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Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

Assuming the rental market is at least somewhat comparative I doubt this will happen.

When you return a ICE car partially empty someone has to either bring gas to the vehicle or drive the vehicle to a pump.

Even though this is probably on-site it is very labor intensive and most rental places are pretty low staff. I could see future EV ones being entirely self service.

Anyway an EV can just be charged where you park assuming they wire each spot with an EV charger which I think makes sense since doing an n+1 charger is probably not much more.

I think the you will just pay whatever the normal charger electricity price would be.

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Estimates are that each supercharger slot costs Tesla over $100,000 for permitting, install, equipment.

Have you been to a rental car company lately? Most don't give the impression of being flush with cash. In order to get the best charging speed and turn your cars around, do you see them laying out $100K per vehicle/slot?

That's in public places. When you're doing a few in a row on ground that is already yours, it's going to be quite a bit cheaper. Not cheap, but cheaper.

are cars really going from one customer to another after an hour or so ?

Otherwise you don’t need to have superchargers, you can just use a normal charger which is a few hundreds dollars, probably less at the scale of Hertz.

Hmm, I cannot imagine why it would cost $100K for a super charger unless they are for some reason much more expensive then regular chargers. And again the marginal cost per charger has got to be an order of magnitude lower than the first charger because trenching is very expensive but each parking space isn't very far from each other. i.e I'm guessing that putting a handful of superchargers in a lot of different places is much more expensive than putting a lot of chargers in one location.

In any case, I know that regular charger's are very simple they are really just glorified relays so it might make sense to use non-superchargers if they are actually much more expensive.

Sure most rental places aren't cash heavy ATM but they aren't the ones buying 100k Tesla vehicles.

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