When the First EV Trip Feels Like the Last - EV charging experience lessons for rental counters, CPOs and landlords

Why rental counters, CPOs and landlords need to design the EV charging experience—not just install hardware.

When Jason R. Goldfarb stepped up to a rental counter in Jacksonville, Florida, he wasn’t just another traveler. He’s a deal architect who spends his spare time structuring EV charging, energy and property transactions so they “work in real life.” What he got instead was a case study in how they don’t:

“The rental counter handed me an EV at 40% charge, no adapter, no apps, no instructions,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Four failed charging sites later, I was circling a dimly lit strip mall with five miles of range left, wondering what ‘infrastructure rollout’ really means when the front line looks like this.”

You can read his full post here: 👉 “You don’t need to be a first-time EV driver to feel range anxiety — you just need to rent one.”

Goldfarb’s bottom line should make every CPO, OEM, landlord and fleet operator wince:

“Every broken charger, bad location, or missing adapter isn’t just inconvenience — it’s a contract failure. The first mile of every infrastructure project isn’t the power line — it’s the user experience.”

He’s not being dramatic. 

J.D. Power’s 2025 U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience (EVX) Public Charging Study found that 14% of EV owners visited a public charger and left without successfully charging—roughly one in seven attempts, even as reliability slowly improves. For someone on a weekend trip or a first-time renter, that’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s a reason to avoid EVs the next time they’re offered.

Same story, different renters

Goldfarb’s thread took off because so many drivers have lived a version of it.

Cityfi’s Ryan Parzick describes renting a Tesla in his Medium essay, “EV Car Rental Experience,” where the vehicle itself was great but the handoff was “chaotic and unclear”—staff couldn’t explain charging, apps, or policies, leaving the family to figure it out on the fly.

Family travel site The Family Voyage goes further in “4 Reasons NOT to Rent an EV Right Now,” recounting a Colorado trip where so much time went into hunting for chargers and waiting on sessions that the conclusion was: we’ll buy an EV, but we won’t rent one on vacation again (yet). The Electric Vehicle Association’s blog post “EV Rentals: How to Improve the Experience” calls out the same pattern: renters are often handed keys with minimal explanation, no simple guide, and no clear plan for charging, “throwing you into the deep end to see if you sink or swim.”

The rental industry’s own moves haven’t helped. Hertz, which once pledged to buy 100,000 Teslas, is now offloading tens of thousands of EVs. Business Insider reports that the company plans to sell around 30,000 EVs from its fleet after higher repair costs and depreciation, offering renters the chance to buy the cars at a discount. Analysts have been blunt: the company bought the cars, but underinvested in customer education, on-site charging, and realistic return policies. Different stories, same arc:

• Great car.

• Patchy or confusing charging.

• Little guidance at the handoff.

• A customer who feels burned and blames “EVs,” not the system design.

This doesn’t just apply to rentals. A tenant arriving at an office tower or hospital garage with a nearly empty battery will judge your building the same way Goldfarb judged his rental experience.

Proof it can work: when charging is designed as a product

The frustrating part is that we do have working examples where charging feels almost invisible—because someone designed the entire journey:

Tesla’s Supercharger network is the most obvious one. Tesla’s 2023 Impact Report shows global Supercharger sites achieving 99.97% average uptime, a near-perfect record. (Impact Report excerpt; see also this summary.) Navigation, route planning, battery preconditioning and payment are all integrated in the car, so the driver never has to think about networks or RFID cards.

Mercedes-Benz has taken a different angle with its new branded charging hubs. Its first North American site in Sandy Springs, Georgia, combines 400 kW chargers with a solar canopy, overhead LED lighting, visible pylon signage and an on-site lounge with restrooms and refreshments—explicitly aimed at making charging feel like a premium rest stop, not a dark corner of a lot. (Mercedes media release; local coverage here.)

