Why I won’t be using SIXT for any EV (or other car) hires I do in the future, plus UK charging tips for tourists! Update:Now with SIXT’s reply (and my analysis of same)!
Ethical disclaimer:
The ethical disclaimer on this one is pretty simple; everything mentioned here was paid for by me, out of my own pocket.
Something tells me that SIXT isn’t likely to pay for “sponsored content” of this type anyway…
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
In this review
Part One: In which SIXT isn’t upfront about a booking
Part Two: In which I attempt to pick up an EV from SIXT
Part Three: UK EV Tourist Charging Tips
Part Four: Returning the EV to SIXT (and what happened next)
SIXT EV Hire UK Verdict
Part One: In which SIXT UK isn’t upfront about a booking
If my recent review of the Simify Global eSIM didn’t make it brutally obvious, the reason why updates at AlexReviewsTech have been non-existent of late has been because I’ve been travelling and taking a little time off for me. Sometimes everyone deserves a break, right?
In my case, the bulk of my travel time was spent in the UK catching up with friends, family and taking in more than a few tourist sites along the way.
Such endeavours take an amount of planning beforehand, and I like to start early; while I was away from late December 2025 through late January 2026, the planning and pre-purchasing stage started in January 2025.
That’s typically the best way to score the lowest prices on most things, including in this case EV hire.
I’ve previously hired an EV in the UK to get around, in that case via UFODrive.
Also read:
UFODrive Review: App-Based Car Rental (with a few quirks)
I did have some issues with UFODrive, and a few years had passed so I was keen to see where the UK EV car hire scene sat, especially as a lot of UK towns and cities have implemented low emission zones in their centres, making EV usage even more of a good deal if one wants to avoid excess charges.
I settled pretty quickly on SIXT for my EV hiring needs after some research (always do your research!) and booked in a Tesla Model Y long range as my vehicle of choice.
Not because of some undying love for Mr Musk (he’s a berk, let’s face it), but because SIXT’s specific EV deal for that vehicle included unlimited supercharging.
For those not au fait with EVs, that basically means that as long as I was using Tesla-specific chargers to effectively “refuel” the Model Y, I wouldn’t have to pay anything more for the usage of the car. The fuel (in this case electricity) was part of the cost of hiring the car, all bundled in.
On a tight freelance journalist’s budget, that made a massive difference, more than enough to get me to sign on the dotted line despite the fact that the entire SIXT EV rental period – 20 days in total – had to be paid upfront, in February, 10 months before I was due to pick the Model Y up. Keep that date in mind…
Time passed, as it tends to do, and by the time December rolled around I was getting ready to hit the skies and head to the UK.
I had places to be, like, for example, this excellent repurposed mill in Stroud.
And then, literally the night before I was due to fly out, my phone rang with an unknown number from the UK.
I nearly didn’t pick it up, because so very many of those international calls end up being scams, but I do have relatives and friends in the UK, and I figured maybe one of them was getting in touch via a new SIM card or similar.
It was, however, the SIXT office in Stratford, London, giving me a call. Not exactly a courtesy call, mind you.
The service rep called, in fact, to inform me that I wasn’t going to be able to pick up my Tesla Model Y in three days time. At all.
At first, I figured that this was pure dumb luck; somebody had wrapped the available model around a tree or something, but it wasn’t that.
The line I was met with was (I’m paraphrasing lightly here)
“We haven’t offered those for rental since March.”
It turns out that SIXT abandoned the idea of renting out Tesla vehicles in the UK entirely a matter of weeks after I had made my booking. SIXT still offered EVs, but it hadn’t done so for more than 9 months at that time, 10 months since I’d booked.
Had SIXT bothered to inform me in February or March that my rental agreement would have had to change then?
Of course not.
Not in April, either.
May? Nope.
June. Not at all.
August? Not a mention… you get the idea.
No, instead, SIXT opted to wait until THREE DAYS BEFORE to inform me that they were making fundamental changes to my EV hire agreement, and I 100% believe that this was intentional.
They did so on purpose.
Had SIXT been upfront with me beforehand, I would have assessed my other options, even though backing out of the prepaid agreement I had would have brought with it a £99 penalty fee.
