Orlando airport has Hertz and that is quite a large hub there.
If Avis is calling you and saying EV only you should have canceled the reservation and walked over to Hertz.
FL is not geared up for EV yet unless it’s Tesla. Not worth it.
Sorry you had a bad experience.
Even public charging stations are a mess, you have to have different apps, many are out of order, make sure you have the right connector/car, different forms of payment, etc.
EV will never become mainstream because of this nonsense.
Probably wasn’t impossible. Better option would have been to just take a car from the airport. You decided to accept a car you knew nothing about.
Would you have taken a manual transmission car if you didn’t know how to drive it?
This has nothing to do with EVs and everything to do with a screwup from the rental place and you accepting the car from them.
In all seriousness though, I would make a big deal with Avis corporate and see what they can do to make it right. You shouldn’t be put on the spot to accept a car you didn’t reserve or want.
I didn’t have time to go to the airport far away to pick up another car. I spent a lot of money on HHN tickets and didn’t want to miss it. The Avis guy said the range was 250 miles and that I could charge at Tesla. Based on the information given to me at that time and the time crunch I was in I decided to take his word for it. Clearly a mistake.
Neighborhood Avis locations are independently owned where I live, corporate doesn’t care much, If I wanna spend hours chasing a decision maker maybe I’ll get a 1 day free rental pass. Not worth my time. Been there, done that.
Bruh it’s not his fault; he booked a particular car and Avis pulled a fast one. He’s not obligated to be an EV expert. Even the customer service rep gave him idiotic info of being able to charge at a Tesla station.
How are you not blaming Avis on this one?
They have dc fast chargers about every 30 miles at every rest stop/service plaza on the drive between miami and orlando. I’m not really sure what more one could need.
What app do you use? Plugshare?
ElectrifyAmerica wouldn’t work for our Jeep 4XE’s right? They use the fast charge.
I pretty much only look for chargepoint.
Next time Turo. Miami area has an endless bounty of fun cars for $100/day.
Evs don’t belong in rental fleets yet. I agree with that. The average person on vacation shouldn’t be burdened to learn the intricacies of them, maybe give them the car free to promote them will be the next govt subsidy.
I’ve never plugged a car in so I prob would have believed the employee as well about the Tesla chargers. My i8 got such low range I never took the charger out of the plastic.
At least with Hertz, even then a politely worded email to the regional person can yield some results, despite being an independently owned/operated location. A simple email about a fairly upsetting issue I had (rental Highlander stalled while in motion and remained dead for about 20 minutes before I could restart it. Had to have a stranger help me push it out of the way of the parking lot roadway I was in), did get me a partial refund. A few emails back & forth all in and we agreed upon an amount that was about 20% of my weekly rental cost. I definitely could have pushed for more and taken a firmer tone, but like you I wanted to put it behind me and didn’t want to spend more than 15 minutes and a few emails to deal with it.
