Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
EVs are best for the types of driving we do on a day-to-day basis. Short commutes in areas we know well. Charge at home over night and 95% of the year you never worry about charging.
Renting a car means I'm usually either driving long distances or im somewhere new and I don't know about the local charging infrastructure. Can I charge at the hotel? What about at Disney World or the San Diego Zoo or wherever else I'm driving on vacation? What if there are no super chargers nearby? Etc...
Maybe in a couple decades of battery/energy tech advancements where we can charge faster or swap batteries easier EVs for rentals will make more sense. Until then it's just extra stress you don't want when traveling. I know that's not why Hertz is dropping Tesla (the article sites high repair costs) but it's just my personal thought on rental EVs.
When I’m traveling for work and need a car, it’s usually for smaller quick trips where I wouldn’t even need to refill a tank of gas. For these types of trips, a single charge on an EV makes sense. But otherwise, I agree with you. EV rental doesn’t make much sense to me for long trips or vacation travel where you’ll be driving a lot in a place you don’t know.
That might make sense a lot of the time. But there's plenty of exceptions - for example winter time in cold climates can transform a single charge rental into several charges needed. Even with just a few short trips taken.
At first, it was hard since I've never owned a model 3. Even if you are a model 3 owner, you are probably used to using your phone as the key.
They give you a keycard.
anyway, I didn't know how to lock the doors. finally I figured out the lock symbol on the central display and locked the doors. But when I got out, they were unlocked again. The trick was to open the door first, press the lock icon, get out and close the doors.
The easy way to lock the doors... Well, you can google it and find out, it is not intuitive, but easy once you learn.
Now renting a car that can drive itself was wonderful. I had to put a lot of miles on and it helped.
Finding charging is easy -- it is all built into the display. You can navigate and it will integrate charging into your trip. I was already familiar with this, but if you're unfamiliar it might be something to learn. There ARE superchargers everywhere, and L2 chargers everywhere else.
I had to do level 2 charging (J1772) and it I had to call hertz to figure out where the adapter was. (It was in a bag in the footwell of the trunk). Once I had that I could charge at hotels.
Hertz did spam me with lots of "get to know the model 3 before your trip" stuff. I should have read it a bit.
I see what you did there...
I think the Tesla is nice if you don't need to go anywhere too far. For trips stick to gasoline.
It’s like any inconvenience though. I used to bicycle commute everywhere that was within about a 20 mile radius. Rain, shine, or snow. This was so routine that it never bothered me. But if you’re a person who hasn’t ridden a bike in ten years and I asked you to adopt my routine, I can’t imagine you’d be terribly happy.
Swapping a battery that weighs a ton and is part of the car structure is another story completely.
I think the more sensible solution is to have fast charging and a reliable network. 800 volt batteries and a good architecture enable incredible fast charging, and in the fjture it might be even faster. Combine that with cars with a lot of range, ex. 400+ miles and a 30m stop once 300 miles doesn't sound bad at all.
With battswap also being done at the lightweight end, eventually there will be convergence in the middle. But I think we have another decade or fifteen years to wait before standardization efforts have a chance and battswap can be vehicle manufacturer agnostic.
Battswap is an obvious way to lower the sticker price of vehicles, which is key to selling the next half billion of them.
Problem is, nobody wanted it. They would rather wait to charge than turn in their personal battery, and later come back for it.
Would you want it? Would you turn over your decent, brand new battery at some charging station?
What's interesting is that they did it differently with the cybertruck. You can buy an additional battery that I believe is swappable.
From what I can tell they showed it off to get some tax credits, then decided not to deploy it anywhere (but keep the money of course).
For instance, when I travel with my regular IC car, I don't plan or think too much about where to refuel, how I am going to drive there, etc. It's usually a last minute decision. Having to spend half an hour somewhere it's a bit more tricky, now the trip revolves around recharging, waiting, possibly combining with lunch or dinner, etc.
Came here and said EV was not cheaper to run for me, many people on here disagreed. I gave up
yeah, once you know it is easy.
It sounds like that would have solved literally all of your problems.
This was my recent experience. I was offered an EV car as a rental upgrade in a major city because the local rental place didn't have an EV charger. I figured what the hell because it was a relaxed holiday vacation. Turns out that was a hilariously bad idea.
Ended up spending at least 5-6 hours of my week vacation trying to avoid the EV going to 0% battery. Half of that time was spent on Google Maps - trying to find chargers with the right plug, ones that aren't broken, ones that were available, downloading various apps, etc. Then when I did find a charger I sat in the parking lot waiting for it to juice up.
All of that effort and I still could only give myself the miles back that I spent finding chargers, it was even funnier when the cold weather took miles away. Finally ended up luckily finding one at a local movie theater and asked family to shuttle me back and forth because of how long it took to charge.
Not a knock on EV's really, mostly the charging infrastructure and the rental experience.
Imagine in 1995 saying emails will never replace sending around documents at the office, just because there wasn't any infra yet. Wait a bit, or even help !
It annoys me to get and send pdfs in text messages, but that seems to be how the world works now.
Do you mean PDFs for correspondence such as bills or invoices? That is not common for me.
I still use email pretty frequently even if communications are at least somewhat fragmented across SMS, Facebook, Slack, etc.
With EVs it's always going to require a tow, which is a nightmare experience I don't recommend to anyone.
These considerations are why I think we'll eventually move to battery swapping, when the market is mature enough to have standards for batteries. When there are as many battery swapping stations as there are gas stations now, the problem will be greatly diminished.
The bigger issue is scaling down cracking stations so you can use stranded electricity from solar and wind to generate the H2.
It’s like saying, “It’s easy to ship fragile glass sculptures. You just smash them into little bits and put the bits in an envelope, I don’t see why people use all that styrofoam.”
You’re obviously not a New Yorker
It's not a problem. At all.
