Randy Dean rented a Tesla Model 3 for a day and shares what he learned. Read the manual first, find a charger before you leave the lot, and plan charging stops: his battery dropped from 82% to 36% over 60 miles, then recharged to 66% in 6-7 minutes. EV rentals often cost the same as economy cars.
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Hi everybody, Randy Dean here. Um, hey, uh, I rented for the first time an electric vehicle when I got my rental car versus a normal or hybrid vehicle. I actually got a Tesla 3. Uh, it was a lot of fun to drive. Um, a little bit of information in case you're new to this and you want to know how the process works. Uh, first thing, um, when I got the car, um, they gave me a little pamphlet. Definitely look at this if you haven't driven, uh, in the electric vehicle before, because it gives you some critical information on like where to find stuff inside the car, uh, including how to get the thing to drive if you haven't driven one before. Um, the other thing that I recommend you do is before you even leave the rental car property, uh, take a moment to find the closest charger for an EV, and like in this case, I'm renting a Tesla. I found the closest Tesla Supercharger to the airport. I'm actually sitting at the Supercharger right now juicing the car back up. Apparently it says that I have to return it at least 70%. When I picked it up, it was at 82%. I did quite a bit of highway driving, about 30 miles each direction, plus a little bit of city driving,, and in this one-day rental I went from 82% down to about 36%. I've been sitting here 6 or 7 minutes, I'm back up to 66%. I'm gonna try to get it up to like 85% before I take it back to the airport. And so definitely you're going to want to find a— and make sure that you have identified where you're going to recharge the car before you take off and go everywhere. If you're going to be driving a far distance, you might want to even map out your charging locations, um, along the path so that you, um, know where you're gonna go to do this. Because, you know, unlike gas stations on, you know, every on every city corner. Um, these you have to think a little bit more about, uh, in terms of finding them. There was that big announcement that GM and a couple other people are going into a joint venture with Tesla to basically double the size of the charging network. They're going from 30,000 to 60,000, but it's going to take a couple years, I think, for that to get all built out. Um, and so, you know, plot out your plan. I knew in this one that I was only going to be driving about 60 miles total, So I basically sort of figured I'm gonna drive it out, drive back, and see if I can do the whole thing without having to recharge it, which is exactly right. I didn't have to recharge until right before taking it to the airport. Um, and if you do these things, I think that the experience will work a lot better for you. Um, depending on the type of vehicle, you're going to want to find out. One thing that I noticed is they did provide a converter. So if you, you know, the Tesla had this converter inside of it in case I had to charge it at a non-Tesla location, but I figured probably easiest to find a Tesla charger if I could. This one's less than 5 miles from the airport, and so not bad, um, and just a good way to do it. Um, so I hope that you find this information helpful if you're thinking about renting an EV. It seems like they're a lot more available now. Uh, the price on this was the same price as an economy car You know, and I will tell you, it's way nicer than the typical economy car to drive one of these. So definitely worth checking out if you're interested in reducing your carbon footprint a bit and you'd like to give this a chance. Hope you find this helpful. Thanks. Bye.
