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Transportation

Hertz Continues EV Purge (arstechnica.com) 258

Posted by BeauHD from the big-gamble-fail dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apparently Hertz's purging of electric vehicles from its fleet isn't going fast enough for the car rental giant. A Reddit user posted an offer they received from Hertz to buy the 2023 Tesla Model 3 they had been renting for $17,913. Hertz originally went strong into EVs, announcing a plan to buy 100,000 Model 3s for its fleet by the end of 2021, but 16 months later had acquired only half that amount. The company found that repair costs -- especially for Teslas, which averaged 20 percent more than other EVs -- were cutting into its profit margins. Customer demand was also not what Hertz had hoped for; last January, it announced plans to sell off 20,000 EVs.

Asking its customers if they want to purchase their rentals isn't a new strategy for Hertz. "By connecting our rental customers who opt into our emails to our sales channels, we're not only building awareness of the fact that we sell arsenal but also offering a unique opportunity to someone who may be in the market for the same car they have on rent," Hertz communications director Jamie Line told The Verge. Hertz is advertising a limited 12-month, 12,000-mile powertrain warranty for each EV, and customers will have seven days to return the car in case of profound buyer's regret.

Hertz Continues EV Purge More | Reply

Hertz Continues EV Purge

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  • I never understood the push for EV rental cars (Score:5, Informative)

    by thsths ( 31372 ) on Friday December 27, 2024 @03:17PM (#65043573)

    EVs are great for many purposes, especially if you can charge them at home.

    But as a rental? I get e rental when I am in a different place, and need to do a lot of driving - otherwise I just get an uber. Unfamiliar place, unfamiliar vehicle, no home charging, long driving distances - that is exactly the combination where EVs absolutely suck. Add the regular incompetence of rental places (no induction for charging, no charging on site), and it was a recipe for disaster.

    Supposedly every company knows their business, but with car rentals I do wonder.

    • Rented a Tesla from Hertz before. I charge at a supercharger as needed. The car tells you where via the on-board navigation.
    • I rent EVs all the time. Love them.

      • Do you own an EV? I wonder how hard it is for a non-EV owner to rent an EV, i.e. how big is the learning curve for core functionality. (I'll do my own assessment, if Hertz still has the Polestar 2 I reserved for a rental in February. It'll be my first EV if that goes through.)

        • Most EVs can be operated the exact same way as an ICE car. The only two things that are different is the much faster acceleration and the charging. The former is not a big deal, the latter can be complicated and frustrating at times, though.

        • I own an EV and wouldn't rent one on a trip. The main reason is that the overwhelming majority of my charging is done at home and no one else is using my chargers, which wouldn't be the case while travelling. Every time I get home, there's a charger waiting for me and I know it is going to work when I plug my car in. Public charging is presently nowhere near that level of availability yet. Charges get broken, ICED (when someone parks a gas car in front of them out of spite or just because they wanted th

    • The rental business model is as much about resale as it is about rental. They expect to buy in bulk at steep discounts, then resell before the cars lose too much value. Apparently the Tesla deal was a double whammy - higher than expected maintenance cost, then resale value plunged due to Tesla price cuts. I don't know how demand was for the cars - maybe less there too as you suggest.

    • No the majority of rental cars do not drive long distances, they are typically used to drive around locally. As for no home charging, that's an American problem. The last few hotels I've stayed at have had EV charging stations. The last few Hertz EV rentals I've had came with Shell Recharge tokens meaning I had access to virtually every curb side charger in the country.

      I'm actually driving a rental right now on holidays. Not an EV this time, but I've been here a week and have driven just over 300km, I would

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      If only there was some electronic means by which you could search for charging locations.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      EVs are great for renting, I strongly prefer them. No need to go find a filling station before returning it, and start every day with a full charge from the hotel.

      Hertz seem to have simply botched it. They chose the wrong cars (Tesla's are expensive to repair and awkward to drive, and associated with Musk), and then didn't get the infrastructure and processes in place to make sure they got charged at the rental locations.

  • 12,000-mile powertrain warranty

    I hope that includes the battery. Or it's worthless. Even then, 12,000 miles isn't much for an EV battery. Not enough time to catch all the lemons.

