As I’m sitting on a plane bored after 20 rounds of playing sling drift, I felt like this would be a great time to vent a little about my recent EV experience. Disaster would be an understatement, but I let you decide…
I reserved a car with Avis to take on a spontaneous trip to HHN in Orlando.
HHN is one of my favorite events and I have a whole system and plan on how I go about my visit to maximize seeing all the haunted houses in the shortest amount of time. I’m not going to go into detail here but arrival at a certain time is part of my plan to make it all work.
I ordered the car for noon pickup which gives me 5 hours to get there, which is plenty of time. At 11:15am I get a call from Avis “we have some bad news but Avis pulled our inventory, all I have left for you is a Kia Niro EV”. Having no time to get another rental elsewhere I went to pick up the car.
Now this is important:
- I know nothing about EVs. Never jumped on the LH Bolt or Etron craze. I had a hybrid BMW before with a battery that gave me 12 miles of range which I always felt was not worth the hassle of charging so I never did.
- I had no time to educate myself because I had to get the car immediately to make it in time.
- I listened to the rental car employee believing that he must know what he’s taking about.
When I picked up the car I asked what the range is on that car. He told me 250 miles. My trip was 200 miles so I felt that based on his information, I would have enough range to make it to HHN, the hotel and a charger in the morning. Since I had no alternative car I felt that it was doable so I took the car. I was told by the Avis employee that i could charge the car at Tesla chargers with the included cable in the trunk and to download an app to find chargers on the way which I did. The car did show 254 mile range when I got in.
45 minutes into the trip I noticed the range number going down faster and faster. We started looking at the app to find a charger on the way because it became clear that we weren’t going to make it.
We then found out that you can’t charge a Kia EV at a Tesla charger. Well of course you can’t If you really think about it but I took the Avis employees word and didn’t give it much more thought, my concern was to leave in time to make it.
Then we came to find out that not all chargers are created equal and that I’d have to find a charger that is a fast charger. That was a problem as well as there were none around me and I had to drive out of my way to find one.
Ended up at a fast charger at a Wawa gas station somewhere in the middle of nowhere. We loaded $10 on the app which you need to pay for the charge but the charger turned out to be free courtesy of Wawa so we kinda wasted $10 on the app.
The charge took 26 min to get us back to 80% charged. Apparently you can’t fill up past that quickly, the last 20% of charge take a long time even on a fast charger. It’s just one smack in the face after the next. Ended up stuffing my face with 1200 empty calories of fried food from PDQ while waiting for the car to charge. Nothing like drowning your EV problems in greasy chicken fingers and fries.
Of course all this took a lot of time and we ended up getting to HHN late, which kinda messed up my mapped-out game plan. Still ended up having a good time until after we left.
Now at 1am, we are sitting in the Universal parking lot ($27 by the way to park there), debating what to do with my 35 mile of remaining range. Called the hotel, they have no chargers. I couldn’t find a fast charger on the app near the hotel either. I wasn’t confident that I’d have enough range left to drive around in the morning to find a charger. Even if we did we’d still only have an 80% charge which wouldn’t be enough to get back so I’d have to charge 2-3 times to just try to get home. And that would mean more breaks wasting a bunch of time and calories again.
I then did the only sensible decision I could come up with while tired AF at 1am after walking 23000 steps through HHN:
Use up the remaining couple of mile range to try to make it to the 24-hour Avis airport location to swap it out for a normal car.
They swapped me out for a Prius. Yes, a Prius, and I couldn’t have been happier.
So the moral of the story, and really the reason why I wrote this long story, is to provide some insight into what a road trip with an EV is like in case you ever consider getting into EVs. Especially if you don’t know about EVs like me.
I know all you Tesla fanboys will say how it’s different with Teslas. And maybe it is. Sure, the infrastructure is better etc but it’s still an EV and you still have to make stops and charge it and it’s just so so so annoying.
My condo building is full of Teslas, can’t charge them there either. The owners have to go drive in rush hour traffic and find a charger and then sit there and charge.
I know all the manufacturers are leaning into EVs. But it’s not a car for everyone.
If you live in a house and have the ability to install the right charger at home and you just do local driving to do some grocery shopping, sure it can be a great fit.
For anybody else, might be worth thinking about it twice.
Or rent one for a day and experience all the hassle yourself.
The choice is yours, my choice is a hard no to EVs.
. I think this may have made my Saturday. 
-lay it on me 