Likewise, “It’s possible to ship and store H2” is not the same thing as “it’s not a problem to ship and store H2”.
It's not a problem. At all.
And nobody said "preventing" adoption, since that's easy to misinterpret.
It's reducing adoption a lot, compared to what it would be if hydrogen was as easy to store as butane or kerosene.
Maybe it took too long, but we've got a single standard for high powered charging going forward, and I think J1772 is universal for PHEVs and slow charging of EVs. Eventually, people running charging networks will figure out how to keep their machines working and add card readers. My favorite broken charger is the wireless ones --- someone has run off with the cable, but hey the advertising display still works.
One person in this thread, was talking about cars, with no knowledge or understand that 3 separate manufacturers have h2 products on the market. Not 3 cars. 3 manufacturers. Another was discussing things as if it's an insurmountable task, that having h2 in cars is "really hard", yet these cars are being sold and used all over the world, with loads of adoption in Japan.
People make up weird claims about efficiency. About storage. About where h2 comes from. On and on and on. It's so ... absurd.
This isn't a 'my team your team' thing, yet it seems like, especially americans, are wired this way. "It's not thing $x, thus evil! wrong!! We must, absolutely must destroy any hope of this other thing existing.
h2 is the future for many application and usage spaces, and I can see batteries the same way too. It's not either or, and made up claims won't help the green movement at all.
In contrast, an electric car uses electricity to charge a 99% efficient battery, and discharge to the 90% engine. So, 89% efficiency - much, much better.
Not to mention the technical challenges (assume we can handle) of the low volume density, low temperature..
There may well be, we don’t really know because we haven’t been looking for it at any scale.
But outside of that, these things will improve, although your numbers are a bit out there.
There aren't claims, these are physical constraints. For heavy vehicles such as trucks and busses (and trains) there might be a market, provided the H2 is an otherwise unused byproduct of some process and needn't be produced, but for the majority of personal mobility major breakthroughs are required to make it competitive.
So much denial in the anti h2 crowd.
I'm not anti H2, why would I? I'm not part of any crowd. I just did part of my physics training on the subject.
20 years ago, while there were more H2 vehicles on the road, nobody in the H2 storage fields thought it would last. On a basc level, the physics of getting electrons out of a material is better than getting protons out. And then there is an already preexisting infrastructure for free.
The biggest issue is the need to build out an entirely new fueling infrastructure with a highly explosive fuel. EVs can piggyback off of the existing electrical grid.
To replace fossil fuel transport will require an entirely new infrastructure regardless - if it's electric the existing grid will essentially have to be built out by a substantial factor.
A hybrid future is entirely feasible with long established city to city truck transport routes using hydrogen from dedicated planned end points and mid points along with lighter EV vehicles and non standard route EV trucking.
For such people, and there's a lot of these people, h2 is less work (quicker fill up) than electric charging.
Right now, electric cars are targeting the wealthy. Wealthy people tend to have houses. That could certainly change, but even if it starts to target those with less fiscal fortitude, many such live in apartments with no charging infrastructure.
What then?
Wake me up when I need nothing more than the payment card I already carry.
> The stations are primarily deployed in three regions: Asia Pacific (over 2,000), North America (over 2,000), and Europe (over 1,000).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Supercharger
Some supercharger stations also work with other cars. I used them over Christmas with my Kia. Surprisingly they were faster and cheaper than anything else in the area.
I'm sure they are the best, those Tesla stations, you're just gonna have to go out of your way for them, around here at least. Hope you got the right card. Or your leasing company. Or your car rental. Etc.
And even if they had then here top, they'd be useless to me, because Teslas are too large for me.
https://www.tesla.com/en_eu/findus
Model 3 is a normal sized compact car, but if you live in Italy or on an island, it could be too big.
The Tesla Model 3 is a Medium car by NHTSA standards and a Compact by EPA standards.
However, in the EU Euro Car Segment standard, the Model 3 is a D-segment or "large car".
Musk is inextricably tied to Teslas brand.
All good when he was ‘space Howard Hughes (pre-hypochondriac shut-in)’, since that brand resonated with people with money who were going for the ‘better future’ image.
Now his antics remind everyone of their asshole racist uncle that they can’t stand. Not a good brand association, as asshole racists uncles aren’t as popular with those with a lot of money.
But since Tesla is leading the bottom in reliability scores, it's still quite unlikely I'm getting one.
https://www.motortrend.com/features/tesla-nacs-charging-port...
Edit Although I should add, even if they work, they may not support the full power charging. My Kia works, but nowhere near 250kWh.
It really is! My port is on the front centre and depending on how others have parked, it's quite tricky to get the angle required to be close enough.
But these are just niggles. We absolutely need standard hardware.
My point is it can’t be much more of a hazard.
I used a gasoline stove for a while and it is bonkers how hard that thing is to light. You can spill the gas or do all sorts of things—the only thing I could do to get a fire out of it was to follow the instructions, exactly, and keep the stove perfectly level. I later learned that gasoline only burns if you keep the gasoline / air mixture within a narrow range. I know that gasoline is implicated in a lot of fires, but it’s also just so damn common and people are careless with it.
Powerful batteries scare me more, to be honest. Not a lot more, just a little. Not trying to fearmonger here. It’s just that I love those sparks and that fire, and have spent time playing with batteries and playing with gasoline or other flammable substances. If you short a battery, it will basically dump as much energy as it can, as fast as it can. It’s easier to accidentally short a battery.
Properly stored & maintained batteries are fine. I just get a little nervous holding a wrench, sometimes.
Gogoro currently do more than 400,000 battery swaps / day, primarily in Taiwan, but are expanding into other Asian countries.
There may be safety concerns (e.g. if I understand it correctly, the swapping process is fully automated and the car locks the doors and takes over steering, so I'm not sure how this deals with emergency scenarios where the driver might need to leave the car or intervene) but as far as the driver is concerned they never touch the battery so the risk of accidents from improper wiring is significantly reduced.
