do so at significantly reduced rates. In my case there's even a nearby charging station that charges approximately the same rate I pay for my home electricity provider - although the speed is also similar so it's not very useful if you don't plan to leave your car for a few hours.
Mostly I charge at work not at home, which uses 240v power (think an electric dryer), and that can charge the car fully in 8-10 hours.
I encourage anybody with the time and diligence to do their own residential electrical work. It can save you a lot of money, and add a lot of value to your home.
The question in the survey is whether they "would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent".
Got $10k in highly liquid stocks and you'd sell some? Or you have plenty of money in your savings account but you use credit cards for all purchases? Then you get counted as "can't come up with $400".
It's useful to look at how the number changes over time, but trying to interpret the raw percentage is prone to misstep.
Vs Uber: I personally prefer driving myself. No wait, and freedom (shoot, it's 10pm and I realize I forgot to pack toothpaste, I might not want to pay Uber $20 for a stupid round trip to CVS to buy a $2 tube of toothpaste). Also I tend to get carsick if the driver's not smooth.
They make more sense for the short term car-club type rentals, where they can be charged the whole time when not in use, then borrowed for an hour or 2 booked on an app. But if you can't charge at home, it makes little sense to use an EV at the moment. It might make sense for small fleets of rental EVs to be based at hotels. You could just take whichever car was charged when you go out in the morning.
The other problem Hertz had was repair costs. EVs are more expensive to repair both because there are less repairers qualified to repair them and because parts are more expensive and more valuable etc.. I expect people driving unfamiliar cars are more likely to have accidents with them, so this would be worse for rental companies than for normal people.
When the infrastructure is there and reliable, and range is consistent with gas vehicles, I’ll make a full switch.
I don't agree. It really depends on what usage you're aiming for.
For instance, if you rent a car right out of an airport so that you can drive to the hotel and then to an meeting somewhere in the city and afterwards perhaps somewhere else and then back to the hotel, you're renting a car so that you are completely free to travel across town to get where you need to be. These are relatively short drives zig-zagging across town which can include a few hours of parking between rides.
It sounds like an EV is the ideal vehicle for this use pattern.
If instead you need to go on long rides that take hours and you can't afford wasting hours charging then EVs are not as well suited as ICE-powered cars.
EVs are best for the types of driving we do on a day-to-day basis. Short commutes in areas we know well. Charge at home over night and 95% of the year you never worry about charging.
Renting a car means I'm usually either driving long distances or im somewhere new and I don't know about the local charging infrastructure. Can I charge at the hotel? What about at Disney World or the San Diego Zoo or wherever else I'm driving on vacation? What if there are no super chargers nearby? Etc...
Maybe in a couple decades of battery/energy tech advancements where we can charge faster or swap batteries easier EVs for rentals will make more sense. Until then it's just extra stress you don't want when traveling. I know that's not why Hertz is dropping Tesla (the article sites high repair costs) but it's just my personal thought on rental EVs.