Sorry, I don’t mean to be rah-rah Tesla, but this is reality in 2023, being worked on…

If you rent a Tesla, your on-board nav will make sure you stop in the right places, and you just plug into literally any Supercharger and the electricity charge shows up on the credit card you gave the rental car firm.

If you rent a non-Tesla, you’ll need Plugshare.com to look at performance ratings of stations, ABetterRoutePlanner.com to plot routes based on available EV charging, and a different phone app for every brand of station you stop at. Expect 20 minutes of “screwing around with your phone” the first time. And at the most popular chains, you’ll be queued up behind locals collecting free charging, because someone thought that would be a good idea.

If you get the impression that a team of people worked their ass off to make the Tesla rental experience smooth and seamless, and precisely no one worked at all to make the CCS car rental experience seamless, that is exactly what happened.

There’s still not nothing to do with Tesla, you still need to be on PlugShare to scope out each Supercharger for what’s near it to kill time. E.g. you have gone through your last drive-thru. Now, you select restaurants because they are an easy walk from DC chargers: plug in, walk into the restaurant and order at the counter. The “sitting in line at the drive thru” and “pumping gas” time-burns are deleted, and in its place is a pleasant meal. This broadens your options, because there’s no line at the inside counter at places infamous for monster drive-thru lines, like Culvers, Raising Cain or In-n-Out. And you have access to nicer places with no drive thru at all, like Chipotle, Panera, Mod Pizza etc.