Of course, they didn’t let me know in any kind of reasonable timeframe, because I might have opted for a different provider who could offer me a better value deal.
The reality here is that if you’re trying to book a car 3 days before you need it, right before Christmas in one of the biggest and busiest cities on the planet, you’re going to have to spend an absolute fortune to do so.
The rep I spoke to (and to be clear, I’m not entirely blaming the ground staff here; they don’t make these decisions, they just get to deal with the customers) told me that “he would talk to his manager about what they could do”… and that was all.
I did check my options, and I was utterly boned; there were precious few vehicles of any type available on such short notice that were available for the time period I needed, and I already had everything else lined up in terms of travel, hotel bookings and the like.
I had little choice but to accept SIXT’s revised terms if I wanted to travel as I had arranged months ago – and they knew it.
Part Two: In which I attempt to pick up an EV from SIXT
At one point, I wondered if this was what I’d end up with as my hire vehicle.
Not that this was the end of the story, mind you.
We’re just getting warmed up, though in the UK in December warming up is a relative matter.
The sales rep who called me informed me that they “should” be able to provide me with a BMW i5, but upon landing in London, I had a fresh email to inform me that my booking had been changed (again) to a VW ID.7 Tourer instead… and that the vehicle would carry a £2,200 excess for any damage, even though the original booking (that, remember, I’d paid for 10 months previously) had a zero excess guarantee on it.
I sighed inwardly at the time… OK, I’ll be honest here, I swore profusely inwardly and repeatedly, because this was becoming a grim cavalcade of customer-confusing nonsense that further reiterated the idea that I was going to be stuffed around with substantially when the time came to get the car.
I gritted my teeth, reminded myself that the people on the ground I would be dealing with didn’t make the policy, and headed in early to pick up whatever it was that SIXT had decided I might be able to drive, if anything.
Before I could do that, the next email arrived, informing me that I’d also need an International Driving Permit to pick the car up at all.
Now, I used to have one of those, but every single time I’d presented it for a UK rental, the rep behind the desk had either stared at it like it was some random object, or at best told me that I didn’t need one at all, so I didn’t have that with me, and it hadn’t been mentioned at all at any time prior to that email as a needed document.
Once again, SIXT has had my money for ten months at this time, but it’s only the night before that this email came through, because I clearly needed more stress and reasons to be angry with them.
Turning up to pick up the car as early as feasible – for my own reasons, I needed to drive from London to Inverness within a day, not exactly a short drive especially in limited Winter sunlight conditions at that time of year — I presented my details… and saw the face of the rep behind the counter fall, which didn’t fill me with confidence.
It turned out that they did have a car for me, but it wasn’t the VW (or, of course, the Tesla), but instead the BMW i5 which was apparently an “upgrade”.
I’ll let the car fanatics argue that one out; for my purposes a car that was going to cost me hundreds of pounds more to personally charge up wasn’t an upgrade in any sense at all.
What about any consideration for the fact that they hadn’t bothered to tell me this months ago when I could have made alternative arrangements?
The only thing they could provide me (beyond an entirely empty apology, because the apology won’t charge up a car) was that an agreement (that I had to notice was an option and insist upon, this wasn’t offered) that I could return the car with any level of charge – they typically want 80% or better on return – and that they would “knock £50 off the rental price”, which I would get back on the conclusion of the rental term.
I still had to pay an upfront £300 bond on the car as well if I wanted it, though I did expect that. But what about the excess level applied to the new vehicle?
I had to argue with them then and there about the excess being zero, because their system kept insisting it would be £2,200 for any damage, despite the fact that this was an extra option I’d paid for months ago. I was told at the time that they:
“would sort that out, don’t worry”.
I did honestly feel like screaming, but I didn’t, because it wouldn’t have achieved anything, and I wanted very much to at least get on the road and start the actual enjoyable part of my holiday, which wasn’t so much the driving but what I could do in terms of places visited and people who I wanted to catch up with.
Of course, there was more, because if it wasn’t obvious, SIXT UK are utterly terrible at customer communications.