On long trips stopping for 20-30 mins every few hours is ~normal anyway. Stretch my legs, use a restroom, have a drink, get back on the road.
Newer cars charge even faster. I don't think battery swapping is going to be important in the end.
Nio Inc. has videos of the process, and that's what you'd expect (and I assume what tesla tried at one time), you drive to a booth, the car gets locked in and the battery is replaced automatically, then you drive out.
This map has real time stats on battery swap. Unfortunately it's only available in Chinese. NIO has done 35 million battery swap to date and you can see where the swap stations are located. Not quite as accessible as your gas stations but not far off especially in the large cities.
You still need standardisation between all manufactureres for it to work.
It can supply energy slowly, perhaps at dozens-of-amps.
The only time when an EV gets into hundreds of amps territory is when it is doing real work: Work like accelerating, or going uphill (or both).
Maintaining a speed on a straight stretch of highway is not a huge burden in terms of work, and that is where I think that a trailer-mounted battery might shine brightest.
The car's internal battery can take the brunt of rapid acceleration tasks and get filled back up over time, just like it already does in normal charge-daily EV use.
So to put some of this into real terms:
20A at 355V is 7,100 Watts, or about 9.5 horsepower. That's a ton of real work.
100A at 355V is 35,500 Watts, or about 47 horsepower. Way more than plenty to keep a portly EV heading down the highway.
The connection for the trailer APU doesn't need to handle the peak current draw of hundreds of amps. It just needs to be able to (slowly) pick up some slack and thus provide greater range.
Like the BMW i3 with the gas-fired range extender: The EV drivetrain could consume a ton more peak power than the built-in genset could produce, and that's OK.
It's not like people are using these in endurance racing or something. Most real-world driving is pretty mundane, with only occasional instances of rapid acceleration.
She asks me to deal with the batteries in the TV remote.
But why not knock on them? They had a lot of promise and a lot of hype when they were being touted as simpler and cheaper and just overall better. Somehow they ended up being more expensive, unless we're talking about Chinese brands, more costly to insure, a longer time to charge than a corresponding IC car and incompatible charging networks. I think they can handle a bit of criticism, it's a big industry, and it can deal with some minor criticism from an orange hacker forum.
There were certainly mistakes (e.g., not supervising VW properly when they went full DGAF on the electricify america rollout).
The parent is saying they still believe in the analysis that electric will work, they just spent their whole comment criticizing their EV experience.
The Chinese brands' pricing seems to be at least in part due to subsidies: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-launches-anti-subsid...
At least that's what the EU says.
> But why not knock on them?
I would agree that the discussion on EVs is a bit misguided in general. It always is EVs or ICE cars and EVs must be the winner otherwise you are "confused" or "out of your mind". In reality, both can coexist and have a place for what they are really good at.
> The anti-subsidy investigation covers battery-powered cars from China, so also includes non-Chinese brands made there, such as Tesla (TSLA.O), Renault (RENA.PA) and BMW (BMWG.DE). It is also unusual in that it is brought by the European Commission itself, rather than in response to an industry complaint.
This does seem like more of a political play rather than China actually trying to flood western markets, especially considering that western EV producers are also being subsidized and that the Chinese domestic market is sufficiently large by itself.
Agreed. That's why I added "At least that's what the EU says."
The EU is clearly whining because the Chinese local market imploded, so they are now exporting more of their cars into the EU markets.
Yet, articles like the linked one make it unclear to me what part of EV production is really subsidized and what part is not. I think it would be advisable to be cautious about claims that they are already cheaper than ICE cars. At least, that's how I am looking at it currently.
I think it's disingenuous to downplay EU's response as "whining". The automotive industry is a strategic sector, not only in terms of economy but also directly and indirectly in defense. Shifting demand from the internal market to the output of a rival and potential threat means spending their own cash financing a rival to place it in a controlling position.
The car finds chargers on it's own. It shows you exactly what's available at each charger. Hardly anything is ever broken.
EVs are far easier and more convenient than gas cars. It's the non Tesla infrastructure that just sucks.
EVs certainly have some advantages, but for most of the world's population "convenience" isn't one of them.
If you live in a house with a garage where you can install a charger and you use your car mostly as a runabout, it's great.
The majority of the western world lives in cities with street parking and fewer chargers than vehicles, though, and in that situation it's far more convenient to spend five minutes at the gas station on your way to the office than it is to find a spot to charge your car for three hours which may or may not be anywhere close to where you actually need to go.
All you have to do is look at the census. 2/3rds of households have a garage or carport. If you add to this the number of people with private parking, that's like 80+% of people who can have chargers subsidized by the state.
It's always important to look at numbers before you get trapped in your bubble.
Speaking of bubbles, I wrote "majority of the western world," which admittedly surprisingly stretches beyond America.
Two-thirds of households in, say, Berlin absolutely do not have carports, garages, or private parking.
The irony. I didn't realise that the UK (and in fact a large portion of Europe) wasn't part of the western world.
The US followed suite and has also forced support for CCS when applying for subsidy programs to grow Tesla's charging network.
https://qz.com/the-white-house-is-trying-to-persuade-tesla-t...
I don't think EVs were ever sold as cheaper or overall better. I recall they were marketed as cheaper to run on short commutes, but at the expense of having a large upfront price, having shorter autonomies, and requiring relatively high logistics and route planning.
There's also the environmental and geopolitical angle, but it was always clear that potential customers were expected to pay a premium for that privilege. In fact, many countries even put together hefty subsidy programs to make EVs more competitive.
- Even though I was staying in their house there was no way I could charge it without buying an expensive cable, or risking some cheap crap from Amazon (blow up the house or the rental car perhaps?)
