Tips for Renting an E.V. for Your Summer Vacation

Are you curious about electric vehicles but not ready to buy one? Renting one can help you see what it’s like — and some car rental companies are offering discounts.

But having a smooth electric vehicle experience, especially if you rent for vacation, requires a fair amount of planning because fast-charging stations, while more available than they were four years ago, still aren’t ubiquitous, like gas stations.

For now, an E.V. may work best for a long weekend or a trip where you plan to stay in one place and take day excursions, rather than an epic coast-to-coast trek.

“A cross-country road trip?” said Damon Bell, senior research editor at Cars.com, an online automobile marketplace. “It can be done, but you’re making things a little trickier.”

Most E.V. owners install special electrical outlets at home that allow them to charge their cars overnight so they don’t have to worry much about finding public charging stations. But if you rent an E.V. for a trip, you’ll want to map out the location of stations along routes you expect to travel.

There are now about 70,000 public charging stations with 186,000 ports, or stalls — the E.V. equivalent of gas pumps — across the country, according to the federal government. But they’re not uniformly distributed. Fast chargers — which can juice up a battery in minutes, rather than hours — are generally concentrated on the East and West Coasts and in parts of Texas.