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Comment by thehappypm | Hacker News Reader

Electric cars are actually a very good fit for many rentals. Thinking through my last 5 rentals.

A wedding that was 1 hour from an airport, ~100 miles RT.

A ski trip where I wanted to drive from Denver to my AirBnB near Winter Park Colorado, ~200 miles RT.

A hiking trip where I needed a second car for a point-to-point car shuttle (New Hampshire!), ~120 miles RT.

A bachelor party where I needed to drive from the airport to a trailhead then to an AirBnB then back to airport, ~150 miles RT.

A national park trip to the Grand Canyon, ~500 miles RT.

Each of those scenarios would have been 1 full charge of a Tesla round-trip, with the exception of the Grand Canyon. Maybe not the ski trip since it's mountainous and cold weather kills the battery so 200 miles might be a stretch, but I could have trickle-charged at my AirBnB. So basically I can see how many quick rental car needs are met by EVs, plus no dealing with filling with gas!

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When you bring a gas car back empty, you get charged heavily.

Wonder how the pricing and will be affected by the juice left in when you return it. And how their scheduling manages it.

Also, will “FSD” be enabled or disabled? There’s an interesting liability chain.

Right, because bringing it back empty means the car is out of commission for ~12h.

The last three times I've rented a car it's been turned and burned and I've had to wait a few minutes for a clean/wash to be complete from the last renter.

I am sure Hertz can afford a 50KW charger at their locations => 1-2h for full charge.

Not to mention that if the charger is on-premise, there is no longer a personnel need to drive gas-depleted cars to an offsite refueling station. That may add up to significant labor savings.

If agency on-site charging is fast enough, that’s a win, like a pump at every stall.

> there is no longer a personnel need to drive gas-depleted cars to an offsite refueling station

Rental car depots have their own on site gas stations. Fuel on return is one of the highest profit margins rental companies have.

This varies. Laws on safely storing fuel frequently mean Hertz doesn't want to take on the risk (a small leak tends to cost millions in fines). Instead they'll pay staff to drive cars to a nearby station, where they'll have a discount.

Above-ground storage tanks for gasoline are quite safe and reliable. The laws aren't that tough, and most of the compliance requirements are satisfied by having double walled tanks. I struggled to find an instance of fines above $50k that didn't also involve gross negligence.

I know it sounds scary, but most of the fire stations, hospitals, business parks, and schools you drive past will have a few hundred gallons of diesel or LNG stored on site for backup generators. Your city or county public works, taxi yards, and larger post offices will have on site fueling. Large construction sites will usually have on site fuel, or a truck that comes every day or two.

In the last couple of months I've rented cars from about 10 (Enterprise) locations in the UK, only Heathrow had it's own fueling station.

The smaller locations you are using are retail fronts, not depots. When you return the car it is taken to an offsite location anyway to get washed, vacuumed, inspected, fueled, and returned.

They aren't charging you for labor, they are charging you just because they can. In most cases where fuel is not returned full, it's probably a business trip where the renter's company is paying and the renter therefore does not take a shit about it.

Their TOS just came out. Apparently they will only ask for a minimum of 10% charge level:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28996234

When you bring an electric car back empty, it will get charged heavily :)

Electric cars are also a good fit for rental companies for another reason: Their customers want to make a good first impression on customers, new friends and other individuals they rarely see.

I'm sure some people do, but do most people really judge each other on rental cars?

That seems, well, stupid. Frankly, I'm not sure if most customers ever even see me in my rental car.

No, people don't usually judge each other on rental cars. But they will judge a contractor for his national origin or skin color, so driving an expensive car offsets that

Sad but true in many parts of the world

> * I'm sure some people do, but do most people really judge each other on rental cars?*

People judge each other on what car they drive, regardless of how they got their hands on it.

I would not associate myself with people who are concerned with the make and model of a rental vehicle. Or any vehicle for that matter. It is snobbish nonsense that should be shunned.

Can anyone with an EV speak to the difference in insurance for these vehicles? That is, if I rented a Tesla, would my regular insurance cover me sufficiently, or would I be a fool not to buy the rental company's insurance addon? I'm sure they'll charge a pretty penny for this, and scare plenty of folks into buying it. What would be good reasons to do so?

