This sucks because it was one desk person, one supervisor, one general manager… Each reaffirmed the poor decision creating a terrible headache for all involved including the higher ups that dealt with this.
I don’t own an EV, so I don’t know how all this works. But I find this behaviour very weird. The amount of energy needed to move a car is gigantic compared to, well, everything else inside the car. Even without power to move the vehicle, there should be enough charge to open the doors, operate the computer and so on.
When my phone shuts down from lack of power, if I immediately put it in the charge, it will light up the screen to show the battery symbol. So, even if there’s not enough juice to power all the components of the phone, there’s still some charge to turn the screen on to show the battery status. Only if I don’t charge it for a long time is that the screen will take time to start showing me the battery symbol.
Phones do not show you the real battery state. The % of real charge left when your battery shows 0% will differ depending on OS and version, but no smartphone will allow you to continue running it when approaching empty.
This is because the closer you get to a really empty battery, the more risk of wear there is on components. Suddenly undervolting components because your battery physically cannot supply enough power is not good.
None of these batteries completely discharges. None.
Ignoring that, there is zero reason the vehicle needs to shutdown all powered accessories. It is more than capable of leaving enough charge to operate the door.
Thinking about this, how do the emergency lights work? Dead in the side of the road with not indicators available should be illegal.
You should reread the comment you replied to. They never said phone batteries completely discharge. They said users don't see the real "percentage of charge" when a phone "dies". They actually said that the reported 0% isn't actually 0%.
Further, they were accurate about undervolting components. I'll add that the damage would of course happen sooner to the battery than the components, but the point stands. No use throwing shade here.
I’m more familiar with desktop components than mobile devices, so that was my frame of reference there with undervolting. Didn’t know about the battery damage, thanks for the interesting tidbit.
Not sure about other phones, but Apple made their devices purposefully shut off before they're totally dead, so that they have enough power to be located for 1-2 days if lost.
It’s even weirder than that, there is an entirely separate 12v battery that powers the doors, screen, accessories, and everything else except the motors. The big high voltage battery literally only powers the motors and charges the 12v one. If the HV battery dies, the rest of the car works as normal just without being able to drive. So I don’t understand how this happened
That sounds like a horrible idea logistically, you still need to ship stuff from a cargo terminal to the location its needed and putting single containers on rail as their own “train” makes traffic a absolute nightmare there will never not be some kind of truck unless we can Teleport shit around or airships become a cheap, fast and reliable option.
The problem is mostly that we don’t build rail spurs in industrial areas anymore. If we did, then these cars could detach from trains at a shunting yard, and split up to head to all their different destinations individually. But the only last-mile infrastructure we currently have is roads.
I rented from them once, didn’t have a choice, my car was totaled. They tried to make me pay a late fee for something I returned on time, my insurance agent chewed them out for that hardcore. I didn’t pay those fuckers a dime, and I sincerely hope someone was fired.
The woman agreed to operate a 2000lbs+ machine w/o doing her due diligence. I’m sure the paperwork she signed stated that she was capable of operating such a machine, which means she lied. Hertz may be a crappy company, but this woman is irresponsible.
Hertz is a horrible company. If you have any other option, use it. If you have no other option, just walk into traffic. It’s less painful than dealing with their scams.
Hah. the biggest inaccuracy here is too many roundabouts.
Honestly, the part that shocks me landing in the US is typically the repeat buildings. The same mall, the same school, the same baseball... eh... court? pitch? gamey space? All of it repeated at regular intervals, surprisingly close to each other.
Because you can't all get to the same one, so they need to copy paste the facilities within driving distance for coverage area like it's Sim City.
Also, holy crap, that's why Sim City works like that.
EDIT: Also why even in moder city builders you can't have housing over commercial areas and why people freak out by cranking up their taxes by 0.1%, but I had noticed those already.
Devs from a city builder game (SimCity or Cities: Skyline) tried to replicate the scale of buildings/lots in real life, but then they realized that a small percentage of the lot is the actual building and it’s mostly parking lots.
Gotta love the cost of free parking here in America
That's what you call the actual field, not just the actual square part with the bases? I wasn't being facetious, I genuinely didn't know what word to use there.
Just call it a stadium. The names will vary with being called a field, park, or stadium, but if you say stadium everyone will know what you mean.
E.g. Turn left by (the stadium/Wrigley Field/Fenway Park/Dodger Stadium)
ETA: Field is generally used for small ones, like you would see in a public park. So if you go to city park to play football/soccer/baseball/whatever, you would call it the $SPORT field if it is on grass. If it is on a hard surface like basketball or tennis, you would say court. Stadium is for large structures with several thousand+ of spectators, and again the proper names are inconsistent, but stadium as a general term works.
Hopefully this helps. American English is all sorts of ambiguous and inconsistent. One positive is it is nice not having gendered nouns and it is forgiving enough that even with grammar errors, a native speaker will know what you mean, like the plural of cow is sometimes cattle when you used as an adjective “cattle farm”. Nobody would be confused if you said “cows farm”, but along with the inevitable accent, it would be a tell that you aren’t a native speaker
A few months ago I made a reservation to rent a car with hertz. When I showed up, the only available car was a mostly dead EV. I’m glad I did a little research before agreeing to it because I would have had to go way out of my way to charge it, and the charging process would have taken HOURS to achieve the charge I needed for my trip.