The rental agreement that bounced into my inbox after I’d set out was for the BMW i5, but it still included that £2,200 excess as part of its policy. I emailed back to point out that this needed rectifying ASAP, and got as a response (and I quote)
“Rest assured this will not be the case and your new agreement will be with you after the weekend.“
That was more than a month ago. I’m still waiting for that “new” agreement to land in my inbox, because of COURSE I am.
For those keeping close track, by the way, the whole thing about the International Driving Permit? Didn’t come up at all, not even once, despite SIXT’s email insistence I’d need it. Why should I, a mere customer, expect consistency in communications from a company that I’m doing business with?
Part Three: Tourist tips for more affordable EV charging in the UK
The UK has far more public EV chargers than Australia…
but like Animal Farm, not all chargers are equal.
So off I headed, but (not surprisingly) a single 80% charged battery wasn’t going to cover 20 days of driving around the UK, which meant I needed to sort out how to best charge the BMW while I was driving it.
I do try to look at the upsides of any situation, and so while I had a problem to solve, I figured it could also make the basis of some useful advice for anyone (notably Australians, because I’m basing off the Australian EV experience) planning a UK trip with an EV.
The last time I drove an EV around the UK there were plenty of networks, but many were siloed in terms of needing their own apps, RFID access cards or (in some cases) only working with UK bank accounts.
Thankfully (for my purposes) a change in UK law specifies that most reasonably fast chargers must accept contactless payment options, which means at a base level you should be able to rock up to most of them, plug in and tap your credit card to start charging… with quite a big catch to bear in mind.
The catch (if you’re coming from an Australian perspective, at least, other countries may vary on this) is that EV charging in the UK is expensive.
While EV charger pricing in Australia varies, you can typically expect to pay (very roughly) between around 40-80c/kWh for a fast charger, depending on the location, charger speed and network. That equates out to between 20-40p/kWh in UK money.
UK EV charging can easily be double that and more, which was a big part of the reason why I’d originally opted for a hire solution that included my charging costs, because my plans incorporated a lot of driving in the UK in winter, where EV battery efficiency is typically at its worst.
I knew I’d have to recharge more frequently than I did at home – the joys of temperatures and physics at play there – and didn’t relish the idea of spending a fortune on charging.
Low temperatures are not kind to EV batteries, to put it mildly.
Slight side note here, because I feel like I can hear the anti-EV types revving up their keyboards to talk about how it would have been cheaper to hire a petrol vehicle.
That ain’t necessarily so; not only would I have had to pay a lot of penalty fees for driving a non-low emission vehicle into the centre of many towns, but UK petrol prices are also on the pointy side; a quick check of some figures at the time of writing suggests that pricing sits at around £1.30/litre, or roughly $2.55/litre. Transport in the UK is pricey no matter how you do it.
While an oft-cited reason why a lot of car hire places have moved away from Teslas has been the issues around replacement parts after cars are damaged, I imagine that the cost of UK charging may have also been a factor in SIXT UK’s decision there, by the way.
While you can just tap and go on charging, it’s not a wise idea to do so, at least if you’re packing a smartphone (which most of us are) and have some level of data connectivity as well.
There are probably multiple solutions to this particular problem, but the one that I settled on after a little research was a duo of apps; Electroverse (Android / iOS) for general discounts and charger discovery and then specifically Ionity ( Android / iOS) for most of my charging.
Electroverse App. Each dot is a charger. That’s a… lot of chargers.
Ionity’s base rates aren’t that flashy, but they do offer a 30-day subscription for £10.50/month that drops charging rates by 42% for each charger; tie that into the Electroverse app for actually starting up the chargers from the phone and I was able to at least slice part of the cost of charging down to around 40p/kWh or so for most charges, or about 80c in Australian money, give or take.
That wasn’t true everywhere I went – Ionity’s coverage is reasonable, but, for example non-existent in the Lake District – but it did at least soften the blow of having to cover my charging costs as I travelled.
I did use some other chargers, sometimes as a matter of sheer necessity, and sometimes to see if they would work or if they could solve a problem I had.
As an example, to my at-first-pleasant surprise, one of my accommodation sites actually had an EV charger that guests could use, albeit for a fee.
