Rental company gives woman EV instead of SUV she reserved, she spends hours trying to charge it

A San Diego, Calif., resident took a trip to Oakland to see an 88-year-old relative who had “a health scare.” She reserved a midsize SUV from Budget Car Rental from an office in Oakland, but when she got there, she was told the vehicle she’d reserved wasn’t ready.

So the office offered her a Mustang Mach E. The woman, who is retired, knew little about electric vehicles.

“What I was really surprised about is that they handed me these keys and gave me zero instruction,” Diane Strain told Just The News.

Strain would end up struggling to find a place to charge it, before a Ford dealership helped her out. Then, it took about eight hours to charge to full.

The story is not unlike that of a brother and sister who rented a Tesla from Hertz to go on a road trip. Once they ended up hitting cold weather, which greatly reduced the car’s range, the added charging times forced them to spend 17 hours to go 452 miles.

Hertz to be green

Car buyers aren’t purchasing electric vehicles at the rates the Biden administration had set in its mandates. And even renters don’t appear to be taking to the vehicles. Vehicle rental company Hertz Global Holdings Inc. is continuing to suffer as a result of its bet on electric vehicle rentals.

In October 2021, the company announced it would buy 100,000 Teslas for its fleet, and then announced in September 2022 that it would buy 175,000 EVs from General Motors over five years. It also planned to buy up to 65,000 EVs from Polestar.

The company then announced in January it was selling 20,000 of the EVs it had in its fleet in order to finance the purchase of more gas-powered vehicles, because of low customer demand and high damage repair costs. In March, Hertz CEO Stephen Sherr resigned after the EV bet went bust.

In its first quarter earnings report posted Thursday, the company said it would sell 30,000 of its EVs in 2024, up from the 10,000 it had originally planned. As a result, Hertz will incur a $195 million charge to vehicle depreciation to write down the EVs it held for sale.

Plenty of chargers

Strain said she likes learning new things and didn’t think the EV experience would be that bad.

When she got into the EV that Budget had offered her, she noticed that it was only charged to 82%. The lot attendant, Strain said, told her that the charge was “plenty” and there were chargers everywhere.

The first part is largely true. Electric vehicles are typically kept around 80% charge because it’s better for the long-term health of the battery, and the last 20% of a 100% charge takes much longer. However, with no EV experience, Strain didn’t have more to go on than what the attendant told her, and the availability of charging stations turned out to be exaggerated.

“They never once asked, ‘Where are you traveling to?’ I was traveling to the suburbs 40 miles away,” she said.

She saw there was a charging station at a gas station across from her hotel, and she planned to go over on Sunday to charge the car before returning to Oakland on Monday. She expected the charge to take a couple of hours and figured she’d just walk back to the hotel while it charged.

At the station, she discovered the plug didn’t fit her car. The attendants at the station told her it was a vendor who operated the charging bays, and so they couldn’t help her. She found a YouTube video that showed that there were adapters in the trunk, but none of them fit the charging bay plug.

Fortunately, a friendly customer at the charging station explained to her that the station was a Tesla Supercharger and Ford doesn’t currently have compatibility with those kinds of chargers.

“I'm like, ‘okie dokie. Well, good to know,’” Strain said.

What now?

Strain looked up on the car’s app where she could find a compatible charging station. She found two, and they were both an hour away. She recalled seeing a Ford dealership in the suburb, so she decided to give them a call.

“I thought, ‘well, this is going to be great, because it's at the dealer, it's gonna be really fast, right? It's gotta be the high end charger. Why wouldn't it be?’’” Strain said.

She expected that it would take an hour or two. With a book in hand, Strain sat down in the service waiting room, where they had some coffee. As it turned out, the dealership didn’t have the fast chargers, and she was informed it would take five to six hours.

The dealership gave her a courtesy ride to her family’s house, and after the car had been charging a few hours, the dealership called to tell her that it was “languishing” at 75% charge. She decided to leave it there for a couple of more hours, which was past when the dealership was closing.

The dealership, she said, was very accommodating. Besides driving her to her family's house, they even brought her key back to her when she decided to leave it there to charge after closing. They also never charged her for the cost to charge the car, she said.

“They could not have been nicer. I could tell they felt badly about my plight,” Strain said.

Over 5,000 dealerships have signed onto letters to President Joe Biden to voice their objections to the EV mandates, as they’ve had so much trouble selling EVs. Perhaps the dealership’s staff was aware of the shortcomings of EVs and sympathized with Strain’s EV difficulties.

She said that when she brought the car back to Budget, she spoke with the manager. The company promised her a discount, but she said the discount she received is less than what they promised.

“So no EVs in my future, and I won’t be the sucker who says yes next time,” Strain said on a Facebook post about the experience.

Just The News reached out to Budget but didn’t receive a response.

Her friend Jeff Reynolds, senior researcher for Restoration of America, posted Strain’s story as part of a weekly collection of the worst climate stories.

He told Just The News that, considering all the trouble Hertz has had, it was surprising that Budget offered her an electric vehicle as an alternative to the gas-powered vehicle she’d reserved.

“I suppose the mistakes happened long before she got to the airport, when Ford decided to destroy the Mustang in the first place,” Reynolds wrote about Strain’s experience.