If you drive, then you have likely noticed the massive increase of EV cars in recent years, it feels like almost every other car on the road. They’re a popular choice for new car owners, so naturally as you might expect they’ve made their way into the fleets of car rental companies meaning you can now have a more eco-friendly way to holiday.
But, are they worth hiring, and should you do it? I was curious, so for my most recent holiday, I booked my Peugeot 208 Electric Car or similar through Auto Europe to pick up from Rome Ciampino Airport with the company Drivalia for the week – and I’m ready to tell you all about it.
Table of Contents
My general opinion on EVs
I feel before I get into advising and sharing my opinion on whether you should hire an EV, I should share my personal opinion on electric vehicles in general. Electric cars definitely split opinion, and several petrol heads simply refuse to touch them, so I want to be completely open before reviewing the experience.
I love EVs.
My personal car is a Tesla Model Y (boo, Elon, I know…), and the other car we have in the family, my wifes car, is a MG ZS EV – so we’re fully bought into the electric life. They are fantastically cost effective, and have minimal repair or maintenance costs and they work perfectly for us as we tend to only do short trips to and from work.
How do you hire an EV?
You can hire an electric vehicle through a handful of suppliers, depending on the location. I often see Sixt, Drivalia & Hertz to name a few.
For the most part, I use comparison sites like Rental Cars or Auto Europe, and these tend to have filters for electric cars now, as detailed in the below screenshot of the Rental Cars booking engine.
How does the cost compare?
I can actually answer this with real data, as I have all the invoices and costs of each charge and know the distance that we travelled over the duration. We did a fair bit of travelling through the week as we stayed pretty central, just outside of Perugia and I’m going to share our itinerary and travel throughout.
Rome CIA Airport to our Airbnb: 166km / 103m
Drive to Florence (& back): 350km / 217m
Drive to Perugia (& back): 46km / 29m
Drive to Rome – Jonio (& back): 296km / 183m
Drive to San Gimignano (& back): 340km / 211m
Airbnb back to Rome CIA Airport: 166km / 103m
*km = kilometers / m = miles
Total distance: 1,364km / 846m
So, in a week, it got a fair amount of use. I was luckily on an unlimited mileage policy with the rental company.
But more importantly, how much did it cost? Luckily I exclusively charged through one app, which sent me all the invoices throughout the trip.
I charged properly a total of 9 times, adding a total of 265.3kWh to the car. This cost a total of €234.50, an average of around €0.88 per kWh, you can get lower than this but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice more time by charging on a 22kWh charger, I always went to 75+ kWh.
Of course this is subject to how I drive, but I was relatively reserved and stuck within speed limits. I didn’t stress the car too much, but I also didn’t drive slow on the motorways to preserve miles.
How does this compare to a more traditional engine car? Luckily, the car we got, a Peugeot 208, has like-for-like comparisons. If you head over to Honest John, you can see the user submitted real MPG figures for petrol and diesel Peugeot 208’s using a comparable petrol, the 1.2 Puretech 110 Automatic, it gets 41mpg.
According to Numbeo, and in line with the prices we generally saw when there, the price for a litre of petrol or gas is €1.74, currently. Then using a fuel cost calculator, and having to convert everything to UK figures, the cost would have been €163.19.
In summary:
Electric Car Cost: €234.50
Petrol Car Cost: €163.19
So, the electric car actually cost me €71.31 more.
Which I would guess is due to inefficiencies at higher speeds with the particular car – but more on that later.
Tips for renting an electric car
If you are going to go for the electric rental car option then there are a few tips I picked up in this journey (and when I went to France in my personal car) that are useful to know before you pick up the vehicle.
Download the local app
The majority of chargers do offer contactless payment in most areas across Europe, in my experience, but when you Google electric chargers the main issue typically is that it doesn’t really give you details on if it’s operational.
There are several apps that you can use which have large networks of EV chargers and live details of each charger – including how many are at the location, what speed they are and importantly whether they are working. I used an app in Italy called Plenitude on the Road.
There is no worse feeling than driving to an EV charger with little to no mileage left, only to find out it isn’t working, the panic of searching for another close enough. The apps are also great for tracking costs, usage and other statistics.
Always pre-plan your journey
Unfortunately, one of the things you do have to do a lot more of when you have an electric car is preplanning. Most cars take 25-30 mins to get to a decent level of charge so that you can drive off again, often adding a fair bit of time to your journey, something you need to account for. Maybe I’m just cautious, but I always map out my journey beforehand, including the chargers that I’m going to use.
Beware of the policy (Full to full)
I actually had to research this and go through the terms and conditions to find out, but rental companies often operate a full to full policy – and I wasn’t sure if the same was true for electric vehicles.
Turns out it is, so you need to make note of electric chargers nearby the drop off location, or you will get charged.
Convenience, is it an issue?
Frankly, yes it was.
The main reason in my opinion was the car, the Peugeot 208, if I had my Tesla which offers a much longer range then it wouldn’t have been an issue.
The car I had with a full charge had a total range of 300km on a full charge, but I would say that I got closer to 200-220km, and I’m used to double that.
What it meant was spending a lot of time at chargers and unfortunately again due to the car the maximum charge speed was showing around 75kWh although the specification does say that it does slightly more, so every morning before the family woke up, I had to drive to the nearest EV charger to the Airbnb and fully charge before our trip for the day.
If I could have guaranteed a better, longer range EV, then it would have been less of a sticking point. Ultimately, I couldn’t, and it did eventually become a significant inconvenience.
In summary, the pros and cons
If we take a step back and look at the overall pros and cons of hiring an electric car, actually using it, not just the “5 reasons you should” by rental companies.
Pros:
- Generally, they are available at a lower overall cost than the traditionally fuelled rental cars.
- It’s useful from a vehicle zone perspective, such as in Rome there is a ZTL charge (a low emissions area) which electric vehicles are fine to travel in.
- It ticks that eco-friendly box.
Cons:
- It’s inconvenient, you lose time on your holiday having to charge, and that was a big thing for me.
- The cost of charging was actually fairly high, much higher than expected.
- You generally can’t guarantee a longer ranged EV.
- You have to put in the time to pre-plan everything, you can’t just have little impromptu visits to local towns without doing the research.
Conclusion (& would I hire an EV again?)
No.
But it’s not that simple. If I was just doing a holiday with minimal travel around a city perhaps, then maybe perhaps there’s a case for it, although I’m still not sure it would work out much cheaper than a gas (petrol/diesel) alternative.
I do love EV cars and there are definitely legs in the future for them to be more available through car rental companies, but the fleets need to be made up of higher range EV vehicles. The infrastructure now in most locations generally isn’t the issue, it’s more so that cheaper EVs are just not quite there yet, and those are the ones these rental companies add to their fleets.
The more premium EVs would allow for longer travel, less charge time and therefore not be such a significant inconvenience which was the main factor for me. Money aside for a second, I would say that I lost an hour or two of my holiday, every day, to charge the car – and on holiday, that just isn’t something I want.
