SEQUIM, WASH.—The dashboard on my Kia Niro rental flashed a warning about 40 miles from Lake Crescent.
The gist: Charge up soon or you won’t make it to your destination. This despite the gauge showing a battery range of 110 miles.
I paid $370 including taxes and fees for a four-day, electric-vehicle rental from Budget to travel 500 miles around the Olympic Peninsula from Seattle. The only cheaper vehicle option was a pickup truck at $350; a gas-powered economy car was $430, a regular SUV $477. By the time I pulled into Forks, Wash., home of the Twilight series, my range was down to 108 miles. The plan was to get a little juice and then charge overnight at the oceanfront resort 16 miles away.
It all worked out thanks to a charging station at a Walmart in Port Angeles and the kindness of a stranger. A local coffee shop and bakery owner was charging his electric Cadillac in the next spot and showed me how to charge my car. (I was such an EV newbie that I hauled the home-charging unit from the trunk thinking I somehow needed it.) And I got to pet his St. Bernard, Romulus, while we waited. The Budget rep at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport wasn’t any help. He didn’t say what the charge level was or what it needed to be upon return or even mention I had an EV. He simply handed me the keys and spot number. By my calculations, with confirmation from chatbot Gemini, I could make it to the lodge without a charging stop. The hotel has two complimentary chargers in a parking lot. It was a smart move given the long drive ahead. I was headed to Cape Flattery, the northwesternmost point in the contiguous U.S., and La Push on the Pacific Ocean, my home for the night. There’s a row of Tesla chargers outside the Dew Drop Inn motel. But I hadn’t downloaded the Tesla app to access the magic adapter the Kia needed to charge there. The hotel nicely let me use their Wi-Fi to download it, but even that didn’t work.