- Every damn thing needs an app (and an account and registration - fun if you don't actually live in the country in question). Seriously just put up a charger and a contactless payment reader. Imagine if every petrol pump needed an app to start? May as well go back to having to put pound coins in a meter...
- Oh and it was expensive anyway at 85p/KWh at public recharging points. So 78kWh * 0.85 = 66GBP ($84) per charge, say 230 miles to be generous. I gave the petrol rental back with 600 miles extra on the clock and put a bit over 50 quid in petrol in it.
This actually isn't true. It is law in the UK that every public charger must have a contactless reader on it. Many of them have apps but you don't need to use them.
Your point about the price is very valid though. With the exception of Tesla Superchargers they are extremely expensive. For some reason Supercharger prices range from 12-35p. The Supercharger network in the UK is pretty good, but driving anything other than a Tesla is a nightmare.
Not a realistic suggestion for anyone not living in London.
You seem to be confusing home/destination chargers and rapid chargers - which is a common mistake for non-EV drivers to make. Unlike petrol, electricity comes to you.
Well, or they went to https://ionity.eu/en/network/network-status or https://www.zap-map.com/live/ looked at Manchester and it listed only one Ionity charger, "Manchester East".
Of course, very few people that live in Greater Manchester would use a really fast charger like those there whilst in Greater Manchester. Maybe if you're a taxi driver, or caught short somehow? This is the confusion I was talking about.
It's still one location. If I live in Trafford is easily a 45 minute drive, much worse at peak times.
> very few people that live in Greater Manchester would use a really fast charger
Because obviously we all have driveways and we can leave the car there overnight. Fuck 'em terraces scum. /s
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The regulation also requires that ad-hoc charging payments can be made via cards or contactless devices, without requiring a subscription. That should make it possible to pull over to any charging station from any network and charge your EV without first hunting for the correct app or signing up for a subscription. Operators are required to clearly list prices at their installed recharging points via “electronic means,” including wait times and availability.
--- end quote ---
It will take time for all chargers to convert though.
EU is going to require all chargers to just work with credit cards: https://www.theverge.com/23806690/eu-ev-fast-charger-60km-la...
--- start quote ---
he regulation also requires that ad-hoc charging payments can be made via cards or contactless devices, without requiring a subscription. That should make it possible to pull over to any charging station from any network and charge your EV without first hunting for the correct app or signing up for a subscription. Operators are required to clearly list prices at their installed recharging points via “electronic means,” including wait times and availability.
--- end quote ---
Wow. For rates like that it'd be worth making your own public charger. ;)
It you want to give people a poor opinion of EVs, dump them in a rental EV and tell them it needs to be returned with 80% charge and don't offer any support on how to do that.
When I'm traveling and I know that I'm going to have to do a week of heavy driving, I prefer an EV to save on gas. I've rented a Tesla Model 3 from Hertz a couple of times for this purpose: when I did the calculations, the cheaper per-mile cost of using superchargers more than made up for the difference in rental price vs. an economy rental (the addition of free destination chargers when i found them was a bonus). The general driving experience was obviously better than an economy rental, as well.
I know it's not the case everywhere, but along my routes, I was able to find convenient superchargers in parking lots of stores that I wanted to visit (bubble tea, Target, etc), and the car was usually finished charging before i was finished in the store. The couple of times that i stopped at superchargers that didn't have a useful establishment nearby, i was able to appease the kids with the built-in video games.
When it was time to return the car, there was no run-around trying to find a gas station to fill up near the rental center: you can return the car with a quarter charge, and it's no problem, Hertz doesn't charge any additional charging fee.
It would have been nice if i didn't have to use key cards, and if i could use the app to, say, precondition the car. It also would have been nice if the videos saved by "sentry mode" were easier to batch clear. But these are quibbles; the rentals were absolutely worth it for me.
How could hertz not have known this? I think this was probably not a business decision but a management decision done so they can call the company green, basically virtue signalling when clearly it was a terrible business decision.
Sustainability is great but I feel like we’re making a lot of bad decisions to pretend like we are sustainable.
In the US, I have a PHEV but when I’m not at home, I don’t even bother to charge it because there are so few chargers, they’re slow, and the ones that exist are often broken.
Sure, at first sight you are not burning fossil fuel in your car so you are slowing down climate change. Plenty of studies show the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lower for an EV than an ICE vehicle. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l... Although perhaps a mere half is not what people would think at first when they just compare tailpipe emissions... and it depends on how carbon intensive is the electricity you are using for charging. And there's more than just emissions to consider.
1. Lithium mining needs water. The typical amount given is 500 000 gallons per one ton of lithium. Think of fracking.
2. Mining waste for base metals such as copper or nickel is 20-200 tonnes but rare earth minerals like platinum make a million tonne of waste per tonne extracted.
3. The lifetime of the battery which is the problematic component is significantly lower than the lifetime of a typical ICE car.
And more.
The solution is, of course, to reverse the dependence on the automobile. https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-m... this might be old but it is still relevant.
The methodolody used by IEA for that chart uses the 2021 global average grid carbon intensity to calculate its electricity generation. If you live in Iceland, Sweeden, UK, Vermont, or similar regions with highly decarbonised grids, the majority of the chart's Electricity co2e isn't generated for that vehicle.
You've got to consider your local average grid carbon intensity, and how that will change across the 20 year lifecycle of the vehicle.
All things considered, green energy is better than fossil and EVs are better than ICEs. Of course where we really need to go is reducing individual transport by expanding public transit infrastructure, electrified buses, trams and trains easily beat personal EVs when it comes to resource use per person.
FWIW a bigger concern than the increased energy demand from EVs is the load this puts on the grid infrastructure. But this is also very much true for rooftop PV.
I can imagine they wanted to have a rapid publicity stunt boarding the trend train of 'Hey! We are so cool and modern and mindful and everything, we have EVs!'. Only to be slapped by reality pretty soon afterwards. As it is ubiquitous with marketing bs.