This was your typical installed AC wall charger best suited for slow charging over a number of hours. Its pricing was high for such a slow charger at around 50p/kWh, but I figured that the convenience of being able to charge to 100% overnight was worth the cost.
It wanted a flat payment upfront with the promise that I’d only pay for what I’d used, with any remainder refunded to my account, which I set up online via a supplied QR code.
Only one problem here: It didn’t work.
At all, despite multiple attempts to start a charge in the cold winter weather. Not fun, but I did try, try and try again, all to no avail.
Another tip to put in here; it’s a good idea to have a SIM in your phone that can make UK phone calls; while a lot of travel SIMs focus on data inclusions not all of them allow for “local” calls in your destination so you can call for help if needed. Yes, old fashioned phone calls are often your best (or in this case, only) resort.
I had a SIM that did support local calls, so I phoned the support line, only to be told that it was late on a Friday, few people were in the office but they would “try” to get someone to call me back.
Nobody called me back, at all, though I did note that about 5 minutes after that call, the hold that had been placed on my card for £50 had been removed entirely, which pretty much said to me that they couldn’t be bothered actually trying to fix my problem – and thankfully for me, I’d planned ahead and had other charging options I could use the next day.
Bonus tip: ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS check the parking rules where you stop. Free parking is quite rare, but some places will let you stay for free if you’re charging, but often only if you register your vehicle with the carpark in some way. Others will bill you by the hour, with stiff penalties and camera detection in play, so be careful.
Can you use overseas Tesla chargers with a non-Tesla vehicle?
Scotland, where I tested out whether an Australian Tesla account would work with a UK supercharger.
One question I couldn’t easily find an answer to online was whether open Tesla chargers would work if you had a Tesla account registered overseas or not.
I was fully aware that you can charge a non-Tesla vehicle through the Tesla app (within the app it’s the hamburger menu and then “charge your other EV”) in the country where you’re registered, but it wasn’t clear if their chargers would work with a bank account registered overseas, so I did try that out in Inverness.
I wasn’t going to get my Ionity discount there, but the pricing – at least for that supercharger, Tesla’s charging rates through the UK vary wildly — wasn’t going to be too bad as long as it worked.
Which, pleasingly, it did, though it does make me ponder on data security. If your Tesla account is compromised (or more simply, someone steals your unlocked smartphone) then they could rack up some charging costs there, at least theoretically.
Quick diversion: BMW i5 Review
The car, by the way, was basically fine; whatever luxury parts come with it being a BMW were essentially wasted on me, though some of these might become more apparent had I set up a BMW account to pair with the car, which didn’t feel like it was worth it for a rental.
It mostly intelligently judged its charging needs in terms of available range across the trip. There’s probably a whole host of luxury perks in the i5 that I skipped right over, but then I was very much viewing it as a compromised option to start with, and I’m not that kind of car reviewer.
I will say that the default setup where the interior of the car glows, KITT style isn’t entirely pleasant, but thankfully that’s something that you can disable without requiring a specific login. That was the first tweak I made to the car because it annoyed me so much.
Part Four: Returning the EV to SIXT
(and what happened next)
Time to head back to London. It’s over that way… I think.
Driving costs aside – and don’t worry, I will let you know precisely how much more I had to pay because of SIXT UK’s duplicity here shortly – the rest of the trip went well enough, and the time came to return the car.
20 days later, I still didn’t have that “new agreement” about the excess, and while there was nothing changed about the car at all – I’m a cautious driver to a fault when it comes to this kind of thing – I drove back to Stratford to drop the car off.
It was not fully charged – it had 27% battery remaining – so of course the guy in the garage picked up on that.
“It’s not charged fully – we’ll have to bill you for that”
I assured him that this shouldn’t be the case, and somewhat chewed his ear off with a truncated version of the whole sorry tale.
He looked again at his device and suddenly “agreed” with me that I wouldn’t have to pay for the lower level of charging (as had been agreed upfront), but I’m once again 100% convinced that had I not been willing to stand up for my rights in a slightly angry fashion, there would have been an additional little sting in the tail there. Not that the “fun” in this regard was over quite yet.
