This past week, my middle child, my older of two sons, graduated from Medical School in Chicago. My wife, my son, and I attended the ceremony and added several more days to have a little vacation and site seeing. I reserved a Toyota Camry with Budget in advance of the trip. We landed at O'Hare airport just after midnight, and after getting luggage we headed to the train that takes you 5 stops to the rental car yards. By the time we got to the Budget counter, it was 1 am. After the counter clerk looked up my reservation, she said to me, "Oh, you're getting the manager's surprise, a Mercedes EV SUV. I had not driven an EV yet, so I agreed to it, so long as they honored the price. WHAT A MISTAKE. I picked up the car in the lot, it was nearly new, I think it had about 4,000 miles on it. After taking a bit to figure out how and where to get it in gear, we left the airport for our hotel. They told me it had a full charge and that I needed to bring the car back with at least 2/3 charge or they would charge me $35.00 extra. Okay, we head to the hotel, not much traffic at 1:30am, and the hotel was 11 miles from the airport. I noticed when I was parking that on the display of the dash in the left lower corner, that there was 108 miles left on the range of the charge. I did some first grade math which led me to the conclusion that I drove 11 miles, I had 108 miles left, and it was fully charged, which meant I had a full range of under 120 miles. I thought that that was a small range for a new EV vehicle but we weren't going to be doing much driving, so I didn't care. The first thing you notice driving the Mercedes (after you figure out how to get the dang thing into gear) is when you lift your foot off of the throttle pedal, the car just stops after a couple of feet, no gradual roll up to a stop sign or light. Strange, but you get used to it. The second is the delayed throttle response from a stop, again a bit unusual but you get used to it, I suppose. Chicago had pretty warm weather while we were there, so I wanted to use the A/C but the buttons are almost hidden below the center of the dash with buttons and symbols so small as to be almost illegible. You just keep pressing each one until you find what you're looking for. In four days of having the car, I never did figure out how to turn the radio on, just a mystery.

Over the first two days after we arrived, we would take the car for short drives to get meals, visit the Navy Pier and it's amusement park and shops, probably no more than 30 miles of total driving. On the third morning when we started to drive to breakfast, I noticed that the range was down to 18 miles and a warning on the dash told me I was within the reserve part of the charge. We decided we'd better find a charging station. We googled Quick Chargers near us, and the first one we went to was closed and had no chargers available. Okay, we looked for the next closest and drove there, pulled up to a Quick Charge EV Go charging system, hooked it up, got the credit card approval, it wouldn't charge, Tried it 3 more times, each time get a credit card authorization but no charge. Pulled out of the parking garage where the charger was located and paid my $10.00 parking fee (minimum charge). Looking at the dash, I'm now down to 6 miles on the range indicator and getting nervous. This scenario went on two more times where the chargers did not work and each time I'm paying for parking in parking structures. Finally, desperate, we found online another one which was inside of a hospital parking structure at which my son did medical rotations. Finally, we were able to get the charging interface to work, but this was not a Quick Charge, it was a normal charge that requires about 8 hours to get to a full, so we sat for one hour just to get enough range to get back to the hotel. After an hour we had 18 mile range so we got 12 additional miles. Again, paid for parking in the hospital structure. We decided to try one last time to visit a charge station in a small supermarket shopping center and finally found a Quick Charge station that worked and after about an hour, we had a 100% charge. It is the first and most likely the last time I will ever drive an EV. It's just a pain in the rear end. I was thinking that if the true range is about a 100 miles to a charge, then taking a family on a vacation where you're driving 400 miles or so, would mean you'd be stopping 4 times and adding an additional 4 hours to your 6 hour drive. That's just unacceptable. As for the driving characteristics of the Merc, it is absolutely joyless driving. There is also nothing intuitive about any functions in the car, so you're looking up even simple functions. And ergonomics? When you reach for the door handle where it would normally be, there are the electric seat controls, the door handle is in an uncomfortable position well below where you're used to it being. Frankly, I was surprised that a manufacturer with the stature that Mercedes enjoys in the marketplace, could build a car this poorly. Tiny range, unintuitive, boring, joyless driving, strange braking and throttle. Very surprising!