This is impossible to answer without the details of your car insurance. It entirely depends on what your insurer’s rental car policies are.

There are two issues at hand: accident liability and damage/theft.

For liability, it’s typical that states require rental companies to purchase stare minimum or sometimes a higher liability level than the state minimum as a base.

For damage/collision, there’s no requirement for anyone to hold coverage, so that’s on you. Many travel credit cards offer damage/collision insurance as a feature, and some individual car insurance plans extend coverage from your personal car insurance to rented cars, but don’t assume this.

You can generally rent a car if you don’t own a car and don’t own your own car insurance, and in most states you wouldn’t be obligated to purchase additional coverage from the car insurer.

A Tesla is no different than any other expensive car rental, the fact that it’s electric is irrelevant. It’s no different than renting an Audi Q7 from a rental car company.

Kind of a big annoyance if your hotel does not have chargers though. Especially if you already booked it.

Just checked. At least Booking has a "ev charging station" filter when searching for places to stay.

I just use Tesla's destination charger map and that usually works. And in many cases, at least in colder parts of the country the hotel might have access to engine block heater outlets. These are good enough to trickle charge overnight and save some time in the morning.

Unfortunately I've that you can't rely on the chargers being available at most hotels. In my experience they're frequently either ICE-ed (the charging spot is taken by a non-EV car), or there's already another car charging.

There is one problem coming: people fighting over chargers. I was in a Target parking lot with two people fighting over who got to the charger first. Fortunately the mall 5 miles away has a Tesla outlet and a dozen underground charging slots.

At some point, there probably will be some kind of competition until the infrastructure catches up.

We had that last month in the UK with people fighting over gas.

https://metro.co.uk/2021/09/29/more-petrol-fights-break-out-...

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/fights-petrol-station...

In the US, people constantly pull out a gun at fast food outlets because they've got the wrong type of cheese on their waffle, or because burger king don't take discover, or some nonsense.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/waffle-house-employee-p...

So yes it's inevitable

I don't think you understand the word "constantly". You make it sound like the US fast food scene is a warzone over a single article that is newsworthy because it isn't _that_ common.

Hasn’t been an issue for me in years now that supercharging is much faster but it’s still an inconvenience to stop for 20-30 minutes.

They'll wise up to it when people start requesting it.

I'll even pay a premium for a 100% guaranteed reserved charging spot at a hotel. This way I can just gun it and arrive at 1% charge, plug in, sleep, have breakfast and be on my way with a full battery again.

Small hotel owner here. There is no grid capacity near our airport, we actually have a restriction of 15kW limit / building in the area, and we ended up powering each floor from a different building (my family owns the neighbouring houses).

We had gov't grants available to build charging stations, and couldn't get them because of the power grid situation.

That's a singularly shitty power grid right there :)

Charging overnight even at 2-3kW is plenty for most people, that's usually enough to get you a good 100-200km away from the hotel and to a fast charger (or your next destination).

On long trips, there may be one or more Hertz locations near your route. If all of them stock electric cars, Hertz could offer a premium offering where you change cars along the way...

I certainly do not look forward to constant unloading/loading, adjusting seats and mirrors, and pairing bluetooth again every 3 hours.

superchargers are not too bad. 30 mins at a charging station while you grab food and stretch your legs is all it takes.

Syncing your driving prefs to your phone or to the cloud would be very interesting. Show the car a QR code as you walk up to it?

Your keycard / phone key can store your driver profile id that the car then uses to fetch the settings from the cloud. No QR code needed.

Other than the loading/unloading of stuff, the rest of these can be handled with some code. Consider the tech stack of the average Tesla, including how they're always connected to the internet already. Tie the settings to your key in the cloud, and then create a UI to move key 123 from car 456 to car 789.

This idea is 150 years old!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express

If Hertz offers up their locations as supercharger locations... that's a LOT of locations to add to the supercharger network with a willing partner to help finance it and maintain it.

Kind of like how the dealer networks, which SHOULD be a massive advantage for Ford/GM to place chargers (and shadow market cars) and build out a huge charging network... well, that's not happening because dealers hate EVs.

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