Hyundai, meanwhile, has focused on reducing friction for its drivers. For Ioniq 5 buyers, Hyundai and Electrify America offer a two-year program of complimentary sessions: 30 minutes of DC fast charging or 60 minutes of Level 2 per session on Electrify America’s network. (Plan disclosure.) Starting in 2025, Hyundai is giving many EV owners a free CCS-to-NACS adapter, letting them tap into more than 20,000 Tesla Superchargers in the U.S.

Retail: Canadian Tire Corporation partnered with FLO to roll out 189 chargers at 68 Canadian Tire locations across Canada, logging over 800,000 charging sessions with 98%+ uptime. FLO handles siting, separate EV power, and 24/7 monitoring so associate dealers can focus on customers—not troubleshooting hardware—turning charging into a branded convenience that deepens loyalty rather than a reliability risk.

Office building/campuses: Alexandria Real Estate + PowerFlex - Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (ARE) partnered with PowerFlex to deploy 51 Level 2 chargers across multiple life science and office properties in San Diego, all managed through the PowerFlex X™ platform with Adaptive Load Management® to avoid costly transformer and panel upgrades. Tenants can now offer subsidized charging with volume- and price-based discounts, while PowerFlex’s centralized monitoring and “Driver Day” education events help boost utilization and satisfaction—turning EV charging into a branded amenity that supports ARE’s sustainability and tenant-retention strategy rather than a facilities headache.

Different strategies, same principle: charging is treated as part of the product and place design, not an afterthought.

Designing for “someone’s first ride” — everywhere

Goldfarb’s line — “What if we treated every deployment like it was someone’s first ride?” — shouldn’t just be a note to rental companies. It’s a design brief for every application: airports, resorts, office towers, hospitals, campuses, logistics yards. Practically, that means:

1. Own the handoff

If you’re a rental brand, fleet manager or property owner, day one should be effortless:

• Vehicles leave at a high state of charge, not 40%.

• Staff follow a simple EV checklist: where to charge, how to start/stop a session, what to do if a charger fails.

• There’s a one-page quick-start guide in the glovebox, with QR codes to your preferred app or roaming platform.

The Electric Vehicle Association’s “EV Rentals: How to Improve the Experience” is basically a step-by-step script for this kind of handoff.

2. Standardize a “charging recipe”

Most horror stories come from fragmentation: five apps, three networks, and a driver scrambling at 5% battery. The opposite pattern looks like Hyundai + Electrify America + NACS: one primary network, a clear benefit, and a default adapter path to the other big network. (EA plan; Hyundai NACS program.)

For CRE and campus owners, that means picking:

• A main network or roaming partner.

• A clear payment experience (app, card, RFID) you can explain in one sentence.

• Connector strategies (NACS + CCS, etc.) that match your tenant base and regional norms.

3. Treat location and safety as part of uptime

A charger in a dark corner behind a strip mall might be technically “online,” but it’s effectively unusable for many drivers — exactly the scenario Goldfarb described.

Mercedes Benz’ Sandy Springs hub demonstrates the alternative: visible from the street, well-lit, covered, with amenities. For landlords, that means considering EV stalls as front-of-house infrastructure, not leftover space.

4. Align contracts with the experience you’re promising

Goldfarb’s legal brain shows in his framing: a broken charger or bad site isn’t just “a glitch,” it’s a contract failure — a gap between what the paper implies and what the user actually gets.

Hertz’s EV pullback is a cautionary tale: big public commitment on cars, far less visible investment in training, on-site infrastructure and customer-friendly policies, followed by a public retreat and fleet sell-off.

For rental firms, CPOs and site hosts, contracts, SLAs and revenue-share deals need to backstop the experience you advertise — including uptime expectations, response times and who owns the “bad Saturday night” when nothing works.

Whether the “customer” is a vacation renter, a hospital nurse arriving for night shift, or a warehouse fleet manager, the bar is the same: Can they succeed on the first try in a strange place, under time pressure?

Until the answer is consistently yes, stories like Jason Goldfarb’s will keep circulating — and each one will quietly slow adoption. The hardware is coming. The real question is whether we’ll design the first mile of the experience with as much care as we design the power.