If you have a private garage. I live in a (non-US) city where there's shared garages (those who do have a garage, a lot of them just park outside) which are old and not always have power sockets. And even if they do, I don't think you're entitled to use them to charge your car. And do EVs work with standard power sockets, or needs some special stuff? I've never driven an EV.
Mostly I charge at work not at home, which uses 240v power (think an electric dryer), and that can charge the car fully in 8-10 hours.
I don't know where outside the US you live but in some countries tenants have the right to install a charging station. Of course they're not exactly cheap, especially if the wiring isn't set up to handle that kind of load (from personal experience: charging your car while the washing machine is running on the same circuit in an old house is an easy way to trip the breaker).
Private charging stations can also be installed outdoors just fine and strangers stealing your power is not a problem either (the plug can't be removed if the car is locked and you can literally switch the charger off if you're not using it). Most public chargers don't have a roof so charging your car in the open isn't exactly odd.
Also in many countries even more rural areas now have charging stations. Often you can pay a flat fee per month to freely use charging stations on the same network or to do so at significantly reduced rates. In my case there's even a nearby charging station that charges approximately the same rate I pay for my home electricity provider - although the speed is also similar so it's not very useful if you don't plan to leave your car for a few hours.
I encourage anybody with the time and diligence to do their own residential electrical work. It can save you a lot of money, and add a lot of value to your home.
The question in the survey is whether they "would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent".
Got $10k in highly liquid stocks and you'd sell some? Or you have plenty of money in your savings account but you use credit cards for all purchases? Then you get counted as "can't come up with $400".
It's useful to look at how the number changes over time, but trying to interpret the raw percentage is prone to misstep.
Vs Uber: I personally prefer driving myself. No wait, and freedom (shoot, it's 10pm and I realize I forgot to pack toothpaste, I might not want to pay Uber $20 for a stupid round trip to CVS to buy a $2 tube of toothpaste). Also I tend to get carsick if the driver's not smooth.
They make more sense for the short term car-club type rentals, where they can be charged the whole time when not in use, then borrowed for an hour or 2 booked on an app. But if you can't charge at home, it makes little sense to use an EV at the moment. It might make sense for small fleets of rental EVs to be based at hotels. You could just take whichever car was charged when you go out in the morning.
The other problem Hertz had was repair costs. EVs are more expensive to repair both because there are less repairers qualified to repair them and because parts are more expensive and more valuable etc.. I expect people driving unfamiliar cars are more likely to have accidents with them, so this would be worse for rental companies than for normal people.
When the infrastructure is there and reliable, and range is consistent with gas vehicles, I’ll make a full switch.
I don't agree. It really depends on what usage you're aiming for.
For instance, if you rent a car right out of an airport so that you can drive to the hotel and then to an meeting somewhere in the city and afterwards perhaps somewhere else and then back to the hotel, you're renting a car so that you are completely free to travel across town to get where you need to be. These are relatively short drives zig-zagging across town which can include a few hours of parking between rides.
It sounds like an EV is the ideal vehicle for this use pattern.
If instead you need to go on long rides that take hours and you can't afford wasting hours charging then EVs are not as well suited as ICE-powered cars.
>Let me share a bit more context on the damage equation. First, while conventional maintenance on electric vehicles remained lower relative to comparable ICE vehicles in Q3, higher collision and damage repairs on EVs continue to weigh on our results and negatively impacted EBITDA. For context, collision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle. Second, where a car is salvaged, we must crystallize at once any difference between our carrying value and the market value of that car. The MSRP declines in EVs over the course of 2023, driven primarily by Tesla have driven the fair market value of our EVs lower as compared to last year, such that a salvage creates a larger loss and, therefore, greater burden.
https://ir.hertz.com/static-files/75a583c0-90e0-496a-8b45-9f...
Update: Bad experiences renting electric cars from Hertz https://adrianco.medium.com/experiences-renting-electric-car...
I guess you can rent a $20k Kia and avoid all the new tech.
For now, I stick to wired USB...
it's a very nice mix so far of just truck and modern.
Bought that car last year for about 20K - Kia Rio 5 door. Wonderful little car.
No complaints on the Kia Carnival I got.
Edit: I forgot but I have some bad news, Kia is probably killing the Rio so you might be out of luck. Makes sense as the dealerships heavily promote the Forte and barely stock any Rios. The salespeople were a little surprised we loved the Rio so much, I think it's just too small for most Americans.
You missed a very important bit: 'old toyota-level reliability and longevity' ;)
The trim was basic, but the suspension was superior to a Tesla, especially on Italian roads.
Road noise was average at highway speeds with the cheaper trim.
A friend of mine rented a Kia Nero EV and it was excellent. It’s just a car that happens to be electric. I didn’t even realize it was an EV until the third day.
Anyway, they're a terrible choice for a rental fleet. You want rental vehicles to behave as much as possible like the average vehicle, so there's a minimal learning curve. Next to manual transmission vehicles in North America, Teslas have to be about the worst choice for that.
My 15 year old BMW:
Has seat memory tied to the key. I don't have to fiddle with a menu to save the setting. It just... remembers.
Has steering wheel buttons with labels. Using steering wheel buttons and three fingertip-reachable and physically distinct stalks I can run my (intermittent rain sensing!) wipers, cruise control, blinkers, headlights, radio, and phone (which can stay in my pocket!).
Has an iDrive knob that controls all non-driving-critical features but can still be safely operated when driving. This includes the navigation system but also things like car settings.
Keyless entry where I just grab the handle and pull (this is one operation, not two) and the car unlocks. This works on the front doors and the trunk. It also works to start the car. No phone interaction required. The key fob stays in my pocket. In 8 years of ownership I have changed the fob battery once. There's a physical lock cylinder in the door if my key fob or the car battery die. I can lock the car with a touch as well.
