They could, but I don't know if people would like it. When you're running late for a flight it takes three minutes to drive through the (somewhat overpriced) airport gas station and throw $20 in the tank, but with an electric car that could be twenty minutes (assuming the airport had a charger available). Which means you're stuck paying Hertz to fill it for you at their crazy markup.

Of course, the answer with most electric car charging questions is "charge it at home", which is great when you own the car, but when you're on a trip who knows what the hotel's infrastructure will be like.

I can do an after hours return with a gas car at 3am and spend the 3 minutes to fill up the tank before I leave it on the lot. You can't really do that with an electric car unless you want to pay a extremely high fillup cost

Minutes. The last three times I've rented I've got a car that was just returned, and even had to wait while they wash and detail the car.

I do kind of agree, but I have not much hope for a free market where a company wins by being that much better than the rest, where they could just go with the flow and charge the same fees as anyone else.

With gas cars, there's a clear cost to having an employee go out and refuel it if its not returned full. This is much less justifiable if the company can just charge the cars on-site, either quickly or slowly.

A compromise could be that if a car is returned with less than x%, where it must be charged before going out to the next customer, then charge more but if its returned with 80-100%, don't charge extra because it could go out to the next customer easily. I've rented plenty of cars without a full tank.

Wasn't tesla already doing it though?

https://electrek.co/2021/05/24/tesla-found-guilty-throttling...

These cars are probably going to use the cheaper iron based batteries which are fine to charge to 100%.