1) I'm likely driving more than I do at home

2) I don't know if my hotel/s will have chargers

3) I am cognizant of my time and don't want to drive out of my way to sit in parking lots while my car charges

4) I might be travelling to rural areas where chargers are infrequent

Not saying that the issues you brought up are invalid, but I do think there's a demand problem.

The most challenging experience was an electric camper. It had a 100 mile max range. I drove it from LA to Seattle without major issue. The only pucker factor was around Silicon Valley where I struggled to find functional fast chargers. No shortage of chargers, just very few that work.

The state of chargers is atrocious. Many of them do not work and the apps are horrible. Signup flows that ask for too much information and don’t set form metadata for auto-completion. Just endless papercuts.

I used A Better Route Planner which does a good job of tracking what chargers actually work but still has an infuriating UI.

For a regular rental car situation I would not hesitate to get an EV. In fact that’s my preference now that I am over the learning curve.

It made me wonder how often I'd be worried about finding a charger if I owned an EV.

If my total expected mileage is practical without charging and I expect the car to start adequately charged, fine. It’s like a free tank of gas.

If not, I can’t charge at home. Charging at a hotel is a PITA. Charging first thing in the morning in cold weather without heated parking is slooooow even at a Supercharger.

And I really don’t want to deal with the utter mess of charger networks and their ridiculous membership cards.

And the usual rental model of strongly encouraging customers to return the car with a full tank of gas doesn’t really make sense for EVs.

This isn't an insurmountable problem, but most people don't like any additional uncertainty when traveling and that extra little bit of friction is probably enough to make travelers want gas powered cars. But I can also see that changing over time as more chargers come on line and especially if hotels start becoming reliable charging destinations. If I could rent an EV and charge at my hotel, that's way more convenient than looking for a gas station.

There are a lot of questions that the general populace simply doesn’t know the answers to. It’s really easy for me to believe what was said about range anxiety as a serious contributing factor to the programs lackluster performance. It wouldn’t have undone the damage the extra depreciation cost, but commercial/popular success would’ve come with rewards.

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.

Vacations are so time constrained that a huge % of ICE renters opt to just get hosed on gas up fees that rental companies charge instead of going to any ubiquitous gas station before dropping the car off. Car drop off with a flight to catch is always a race against time.

I just bought an EV (Model Y) because I needed a new car (I would have waited longer if I could have), and I live in an apartment that doesn't have chargers. I work from home, so I don't have a commute, so it's not a deal breaker, but it's definitely not ideal. I live in Austin, which has a network of public chargers that you can use for only 4$ a month, so that helps, but still not ideal. With my ICE car, I can run it until the gas light goes on, and even then I know I can drive for 20 miles without worries, because there's invariably a gas station within < 5 miles away. With the EV right now, that's not the case. There are slow chargers nearby, but fast chargers are about 7 miles away.

In my situation, my worst case is that I have to go to a supercharger about once a week. I did this for the first time recently, another gripe I have is that the range I get out of the car (Model Y LR) is a lot lower than what I expected to get (~200 miles vs 330). At current gas prices, it's actually MORE expensive to charge the Tesla at a supercharger (0.38$/kWH @ 74KW capacity / 200 miles = 0.14$ a mile, than it was to fill up my Elantra at a gas station (3.50$ per gallon at 30MPG = 0.11$). If I lived in a house, obviously I would save a lot more money, since electricity prices are only like 0.11$/kWH I think.

It's an interesting problem. In dense urban environments, the infrastructure has a long way to go. However, I think this is probably the minority, since most people live in the suburbs or smaller cities in America. In those cases, they can simply charge at home, and they might have to visit a supercharger on road trips or odd cases. Therefore the demand for charging will be lower than it would be for gas cars.

Road trips was something that was I was worried about when making the purchase in 2018, and it turned out to be a complete non-issue. In all that time, I have waited for a charger exactly once, for under 5 minutes, because we decided to stop at a busy outlet mall. During road trips, I'm not going to argue that we don't spend more time charging than we would stopping for gas, but it's not enough to bother me or my family, and if we include getting snacks or a bathroom break, the car is ready to go before we are.

It is wildly offset by the convenience of never having to fill up the car outside of those occasional road trips. People in the comments are talking about gas cars as the ones where you just get in and go without having to think about it -- there's very much a mirror image of that situation with an EV. When I had a gas car, fueling it was a constant chore. I had to think about it orders of magnitude more often. It simply doesn't come up with our EV. Every time it leaves the house, it does so with hundreds of miles of range. The idea of getting another car where I have to watch the gas gauge is almost reason enough that I'm going to stick with electric forever.

It is absolutely true that my experience is highly dependent on where I live, the kind of use I have for a car, the places I go, resources available to me, and just dumb luck. Others' mileage, literally, may vary. I'm not trying to sell you on this. It's just really easy to overestimate the importance of EV range.

The EV renting experience is bad. I got one though Avis, I believe a Kia Niro. I was told that I’d be charged if I brought it back under 80%. It was at 81%. Ok fine, I’m driving less than 50 miles and returning it. I’ll find a charger, since my AirBNB didn’t have charger.

We tried to use the on board map to find a charging station. It took us two tries to find on that was actually public, which was at a fire station. It took over an hour to go from 70% to 85%.

I never had range anxiety about the car itself, but trying to return it full enough was anxiety inducing, even though it wasn’t that big a fee.

I feel my experience would have been really improved if 1) they made the fee be a sliding amount based on how close you returned it to where you checked out and 2) there was an onboard L1 charger you could use with a normal plug.

But I've also rented EVs in metros with decent fast charging, but none at the hotel. It was fun, but charging was a notable downside.

On the flip side, on most days it would be much more hassle to spend 10 minutes or so refueling my ICE car instead of just driving home, connecting my EV and let it charge overnight.

Granted, I have a property that allows the installation of a charger. But so do basically all suburban Americans, many people in cities and around the world. People that live so urban that owning their own charging infrastructure is impractical are probably better served with public transport, anyway.

I drive a lot, and I’ve ran into a situation only once where I had to find a charging station away from home. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as people worry.

I pay about 15% of what I would have previously paid for diesel, and the only maintenance I've had to do was a new tyre after running over a nail.