Has physical buttons for almost everything (except car settings and nav). Seats (including heaters), mirrors, windows, blinkers (including hazards), head lights, cruise control, radio (volume, tuner, track, presets), dual zone climate control, hill descent, etc.
The Tesla isn't just unfamiliar, it is worse.
I do largely agree with you re the Tesla, although the steering wheel controls I could argue both sides. They're multi-function, which allows you to customize their operation and do a lot more than you can with dedicated controls.
Edit: though I guess it's 2024 now. IIRC the 2009s had slightly less bad idrive.
No screen.
The seat memory does remember. Not just for the physical key, but for your phone. You do nothing. If my wife gets in the car, it sets up the car for her. If I do, it sets it up for me. Neither of us touch anything, it's automatic depending on where our phones are.
The steering buttons aren't labeled for a reason! Because you can remap them. Which is awesome, because I can set them up exactly how I like them. I can put all the functionality you mentioned on the steering buttons.
It doesn't need an idrive button. It has voice. I don't look at the car to navigate. I tell it what I want. Same with other non critical functions.
It needs zero phone interactions. I walk to the car and open the door. That's it. I don't look at the phone. Don't wait. It just works. For every door and the trunk. You just never think about it.
The Tesla does all the things you listed vastly better. You just haven't learned to set them up and use them.
Every car has voice, it just does not work well in the US because street and establishment names are often not real words in English, people don't know how they are pronounced and, even if they do, the car itself has different ideas about pronunciation. iDrive guarantees that you can get to the "Manet st" and not the "Monet st".
>The Tesla does all the things you listed vastly better.
Don't you need to get into menus to change the A/C air direction/temperature/pressure in a Tesla? How is it better than operating a physical dial/lever for example? Especially for the people on the rear seat? Also, the glove box latch is in the menu too, is not it?
And no. I never go into the menus for the AC. I do it though voice.
Well, good for you, perhaps you are the person the voice models had been trained on.
>And no. I never go into the menus for the AC. I do it though voice.
What about the passengers on the rear seat? And how is it "vastly better" to change the AC direction through voice than just to pull the lever until it's blowing in the right direction?
But you're spot on! The fact that people in the rear have no amenities is one of the big downsides of Tesla. And that rear seat heater? You need to pay extra to unlock it! I hope they choke on their $200
BMW is currently having all excellent EV cars, and that’s even with shared architecture with their ICE counterparts. Specially their electrical motors are above everyone else’s, due to the lack of permanent magnets, which allows for finer control of their power and instant disconnection. I am expecting to BMW to beat Tesla completely when they finally offer their dedicated EV platform in 2025-2026.
Maybe excellent, but they have nothing as affordable as what other EV makers are offering AFAICT.
Personally I care more about an elegant ride than a fast, jerky one.
The most painful part of the experience was attempting to charge it before returning it. Finding a compatible, working L3 charger was very difficult, even in Zurich and the experience of downloading an app to start the charging process was terrible. It of course, didn't accept my non-Swiss credit card and I had a get a local friend to help with the payment part.
If I can't use the vehicle without needing to carry a working cellular-connected computer running a specific operating system in my pocket and/or having a specific category of bank card, that's a hard 'no' for me. Either have the car negotiate payment with the charging network or give me the option of handing currency to a person at a register. Otherwise I insist on a dino car.
It's third-party chargers that are an endless source of frustration.
That's not the "just need to" that works for me. For privacy reasons I don't carry a device that constantly reports my personal information to Apple or Google. Can I install this app from F-Droid? Strike one.
Now supposing I decide I'm cool with being tracked by Apple or Google all the time and use a device I can get the app on. Do I need to register an account with the app? With my personal information? So the fact that I am driving a specific Tesla vehicle along with my location can be tracked by Tesla? Strike two.
Now supposing I decide I'm cool with being tracked by Apple or Google and Tesla, do I need to register a Visa or Mastercard with the app so I can also be tracked by the payment provider, who will sell my transactions to random third-party eReceipt brokers who will dutifully add my travel habits to the profile they keep on me? Strike three.
Nope. Not playing any of these games. Gas car, cash. Thank you very much.
Hang on though, this part has nothing to do with repair costs. This just sounds like an accounting issue, right? If anything I would expect this to benefit Hertz since they could write off the higher loss in their taxes immediately, instead of waiting until future years to write the value off via depreciation.
On the other hand, I can see how this would make their numbers look worse at a glance since it shows up as though they lost money, but in fact no actual assets have been lost; they have the same car, it was repaired, and the repair was paid for by insurance, but now it looks like they took a loss because an arbitrary accounting rule forces them to adjust their balance sheet in a different way than they would otherwise.
Not sure if I'm understanding this right but it sure sounds like Hertz is flat-out admitting that they're making sub-optimal business decisions to make their numbers look better. Wouldn't that be a blatant violation of their fiduciary duties?
But on a newer vehicle, it takes a lot of damage to get branded salvage.
Also makes sense for Hertz to do it in-house as they'll have a somewhat standardized fleet. Can "borrow" a rear bumper from a vehicle in for more serious heavier-duty front-end repair to get at least 1 back in the fleet.
Insurance companies still make you pay for everyone else's coverage.
ref: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/05/auto-insu...
So in this case they are basically writing off more value “for free”, because the loss is coming from a genuine loss in value of the asset, but since the asset is a car that may still provide the same amount of value back to Hertz and still last the same amount of time, it’s sort of a weird corner case where you could argue they haven’t really lost anything.
Of course that loss is offset by lower depreciation losses in the future, so it’s not like it’s coming out of nowhere.
