Fiat Fiasco

Mal, tres mal.

Some advice: do not rent an electric car in Europe. My wife and I are currently on a somewhat involuntary sabbatical in Rome. (Involuntary because I’m unemployed and cannot seem to get a job no matter how strenuously I employ “The Secret”)  While here, we decided to take a few days to go to the South of France to bop around and see what’s what with all those swishy Frenchies. Martha, my soon-to-be-ex-wife, secured our car rental from Hertz.

When we arrived, the woman at the counter asked us if we knew we had reserved an all-electric vehicle. Martha was in charge of all communication because she speaks the language and I do not. No, she told the woman, she hadn’t realized she had reserved an electric. Why? Would that be a problem? Ms. Hertz gave one of those classic insouciant French shrugs which generally means you are about to place your own head on the guillotine.

She said charging can be a little complicated, especially if you plan on doing a lot of driving. Indeed we did plan on doing a lot of driving, as we wanted to spectate as much swishiness as we could find. Perhaps we should get a gas-powered car. More insouciance followed as she explained they had no more gas-powered cars, but the Tesla was available, which had much better range and would only cost us an additional 800 euros for the four days of our trip. As I have already explained, I am on an involuntary sabbatical. We do not have an additional 800 euros. We barely have any euros. With that, she handed us the key fob to an adorable Fiat 500e. Because we were in France, the “e” stands for both “electric” and “ennui.”

The car itself was fine. A sporty little Italian job whose only real drawback is the seats, which seem to have been crafted from plywood and some leftover IKEA foam. The problem, and it is a big problem, is that there is very little infrastructure to charge the damned thing. The Fiat will helpfully direct you to chargers, which invariably turn out to be occupied or, more commonly, non-existent. I can’t tell you the number of times we followed our GPS’s directions to a charging station that simply was not there. Furthermore, when one does find a charging station, the charging itself is maddeningly slow. One can easily spend two and a half hours sitting in a parking lot off whatever the French version of the autobahn is called waiting for your car to get enough juice to continue your travels.

On our second day, we planned a leisurely drive from Nimes, the city in which we were staying, to the next big city, the cosmopolitan Montpellier, and then on to Narbonne, supposedly a lovely Mediterranean city. We didn’t see either of those cities because by the time we arrived in each one, our battery was so low that we had to spend our time seeking out chargers rather than sightseeing. So we just kind of zipped through saying things like, “This seems nice.” Did our frustrations with the car eventually turn towards our frustrations with each other? They did. Did we end up eating Burger King at some rest stop instead of steak frites at some cozy bistro? We did. Every town in France has a street named after Victor Hugo and now I know why. We were miserable.

Our entire itinerary for the trip changed as we sought to accommodate the needs of our thirsty electric baby. Instead of dashing across the zesty French countryside, we stuck closer to our little flat in Nimes, strolling the Jardin de la Fontaine. Stupid French jardin. Instead of sipping cafe au lait in some medieval walled city up in the hills, we walked the aisles of the local supermarche looking for cheap eats. Stupid supermarche. You wouldn’t think something as seemingly inconsequential as ticking the wrong box on a Hertz reservation would have such terrible implications for a quick getaway but, brother, it did. All in all, the trip sucked.

Now, you might be thinking Poor baby didn’t get to enjoy his French vacation from his Roman sabbatical. To which I would reply: That’s right. I am a baby and, increasingly, poor. But my first-world problems are still problems to me, and the fact that they are champagne problems does nothing to diminish my hatred for that fucking Fiat and the lack of infrastructure to support it. If we’re going to transition away from fossil fuels, we’ve got to figure out a way to encourage ease of use and discourage the divorces they are sure to cause. Merde.