  • Rental cars have a high milage as they are rented mostly for long drives. Especially when Herz went into it, ranges of these tesla's and charging time weren't that great, also the amount of (good) charging points isn't still really great (unless you have your own driveway). Add up the crappy build quality of Tesla's and you have a pretty nightmare for a rental car. It's only now that EV's are getting really longer ranges and faster charging capabilities, but we're still at the early years of EV adoption/tec
    • Yeah I wouldn't mind having one, eventually. Heck, petroleum is far too valuable to burn for transport, not when our many nuclear power stations provide so much energy to the grid (snerk). Seriously, I wouldn't mind having one but I think we're at about the 1915 level equivalent with EVs to ICE vehicles.
      • Well, that's the main problem, if those oilbarons back in the days hadn't pushed their product so aggressively and even threatened others, we would have been driving very advanced EV's now, as EV's were being developed and built before even the ICE cars.

        • In the early days, you just couldn't hope to compete with hydrocarbon energy densities. The battery tech was at least a generation away if not two.

          I'm very confident if you had explained smog and global warming to them, they'd still have chosen oil and put off dealing with those issues.

    • Rentals are not universally rented for long drives. In many cases rentals are used a lot, that doesn't mean they go long distances. Many rentals are done so with contracts that may actually limit how far you can drive them. There are many options for many situations. For many EVs are fine, for some they are not.

      I recently rented a Polestar 2 from Hertz that was 3 years old and had only 16000km on it. That's about the distance I put on my own Polestar in 9 months, just commuting. Just for fun I looked up cen

  • Sounds more like a purge of over priced Teslas.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Friday December 27, 2024 @04:27PM (#65043761) Homepage
    But sure blame the entire sector for that click-bait pizzazz.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Yeah, with Tesla you have so many particular things.

      A design that emphasizes manufacturing cost at the expense of repairability for abused vehicles, and rentals get abused heavily.

      You also have the accounting mess of Tesla's deep price cuts, which sucks for Hertz' accountants when declaring capital value.

  • High maintenance? (Score:3)

    by sonicmerlin ( 1505111 ) on Friday December 27, 2024 @04:34PM (#65043781)

    Doesn't exactly make sense. Batteries are lasting longer than manufacturers anticipated and there's a lot less moving parts in an EV. Not sure where they're getting high maintenance costs from.

    • I looked this up and "repairs" mean body work and collision repairs. Not normal wear and tear or shit generally breaking.

    • From dipshit renters who don't care about the car when driving it, because it's not theirs.

      Have you seen how people drive rentals?

      NEVER buy a pre-owned rental.

    • Tesla crash repair has to be very expensive given that some at least are using single part castings - cheap to make, and all but impossible to repair

  • An electric mobility researcher I know sums it up nicely: "The future is electric, but the future is not necessarily now."

    Basically, for some people going electric makes sense now (and/or they can afford it), and for others (still many more on this planet) that is presently not true. Some countries can force the issue if they want to for whatever reason (e.g., EVs in China; Norway in general: small population, lots of hydro power, they could focus on clean electricity for decades and wisely chose to do so,

  • Rampant Ignorance (Score:3)

    by methano ( 519830 ) on Friday December 27, 2024 @05:55PM (#65044039)
    Judging from the comments on this post, there are still lots of ignorant people with regard to EV's. And it appears that the greater the ignorance, the more likely the poster will make statements with a great sense of certainty, tossing out bogus stats ad nauseam. Most EV owners (>95%) who have home charging and access to the Tesla charging network, ain't going back.

    Yeah, I know. I can make up stats with the best of them.
    • Because the people who buy EVs rarely go far from home, by the sounds of it. No one is trying to argue that there isn't a small number of people that they work for. Personally I go on enough long trips that the inconvenience of being delayed or uncertain how long a drive will be outweighs the convenience of charging at home most days. There are too many deadlines in life to find out you needed to wait at an EV charging station and having your trip go over by 30 minutes.

      • You assert they work for a small number, I assert they work for anyone who isn't employed in OTR freight. If I'm driving a long distance - perhaps once a year - it's for pleasure, not to meet a deadline.

        If you get to assume everyone's driving cross-country every weekend, I get to assume no one does.

        • And as far as Hertz goes, they were dumb to load up on EVs because their business specifically caters to those edge cases where someone may need more than 200 miles of range. Rental lots will be the last bastion of gas cars, long after everyone has an EV for daily driving.

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