For a public company with steady growth I imagine you generally want to amortize losses over a fairly long window. Also if you already had losses this year, and think you’ll grow more in future years, you really don’t want to book more losses now! Hertz has been getting hammered recently. Especially problematic if these are lumpy losses which will make profits less predictable. You’d rather smooth those out and hit your earnings forecast. (At least, that’s the CFO’s mandate.)
It gets even more complex when you consider the interplay with windfalls and rapid growth, but you can probably assume here that they are optimizing for short-to-medium term stock price (1-5 yr). Most CEOs don’t invest in 10yr bets. You might get fired for lackluster growth before that pays off!
More generally, “fiduciary duties” is generally construed pretty loosely. Delaware corporate law defers quite strongly to the corporation; if they can make a coherent argument for why they are benefitting shareholders they tend to get the benefit of the doubt.
The root cause is that batteries are too heavy so other components must be made lighter.
Other materials have their own issues, but if you cast large pieces of anything you also make it super expensive to replace parts that can't be repaired onsite.
Don't know if the Tesla cars owned by Hertz are built using a Giga Press.
Got to the counter and the agent first suggested that I take a gas car for $25/day. I was confused because that was so cheap, although the Tesla was already heavily discounted. Apparently, this was $25/day above what I had paid for the model 3 and it was for a compact economy car. I stuck with the Tesla.
The agent warned me that repairs were very expensive and I need to have insurance, which I had bought and my company also provided. Stuck with the Tesla.
I was told I need to return the car charged or I would be billed for "filling it up". I was confused why they couldn't charge at the airport and also explained that if I charge near my hotel it will likely not be 100% when I get to the airport. They couldn't say if that was ok.
I went outside to get the car and they had to go get it, a few people asked me what I was waiting for while I stood there. People getting gas cars were quickly served.
I got the car and was again told that I need to return the car charged, explained again that it won't be 100%. The agent said that 85% is fine. He asked me if I had driven a Tesla before, I had not, I expected he would show me the vehicle and provide some guidance. He simply handed me a QR code and wandered off.
I got in the car and it was only at 80% charge. I figured out how to drive it on the way out of the parking lot.
I was once spending maybe an hour to figure out how to start and move a rental mercedes after picking it up, and next to me was some german guy in exactly same situation with same model. Eventually we managed to figure it out with phones.
Not every customer needs explanations. I think it's completely realistic to expect a business to show me how to use what they are selling to me. How they profit from that is their problem - when they start having compassion for customers' finances, I'll have it for theirs.
Whether it's likely and whether we should expect it are different questions. Don't let them normalize lower standards, as if customers should support some right to higher profit margins. Unless they are giving you a cut, profit margins are 100% not your problem.
Recently I rented one again, and the process was much improved, which I take as an indicator that (despite this sale), they haven't turned completely bearish on Tesla. Counter-person much more knowledgable and agreeable. No mixups. Also, the software has improved. The rental now provides an on-screen tutorial on using the car, and you can now use your phone as a key. Huge quality of life improvement.
Hertz could still do better. They need fast chargers at their location. All cars should be available "fully" charged (80%) with no need to bring the car back full. And they need to get rid of that ridiculous key-cover for the physical key that prevents you from just slipping it into your wallet like God intended.
Where I am in Europe there are a few car sharing apps that have electric cars, and all that I've rented (VW, Peugeot, Nissan, Hyundai) just work the same as ICE cars. You press the button on the key fob and it unlocks, you press Start and the car starts.
Charging was not terribly complicated either. Scan the RFID tag on the keys against the charger, plug in the cable and wait for it to show it's charging.
On the other hand, the fob-less key is a massive advantage. Connect your phone, and it is your key. You don't even have to take it out of your pocket. You've also got a backup, physical key card that fits in your wallet. I hate bulky key fobs, so this is a huge win for me.
As for charging, nothing beats Tesla. Plug in to a SuperCharger and 1) charging starts immediately, no scanning, no app, no nothing, 2) the SuperCharger network is extensive and reliable--on my last road trip, I stopped in a small town that had a SuperCharger with eight working stalls and a Level 3 charger that had one non-working stall; bummer if you're not driving a Tesla; 3) the navigation is SC aware and will route you to the nearest SC, pre-condition the battery for faster charging when you get close and even let you know how many stalls are free as you're approaching.
Now whether they should charge them fully is another story. No higher than 80% is best for long battery life, unless they know the customer is picking up the car today, in which case 100% is fine.
Setting max charge to 80% is fine, but I think it would be nice to add a paid option to start at 100%. Most folks won't need it, but for those who are road-tripping (me), it makes a difference. Happy to pay a little extra in that case.
I'll take unlimited mileage and the lack of weird car rules any day, also. I don't understand the other convenience factors either -- car rental places tend to be located on-site at the airport or the train station?
It's also a lemon market for customers. Turo gets all of the people who aren't qualified to rent at the major car rental places, and the prices are adjusted accordingly.
Traditional airport car rental: Exit baggage claim and catch shuttle to rental car center. Stand in line (almost always), deal with hassles (upselling agents, car not ready, car given to someone else, different car available, etc. Find car in lot, then wait in security/checkout line to leave garage/lot. All that takes 30-60 minutes.
Turo: AirBNB-style app-based car rental with in-app comms with the vehicle owner or rental service (more and more, Turo rentals are via car rental services rather than individual owners). Show up at airport having pre-arranged where the car will be. Exit baggage claim and either pick up the car at the curb or (more typically) in short term parking. The retrieval process is so simple: car will be unlocked with keys in it, and you just get in and drive away. The only thing you have to do is message the owner through Turo that you have picked it up. The return process is just as easy: drop it in short term parking or arrange for the owner to meet you curbside at Departures. It's 100% frictionless relative to the traditional method.
I've found prices to be roughly on par with traditional rental car companies' rack rates. There are some exceptions, and I've also found that Turo is using VC funding to partially subsidize rentals right now, so it can be a bit cheaper in some circumstances. There's also a much wider range of vehicle options, and if you need something specific (pickup truck, full size SUV, minivan, convertible, exotic) Turo can't be beaten.
