EV Recommendations to Car Rental Companies

I have recently experienced several suboptimal car rentals which I’ve written about in this series. While traveling this week, I booked a rental car with Budget. The best deals were with electric vehicles (EVs), and given that I am comfortable with driving EVs and charging EVs at the company apartment, I chose an EV.

Upon vehicle pickup, I learned that Budget no longer provides charging cables. However, I discovered this in a circuitous manner. I recalled a prior experience in which I was given an EV with a low battery and without a charging cable. Therefore, I made sure to search my rental car for a charging cable—it didn’t have one. So I went back to the rental counter, and they assigned a different EV to me—that one didn’t have a charging cable either. I was then told by the manager that Budget no longer provides charging cables “because people steal them”. For context, not all car rental companies have this policy. Just last week, a co-worker rented an EV from another company, and it provided a charging cable.

When I rent EVs for my business trips to company headquarters, I always charge them at the company apartment which has electrical outlets in the 2-car garage, and for that I need a charging cable. The great benefit is that no time is lost by simply plugging in the car at the apartment. The alternative is to charge the vehicle at a public charging station which is undesirable for me because a typical level 2 public charger can take several hours to charge an EV from 50% to 80% capacity. So if a car rental company does not provide a charging cable along with an EV rental, that significantly worsens the customer experience.

I ended up switching from an EV to a hybrid vehicle, and I had a flawless experience with it. That being said, I have a few recommendations to all car rental companies who rent EVs to their customers.

First, car rental companies have a responsibility provide charging cables with EV rentals. Not every customer is willing or able to spend hours of precious time at a charging station. Business travelers are busy. Leisure travelers want to maximize their time on vacation. Nobody wants to use a public charging station unless it is their last option. Plugging an EV into a standard outlet is much slower than a level 2 charging station, but if it can be left unattended (e.g., while sleeping), the convenience far outweighs the slower charging speed. A charging cable should be considered a standard item included in an EV rental.

Second, charge the customer if they do not return the charging cable. If a customer borrows a GPS or a child car seat and fails to return it, then I assume the customer would be charged for those items. A car rental company should do the same for charging cables, and I would completely understand if the replacement fee for a charging cable exceeded the cost of a brand new charging cable because of the effort that must be taken to manage an inventory of charging cables. Furthermore, car rental companies already place a temporary charge on the customer’s credit card (Budget charged me $250 for this week’s rental), so they are already pre-authorized to charge fees for lost or stolen charging cables.

Third, charge the EV to 80% before letting a customer borrow it. This is a common customer expectation. It is also a common expectation that vehicles are adequately prepared for rental. The tire pressure should be adequate, the headlights should be working, none of the warning lights should be flashing, and the vehicle should be free of trash from the prior rental. Most car rental companies that I’ve used also require that the car be returned with at least 70% (or similar) charge, or a fee will be incurred (similar to a refueling fee for gas vehicles). On the flip side, car rental companies have a duty to provide customers with EVs whose batteries are 70-80% charged.

If a rental company cannot support EV rentals with the same level of convenience and preparedness that customers expect from gasoline vehicles, it shouldn’t offer them.

LLM Analysis of College Ratings

Money Magazine recently published research on the best colleges in America. Its methodology includes metrics that are weighted based on graduation rates, costs, financial aid, student debt, and alumni salaries. My daughter is looking at University of California schools (among other options), and I noticed that while UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego achieved 5-star ratings, UCLA “only” received 4.5 stars.

Beyond what was stated in the methodology, I could not find detailed information about the raw scores that led to the star ratings, so I decided to consult various large language models (LLMs) to see if they could do some digging for me and propose plausible explanations for why UCLA wasn’t given a full 5 stars as I would have expected.

I asked the exact same question to Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude: “Money Magazine released their 2026 ratings of the best colleges in the US (https://money.com/best-colleges/). Try your best to find out why UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego achieved 5-star ratings while UCLA only received 4.5 stars. Make sure to examing their scoring methodology and determine what criteria may have caused UCLA to not achieve a full 5 stars.” Note that I copied and pasted the same typo (“examing” should have been “examine”).

Copilot didn’t spend much time researching this topic, and it started spitting out an answer 1-2 seconds after I pressed the “return” key. One of its main explanations for UCLA not achieving 5 stars was due to affordability which didn’t make sense based on the table above, so I followed up with a 2nd prompt: “UC Berkeley has a higher estimated full price and estimated priced with average aid than UCLA, yet UC Berkeley achieved 5 stars. Are you still confident in your assessment? If not sure, then state so.” Copilot then backtracked and revised its explanation, and its revision sounded more plausible to me. Here is Copilot’s full response.

A similar thing happened with ChatGPT which spent only a second or two longer to “think” than Copilot, and it responded almost immediately. It too explained that cost was a factor in it not achieving 5 stars, so I followed up with the exact same 2nd prompt: “UC Berkeley has a higher estimated full price and estimated priced with average aid than UCLA, yet UC Berkeley achieved 5 stars. Are you still confident in your assessment? If not sure, then state so.” Like Copilot, ChatGPT also backtracked and revised its explanation. Here is ChatGPT’s full response.

On the other hand, Claude thought long and hard about its response. It displayed multiple websites that it was consulting to formulate its response, including Money Magazine’s methodology page and the websites from each of the schools mentioned. I can no longer see the pages it was consulting, as they disappeared and were not displaying in the final response. Although I didn’t use a stopwatch, I’d estimate that Claude took 20-30 seconds to think before providing a response. I felt that Claude’s explanation was the most analytical and credible of the 3 LLMs, and unlike Copilot and ChatGPT, I didn’t feel that any of its responses were contradicted by the data. Here is Claude’s full response.

Of course, these are my personal opinions which are completely subjective. Also, my conclusion that Claude performed the best on this specific task are not necessarily generalizable to conversations about other subjects. The take home message is that if you often consult LLMs, I’d encourage you to always think critically about LLM replies and to explore multiple LLMs to compare and contrast their responses and determine which ones are best suited to your needs.