The condition report was flawless – as it should have been because it was – but there was the matter of both the £50 “discount” I’d been promised and the £300 bond I’d had to pay upfront.
I will give SIXT this; the £50 was refunded reasonably promptly, and with full honest disclosure in mind, I missed that this had been done for a little while, so it did feature in one of my communications with them. That’s on me, though of course it’s the lesser of the sums involved. What about that £300 bond?
According to SIXT UK’s own emails,
“If your rental had a deposit at pickup, SIXT will release the funds within 24 business hours.”
Yeah… that didn’t happen the next day. Or the next, or the next, or even within 7 days, at which point I emailed SIXT UK to find out what the hell was happening.
Did I get a response to that email?
Hell no, not at all.
I’ve had nothing in terms of actual direct customer communication that didn’t fall out of a computerised script from the company at all.
The only way that I got my money back was when the original credit card hold was exhausted by date by my bank, a month after it had been put in place.
It’s also a good job that I wasn’t trying to claim the rental from a business I was working for, because while the final condition report was indeed for the BMW i5 I’d been driving, the actual final invoice was for a VW ID.7 that I never actually set foot in or put eyes on.
Just in case you thought I was kidding
(Personal ID information scrubbed out, because this is the Internet)
Does SIXT UK even know which vehicles they actually have to rent out?
I’m starting to have my doubts.
Sixt EV Hire: Alex’s Verdict
Upside: I got to go see this house in person (IYKYK).
Downside: I rented an EV from SIXT UK.
Nope.
Do not rent an EV from SIXT UK under any circumstances.
If you’ve got this far, that’s not a surprise, right?
At one level, SIXT did provide me with a vehicle that did function, and I was able to do what I’d planned to do through the UK as a result.
However the communications around that hiring process were abysmal from start to finish, including conduct that clearly benefitted SIXT to my detriment; if SIXT had been upfront and honest about the switch back in March – and once again, they had TEN MONTHS to contact me to let me know this – then my options (including potentially staying with them for the rental or making another choice) would have been much wider.
For some reason, this display (from Manchester’s truly EXCELLENT People’s History Museum speaks to me right now. Can’t think why…
Leaving it to the last minute and then muddying the waters left me with few choices, and significantly out of pocket.
How much extra did this actually cost?
I travelled far and wide, and this did incur significant extra costs out of my own pocket.
For those who like the numbers, here they are.
If SIXT had continued with Tesla Model Y rentals and supercharging, I had my trip planned and would have spent precisely zero dollars more.
That wasn’t what happened, so I had to get creative finding the lowest cost fast charging solutions available to me.
The quantity of assistance I got from SIXT in this respect?
Sweet bugger all beyond that £50 drop in the bucket offer, certainly no advice on how to best charge or anything like that. But that’s not a shock by now.
The total cost of charging the BMW i5 over 1890 miles of driving (as per SIXT’s final return notes) was an additional $661.98 AUD, but of course that could have been much worse without having taken up a charging subscription to lower prices.
Without that 43% discount, not including two charges done at non-Ionity locations, I would have been out of pocket at least $955.18 (or more, pricier chargers do exist as well), all because SIXT couldn’t be honest enough to be upfront about a major change in their hiring policies when they actually made it.
At that time, SIXT was marginally cheaper than its competition, but we’re talking in the range of about $50-$100 cheaper from memory, not $661.98-$955.18 cheaper – and those competitors included those that included all charging, including Tesla supercharging in the equation.
That extra money might be trivial to some, but for me, it absolutely changed what I could afford to do on that trip; it didn’t totally derail it, but it forced me into a number of compromises around what I could afford to do in terms of attractions, food and accomodation along the way.
All because SIXT couldn’t be bothered to be upfront and communicate honestly with me.
Why the hell should I recommend them after that?
Update: SIXT got back to me, with an email that… basically ignores my primary concern.
But I believe in the right of reply, so here’s what they sent me:
Dear Alex,
We are reaching out to you from the Office of the COO regarding your latest LinkedIn Post about your EV rental with SIXT.
