I booked a petrol hire car but Hertz sent me on a nightmare 560-mile trip in an EV: CRANE

My wife and I live in Australia and recently visited family in England. One day, we booked a Hertz hire car so we could visit my wife’s grandparents. One of them is unwell and this may be the last time she is able to see them. 

I asked for a Mercedes GLA  when I booked – which would be either a petrol or diesel car, or a hybrid. But when I turned up, I was was given a Polestar electric vehicle. 

Neither of us had driven an EV before, and this caused huge problems. 

Our journey was a 560-mile round trip from London to the Lake District, with a stop in Birmingham on the way home to see my uncle. The maximum mileage of the car in peak conditions is about 250 miles.

We had to stop to charge four times for about 40 minutes each, and also kept having to veer off course to find a charger. 

Electric shock: This reader was surprised to be handed a Polestar EV – similar to this one – when he rented a car to drive from London to the Lake District (stock image)

This totally derailed our trip and meant we missed our dinner with my uncle in Birmingham at 5pm. We didn’t arrive there until 9pm. 

It was a freezing winter day and we kept the heating off to conserve battery. The card Hertz gave us to pay for charging also didn’t work. 

This completely ruined our day, and by the end my wife was in tears. N.L, Brisbane

Helen Crane, of This is Money, replies: I am sorry to hear about your traumatic trip in this electric car. This was an important and emotional day for your wife, and the vehicle Hertz gave you just wasn’t up to the job. 

Baffled to be given an electric car, you requested a replacement when you arrived at the Hertz office to pick it up – but the assistant told you that only EVs were available. You say they were rude and told you to ‘take it or leave it’.

The lack of petrol cars may have been because you were in central London, where many non-electric vehicles must pay the £12.50 daily ULEZ charge, so perhaps Hertz keeps a smaller internal combustion-engined fleet there.

You and your wife can also only drive an automatic – which is the norm down under – and this ruled out many of the cars.

But it is Hertz’s responsibility to give you a car that is the equivalent to the one you booked and if that isn’t available it is standard car hire industry practice to upgrade people.

You were reluctant to take the EV, but the desk assistant assured you there were charging points ‘everywhere’ and that the car would charge fully in 15 minutes, so you set off. 

This easy charging was far from the case, in your experience. You made one stop to charge on the way to the Lake District, which took around 40 minutes. 

This only charged the car’s battery to around 50 per cent – which might have been down to the freezing weather and depends on how fast the charger available was.

EVs don’t charge as quickly when it is very cold, and the battery will also run down faster – but you can’t have been expected to know this, as total novices. 

When hiring an electric car, you must pay for charging in the same way you would pay for fuel in a petrol car. Unfortunately, while charging an EV at home is cheap, on the move it can be expensive.

You paid £112 in total for charging, which you claimed was more than double what you might have paid in petrol for a similar journey. 

Chargers can be cheaper or more expensive depending on who runs them and how fast they are, but you didn’t know this. 

Hertz had given you a payment card for charging, which would add the cost of the charging to your final Hertz bill, rather you paying out of pocket upfront. However, you couldn’t make it work. 

When you arrived at the grandparents’ home, you plugged the car in and hoped the four-hour stay would allow it to charge enough to get you home. 

But in fact, it charged the car by just a measly 3 per cent. While EVs can  charge via a regular three-pin plug, this is painfully slow. They really need a dedicated charger, which of course your wife’s elderly grandparents didn’t have. 

After leaving the Lakes, you had to charge the car twice on the way to Birmingham and both times had to veer wildly off course to find a high-powered charging point. 

All in all it took you seven hours to drive from the Lakes to Birmingham – a trip that could be done in three and a half hours in good conditions. 

You arrived at 9pm, having missed dinner with your uncle and with your wife cold, fed up and in tears.

You had to make a final charging stop on the way from Birmingham to London, which meant you didn’t get back to your hotel until 1:30am – not ideal as you had a sightseeing tour booked first thing the next day. 

You couldn’t complain when you returned the car early the next morning, as the office wasn’t yet open – but you did so afterwards with the help of your UK-based uncle. 

Hertz refused to reimburse you, saying that only EVs were available at the time and that it didn’t take responsibility for customers’ charging issues. 

You were then hit with an extra cost when you checked your bill. The petrol car you originally booked included unlimited mileage, but only 300 miles were included on the electric car. Extra miles were charged at 24p per mile.

It meant that in total, the rental cost you £252 including the fee for the hire, extra mileage and charging costs. 

Can a car hire firm give me an EV? 

You selected a petrol Mercedes GLA when you booked. You’ve sent me a screenshot to show that, on the website, cars are clearly marked as electric – and the one you opted for was not.

This is standard car hire industry practice to show whether a car is petrol / diesel or electric and many people do not want to hire EVs due to the extra hassle.

Plain to see: I also checked Hertz’s website, and EVs are clearly marked

But when you later complained to Hertz, it simply said you booked a ‘medium car’ and the booking didn’t specify whether it was petrol, hybrid or electric. 

Hire firms are allowed to swap the car you’ve booked for a similar or higher-spec car, if it isn’t available.

Hertz’s website states that ‘similar’ means ‘that the vehicle you rent may not be the exact make and model as the vehicle displayed, although it will be from the same car group, meaning that it will be comparable in size and performance to that vehicle.’

Is an EV comparable to a similar-sized petrol car? The problem here is that it’s so subjective. For someone who regularly drives an EV, and was only going 100 miles, the Polestar EV you were given might not have been a problem. 

But for you, it was a disaster. The car was totally unsuitable for your trip, and you were told the car would be electric with any reasonable notice, you would have cancelled and booked elsewhere. 

Being able to spring an EV on you at the rental garage, when you’re eager to get away, doesn’t seem fair.

It would seem sensible to have an option where drivers can opt out of EVs during the booking process, if they don’t feel comfortable driving one or don’t think it’s suitable for their trip. 

Given how upset you were about this experience, I contacted Hertz to ask if it would reconsider reimbursing you. 

It said the limited car choice you were offered on pick-up was because you required an automatic. But many tourists aren’t able to drive manual cars or don’t want to, and I agree with you that there should have been better options. 

Hertz also clarified that the charging card you were given was not broken, but would only work with chargers operated by Shell, with which it has a partnership. This could have been explained better. 

However, Hertz added that it recognised that you were disappointed with your experience during an important time. 

Therefore, it has provided a refund of your hire fee and charging costs as a gesture of goodwill.