This is my second time renting an EV. First time wasn’t too bad. We stayed local and only had to charge once.
This Thanksgiving we had to drive from Chicago to Omaha to Minneapolis and back to Chicago. It was approximately 1400 miles total. $289 in electric charges. (that feels a lot more expensive than gas). We had to stop every 2 hours to charge for an hour so it extended our trips by 50%. This was quite challenging when we were in a caravan of cars and the ICE ones beat us by several hours. A 6 hour drive turned into 10 hours. I shaved off a few hours by always running the car down to the last couple miles and charging it to 100%. One time was not by choice as we almost ran out due to a dead zone. We were then charged $50 to fill up 3/4 tank at an EA in the middle of Minnesota. That was kind of our breaking point.
Some positives are it was a smooth ride and felt great in the snow.
We wanted to buy an EV but wanted to see how they fair on road trips in the midwest. This experience may scare us away for a while as it was exhausting stressful and expensive. Wondering what we did wrong since so many enjoy EV.
Yeah i know for next time. It was a rental so I didn’t have much time to research it beforehand. Kind of just got it and left. It seems I made a number of mistakes including choosing a not ideal vehicle and improper charging.
Oh man, now i feel bad bc there were two occasions where I charged to 100 with other vehicles waiting.
With EA, I was rounding. It was $48 and change. I think i was price gouged bc that location was the only one around.