Fun driving the Telsa. A slight learning curve but I picked using all the bells and gadgets quickly. The Budget person dropping it of was excellent.
quick efficient rental and fair price
I'm sorry I just completely answered my experience question with budget in the previous statement for Expedia and I really really hope someone reads it and acknowledges it because it was the car rental from hell...
.. where do I begin. Well I begin at the beginning. I didn't realize I had booked an electric car. Never drove one before. Don't really know anything about them. So I thought okay this is an opportunity to find out. I was only going to be using the car to drive from point A and back, 170 mi each way. On the freeway. Seems simple enough. And it should have been and could have been, but wasn't due to the inadequate information provided to me by the rental agent regarding the electric car. My suggestion is that there should be a cheat sheet in every electric car, telling renters and basic information about how electric cars work and of course about charging them. But the biggest mistake that really messed me up with this rental was that the rental agent when I asked what the range was on the car, that was my main question because I know that's important. The car was a Kia Niro, he said the range was 220 miles. I was going to be driving 170 miles each way, and the hotel I was going to I know had electric car chargers so I figured I was good. I got the car and went on my way back home to put my stuff in the car before leaving. Fortunately for me my neighbor's son who works at Lexus and knows all about cars happened to be at my location when I got home visiting his mother. I told him that I had electric car but I didn't really know anything about it because all the rental agent said to me was to charge the car you needed to tap your credit card. That and the mileage range was all I said to me about it. I'm 74 years old so I've driven a lot of different cars and I know they all vary a little bit in one way or another, I also know that you should have a general idea of the dashboard and whatnot before you take off. So my neighbor's son looked at it, the dashboard to just show me where things were and he noticed that the car did not have the 220 miles available on it that I was told, after driving home from the airport where I picked it up, which was a couple of miles, the car had 176 miles on it. He told me that wasn't going to be enough although technically it was because I was driving 170 miles, he said electric cars are basically like gas cars the kind of mileage you get, depends on how you drive. Faster you drive the poor the mileage if you have the air conditioning on the poorer the mileage. I had no clue about this. He told me I needed to charge the car and get at least 20 more miles on it and ideally more to make sure the car didn't die on the freeway on route to my destination. He also explained to me that all charging machines are not created equal, when it comes to cars that are not Teslas and you can't use a Tesla charger on any other kind of vehicle. After some trial and error I found some charging stations at a shopping center after backtracking to get to it. Usually I've noticed that the electric cars are like gas cars in that the chargers on the side of the car. Well not with this car, I found it on the front of the car, covered by this flap. I couldn't get the flap open to access the charger. Fortunately a couple walk by just then and the man offered to help me. Again after some trial and error discovered the way to get the flap open which you had to push unlock on the key fob. Well apparently this was one of those slow charging machines, I had picked the car up at 5:00 p.m. . It was now 8:00 p.m. and and I finally had 20 extra miles charged on the car. It took over an hour and a half for that. Because of this delay in time and that 3-hour estimated drive to my destination, it being Sunday evening I knew I was going to miss my dinner at my destination. Thank God my neighbor's son told me about putting additional miles on the charging of the vehicle because if I hadn't done that, the car would have died on the freeway because when I got to my destination I had six miles to spare. Now the vehicle does have a warning that comes on that tells you you only have 15% of charge left, but to someone like me who knows nothing about how these cars work that meant nothing, but it did have a screen that told you places you could get off the freeway and find a charger. So being a reasonably intelligent person I probably would have done that but didn't do it because I knew I was only a couple miles from my destination and didn't want to spend time and Miles driving around looking for the charger in a strange city that I didn't know. The point is if there had been a cheat sheet in the car, telling me all these things that I didn't know it would have made a world of difference in this experience plus if the car had been fully charged at rental. I found out of return that the Santa Barbara airport even though it rents all major car rentals, doesn't have one single charging machine for either non Tesla's or Teslas, and that they have to drive several miles to the Costco to use their chargers to charge the rental cars. So a lot of times they don't bother to fully charge them. Which is fine if you're driving around town only, but I told the rental agent I was going to drive 170 MI. The hotel also had one of those slow charging things and it took over 10 hours to get the car just 80% charged, to 206 MI, which I figured was enough to get me home. But to be on the safe side, I did not use the air conditioning except for a minute here and there to keep me from getting heat stroke, because it was 95° outside. I did this because I was told that using the air conditioning would cut down on the available miles. And I just wanted to get home and be done with this an address my concerns and complaints to the return agent when I got there.. her name was Tammy and she was probably the most apathetic person I've ever encountered. Every problematic thing I tried to describe to her she canceled it out with some kind of comment and in the end made it all seem like everything was my fault and probably the most significant thing she said to me was yeah I've heard it all before I asked her what if I had died on the freeway due to running out of mileage. Her response was well you call roadside service. Roadside service doesn't have portable chargers so they would have towed the car to the nearest charger. How many more hours of my time would that have taken? She didn't care she just didn't care. And in the end she just said, well just don't rent an electric car anymore. She did take a whopping $10 off my rental.. she said that's all she's authorized to do.. there was no manager or anybody else there just her. I asked her how long she worked there. She said 2 years. In my opinion it's 2 years too long, obviously someone that doesn't enjoy customers and doesn't enjoy helping them and that's something I know a lot about as someone who worked as a rental agent for Hertz for 8 years and actually had customers come back and say you know we really enjoy renting from you you're so helpful and so nice on many occasions by the way, I tolerance for poor customer service is zero. If each of these agents had properly done their job I would not have had such a horrible experience. And as a additional note when I rented the car, there was no long line of customers behind me causing the rental agent to not give me adequate information. In summary, each electric car should have a cheat sheet in a giving basic information especially regarding the mileage range and how it's not what it seems to be and secondly that in any job that requires customer service, there's absolutely no room for apathy. If you don't like your job get another one...
Wasted my time. Budget did not honor the booking. Stop reserving the cars.
Super friendly and professional service. Clean nice car.