Firstly, we sincerely apologise for the unsatisfactory experience you had with your rental. We appreciate you taking the time to share your concerns, and we take your feedback seriously.To clarify your first point: when you make a reservation with SIXT, you are booking a vehicle category, not a specific make or model. Our fleet is dynamic, vehicles are added, removed, and rotated based on performance, reliability, customer demand, and operational considerations. As a result, we cannot guarantee a specific make or model, even if it was previously part of our fleet.
We did have Tesla vehicles in our fleet earlier in the year and held them in our stock as long as possible. However, by the time your rental dates approached in December, all Tesla units had been removed from service and were no longer available. Consequently, you were provided with a higher category vehicle, in your case a BMW i5.
Your point regarding the insurance excess option is correct. You selected the full protection (zero excess) on your original booking, and this should have been reflected in your rental contract, regardless of any change in vehicle category. That was an oversight on our part, and we acknowledge this was incorrect and understandably frustrating.
Regarding the battery level, we understand the frustration caused by the initial miscommunication. There was an agreement with one team member about your return level, but unfortunately that was not communicated to the staff checking the vehicle in. This internal breakdown should not have occurred. We apologise for any stress this caused, and we are addressing this with our teams. Thankfully, the agreement was honoured and you were not charged.
With respect to the deposit, once the rental contract is closed on our end, the deposit release is automatically triggered. The timing of funds becoming available is determined by your individual financial institution. Some banks process this within 24 hours, others, especially international banks, may take up to 28 days. Unfortunately, the timing of this is outside of our control.
We recognise there were multiple communication errors on our part that contributed to a less than stress‑free experience. We have flagged these points with the relevant teams to help prevent similar issues in future. While we know that does not undo what happened, we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and frustration you experienced.
To show our goodwill and to offer you the opportunity to trust us again, we would like to offer you a 250 GBP/EUR/USD voucher for use on a future booking. This voucher can be issued for one of the following locations: Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Great Britain, or the USA. Please let us know if you would like to accept this offer and for which country you wish the voucher to be issued.
We appreciate you sharing your concerns and would welcome the chance to serve you again.
Here’s the response I sent through to SIXT:
Thanks for reaching out.
Unfortunately, while we agree that the communications from SIXT in this case were abysmal, your point about vehicle category outright ignores my primary complaint; pretty much everything else builds from that. I am not in any way fussed about the make or model of the car per se (four wheels, enough space and it goes is good enough for me). I even noted that in the review, because my first thought when I was called was that my vehicle was changing due to damage to fleet stock, not because of a more substantial change to the deal I’d signed up for.
My complaint here is that by changing the vehicle — removing the type from your fleet entirely a matter of weeks after I’d made my initial booking — you also fundamentally changed the deal I’d signed up for with regards to the ability to charge the car up at Tesla superchargers without notifying me in any semblance of a timely manner.
That change — and SIXT’s absolute lack of communication around it — left me with no real choices in terms of my rental at the time, but what’s more, substantially out of pocket for hundreds of dollars of charging fees as a result of SIXT’s choices in this matter.
Had SIXT been upfront about that change — it’s not just a change of vehicle make but of how the economics of that rental worked — I may well have opted to keep the booking with foreknowledge that it was going to cost extra, or gone elsewhere. SIXT’s communication policies around this completely removed that option from me and left me significantly worse off.
I do hope you do take feedback like this seriously for the sake of other customers, but this response doesn’t in any way change my opinion of what happened or future plans in terms of rentals; I cannot trust SIXT and can’t see a reason to do so. As such, I’ll decline your “goodwill” offer, because all it represents to me is another opportunity to end up further out of pocket at the end of a future rental period, as I did here.
Tldr version; SIXT UK – do not hire from them under any circumstances. End of (long) story.
About the Author
Very timely review, about to go to UK in a few months.
Admittedly wgrn I’ve hured cars in Australia I rarely got the actual car model described. But the SIXT COO office do not consider free charging to be a contract feature or vehicle class feature – just something that swaps in & out with car model within a rental class. That’s bait & switch.
Their “goodwill” offer of a discount on a future rental is miserable & almost cost free to them.
I’ll still avoid SIXT.