I’m pro-EV in general but rental companies shouldn’t be offering them in their current state imo
A charged battery should be expected from a rental EV, totally. It’s not difficult for Hertz to install a fast charger at their locations to handle that for their vehicles and just cycle through the to keep their inventory charged.
Now 100% may not be realistic. Just like your phone getting from say 80% to a full charge can take as long or longer than from 0% to 80%. But a full charge isn’t necessary most of the time, and there are a lot of public chargers, even without the adapter to use 3rd party chargers on a Tesla for instance.
and the charging process would have taken HOURS to achieve the charge I needed for my trip.
I see people post this, and honestly it’s usually just not true. It is entirely a lack of understanding and/or education and just assuming you need to treat it like your gas vehicle. Which isn’t unexpected of course, it’s just that fully charging is not necessary in an EV and will just waste your time. Now I’m not saying that the car battery would not take hours to fully charge, that is true… It does take a very long time to take a car battery from 0 to 100%… but you just don’t need to fully charge most of the time. Especially if you’re driving a longer distance.
Fully charging Lithium-Ion batteries actually damages the battery a LOT more than partial charges do, just like on your phone. And charging at a low state of charge is a lot faster than when the battery is nearly full. They’re both using Li-Ion batteries after all. It is actually quite fast to charge from say 20% to 60% on a DC fast charger or Tesla Supercharger. You don’t need to fully charge every time you plug in, on a trip you only need to charge enough to make the next leg of the journey.
In most EVs, you just enter your destination in the navigation and it will take into account your charge level and automatically include needed charging stops along the way. I can tell you from personal experience that in a Tesla, most of my stops during longer trips are no more than 15 minutes long because of how the fast chargers are spaced out. That 15 minutes usually will shove about 50% charge into the battery via a Supercharger. It will have you arrive at the charger with as little charge as possible on purpose because a lower state of charge means power can be sent to the battery faster (within reason, it tries to leave about 20% as a safety buffer). Unless you’re driving to a very remote location, you’re probably pretty close to a charger at any given time.
A screenshot of Tesla’s current US charging map for an example](i.imgur.com/xMrkhMT.png)/. You can check their website if you want to look at your area to see. Destination chargers are located at places like malls, hotels, etc. and are usually an amenity for guests to help charge slowly overnight or while shopping. Superchargers on the other hand will shove power into the pack to charge as fast as possible and get you on the way.
You don’t need to, you can ignore all that. The car will tell you where the closest charger is. You just have to tap the button and it will take you there. You can treat it like a regular gas car, you just may be wasting time by doing so and charging to 100% all the time.
I think that actually reinforces my point about rentals though- I’m a relatively tech savvy individual and I didn’t know much of that, and would have been unlikely to be able to easy learn that information in an environment/situation such as “need a rental car now”.
You are fine with google tracking you every waking moment?
Yes, I am aware you can be tracked via other means e.g. triangulation and some such. Still, I turn off as much as I can. I try to get as little privacy invasion as possible.
A lot of people claim that this is a ‘feature’ and welcome google into their lives. Obviously some don’t know the full extent of it all, but remember there’s people who willingly broadcast their location to the world via snapchat. Scary stuff
A video on “how to open a door” is more than ten minutes long. Oh, Youtubers. You’re no better than those recipes that come prepended with the author’s life story sometimes.
According to YouTube advice people, monetization works best for videos between 7 and 15 minutes. That's changed now though as they're focused on Shorts, their TikTok knock off. Probably even easier to advertise between a bunch of 30-60 sec videos.
If you require a video on how to open doors at all there is a problem with the car, let alone a 10 minute video that includes explanations about how the manual release can damage the car.
A video isn’t necessary at all. The manual release is in a normal spot on both the driver and passenger front doors. New passengers try to open my Model 3 doors by pulling that lever all the time instead of using the normal button.
I got stranded in a rental moving truck because they gave it to me with a low tire that turned out to be damaged. I'm still not sure if I handled it right, but I ended up denying the charges for an extra day since it was 100% their fault (still waiting to see if my bank agrees...). Nice to see these people were refunded, but still they were put on the blacklist. Fuck these companies.
Plenty of rentals, Hertz included, go out on less than full. You are only required to fill it where you got it. E.g car goes out with half, you return it with half.
the best part about this is that the rental company will charge you for not filling up to make up the difference… but then not bother filling up the car and just send it out with half a tank.
More often than not I’ve found they don’t care and won’t charge you. I’ve had several times where I didn’t care told them to change me and they said I was good.
I’ve never gotten anything other than full-to-full from Avis. But yeah, I’ve gotten that with Hertz and Enterprise - usually along with other problems.
Is situations like this where it’s a last minute swap, normally they’ll either have you return it at or above the current level or simply tell you that fuel is on the house.
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