Experiences renting electric cars?

[PeteM]

I was wondering what people’s experience is with renting electric cars?

I’ve generally been reluctant to do it, because I don’t want to spend my holiday looking for charging points and worrying about ranges.

But I need a car for the day in Prague next weekend and Sixt’s cheapest option was a little electric VW, the range of which would work perfectly for the journey I need to make and back.

So I started looking at what the policy for returning an electric car is and they don’t seem to have one. I found one for Sixt France, which says you have to return the car as you got it, ie fully charged.

Which, in my view, completely kills the appeal of an electric car? Surely no one wants to spend x-hours at the end of their holiday charging the car? They say otherwise they’ll charge you a recharging fee, which of course isn’t detailed…

[memesweeper]

I’ve only rented in the UK but there’s never been a question of returning the car charged. I’d email the station you’re renting from directly.

[PeteM]

Thanks, @memesweeper. That’s what I kind of assumed, but the Sixt France site made me wonder!

[BLT]

Hertz USA policy is they rent out the car close to 100% charge and when you return it you need a minimum of 10%. Worked well when we rented a Tesla over the summer.

[PeteM]

I ended up renting a regular car, but asked about this.

The very nice Sixt man said they don’t mind the level of charge electric cars are returned with. He did say, though, that the VW Up! comes in two ranges – something like 125km and 250km. Apparently Sixt bought the former, giving it a super limited range and making it basically useless as a hire car. He said they’d had no end of complaints about them. An interesting lesson for sure!