I know I sound like a shill, but I suggest you try it sometime. The time savings alone -- especially if you're traveling with kids -- makes Turo worth its weight in gold.
If a host cancels or is terrible, you can quickly be in a terrible position.
The only winner here is Polestar. That will be the next car I'll buy.
1. We ask you to return the EV with at least the same level of charge or 75% (whichever is lower). via https://images.hertz.com/pdfs/ENGB_EV_RENTAL_TERMS.pdf
They were clear with me that I needed to return it with at least 80% charge or pay an extra fee for them to recharge it on my behalf.
Enterprise's policy sounds more convenient but Hertz were the only company offering a Tesla over here at a (very) reasonable price.
This is the same with gas cars. It's very frustrating because they're directly being dicks to their customers. You have 3 options
1. Bring it back with a full tank of gas (annoying, as you have find a gas station and plan time)
2. Pay up front for a full tank of gas and 1.5x to 2x the price of normal gas. Now you'll be trying to drive it extra so you can use all the gas you paid for but not so much that you run out.
3. Bring it back not full and then they charge you even more.
It's infuriating how adversarial it is and I'm surprised no company advertises they don't do this to their customers. No idea if there are good ones out there but have never been to one.
But with an electric car, they just have to park it (which they have to do anyway) and plug it in (although I suppose if you left it near zero, it could mean they can't re-rent the car for some amount of time).
That's not to say rental agencies don't universally suck, they certainly do, but, I wouldn't really say that's a major sticking point. Really the biggest problems seem to be them under-provisioning their fleets, and going after you for damage you didn't cause, both are far, far too common.
So whether you're in electric or gas, obviously nobody is going to expect 100.0% fuel capacity on return. This is customer arm flailing, being pedantic and dramatic about something that is very clear. "Maybe if I make a bunch of noise they'll treat me special!"
So I was usually able to find a gas station near the airport rental, and get as close as possible to topping off (if the car was a full tank when I first picked it up). I've never tried to rent an EV, so I'm not sure how easy that would be in a comparable situation. Probably not very.
When you rent a car, more than likely you will be in unfamiliar territory. So it seems that it just adds to the stress of travel and yet another thing you have to pay attention to.
Will my hotel have charging spots? Will I be able to charge at the client site I'm visiting? How do I plan this long leg of the trip that I need to drive?
Will my hotel have charging spots? Will I be able to charge at the client site I'm visiting? How do I plan this long leg of the trip that I need to drive?
As a Tesla owner, driver, and 3 times Hertz Tesla renter, let me attest:
- Hertz staff are poorly trained for Tesla rentals
- The "must use same credit card" thing is worst than an absolute nightmare
if one doesn't have the exact same credit card, landing late at night on
a holiday weekend. The experience is so extremely bad, it sounds fictional!One anecdote does not data make, and I didn't know at the time of reservation that my hotel would be adequately equipped.
I look forward to owning an EV someday but the rental experience right now and in my state was VERY stressful.
There are now also adapters for fast charging Tesla connectors to CCS1, but that is relatively recent.
So they just put the charging fee on your bill with the little bottles of gin from the minibar? I'm sure hotel power is reasonably priced...
And if you ARE going into the wilderness, you can easily bring a few Jerry cans.
With an EV, I might have to go 10+ minutes out of my way (doubled for roundtrip), they might not work, and they might be full. And if I have to return with 80% charge or higher, it could easily take 30 mins or more of charging.
Also, it's really easy for the rental place to see exactly what percent you returned it with. In gas cars, as long as you're in the ballpark of "full" you're usually good to go, partly because there's not an easy way for the rental clerk to tell exactly how many gallons are in the tank.
I've been OFFERED electric rentals in:
* Tromsø Norway (on a roadtrip through the Lofoten)
* Nelson NZ
* Brisbane AU
The reality is, when I rent a car on vacation, I'm typically doing more miles per day than when I'm at home. That's because I'm not sitting at work 9 hours a day! Plus, I don't know their charging situation. Even if it WAS Tesla, no doubt these places have fewer Superchargers per capita than California (even though of course Norway has a TON of good EV charging). I have no idea if I can charge at my (multiple!) homes throughout the trip.
I'm already dealing with the cognitive load of a different country, a different currency, often a foreign language, different driving standards (maybe on the other side of the road). Finding places to stay and eat. I don't need one more chore!
To put it simply: An EV is more convenient as our primary car, full stop. An EV would be less convenient as a rental car while on vacation.
Norway has 503 Superchargers, 1 per 11,000 people.
California has 307, 1 per 130,000.
I haven't checked NZ or Oz, or looked at a map for Norway. There are also 10 times that many non-Tesla chargers, of which some will be the highest power.
All three countries have 230V domestic electricity, so in the worst case you can charge at about 2.5kW (more, e.g. 3kW, if you're more confident of the wiring).
The most challenging experience was an electric camper. It had a 100 mile max range. I drove it from LA to Seattle without major issue. The only pucker factor was around Silicon Valley where I struggled to find functional fast chargers. No shortage of chargers, just very few that work.
The state of chargers is atrocious. Many of them do not work and the apps are horrible. Signup flows that ask for too much information and don’t set form metadata for auto-completion. Just endless papercuts.
I used A Better Route Planner which does a good job of tracking what chargers actually work but still has an infuriating UI.
For a regular rental car situation I would not hesitate to get an EV. In fact that’s my preference now that I am over the learning curve.
uhhhhhhhh, you stopped to charge every ~2 hours (12 charging stops minimum)?
It was an older conversion, not intended for long range travel. This is a once a year thing to relocate from Joshua Tree to the Olympic Peninsula.
I made a snack or took a quick nap in the back when charging. Travel days were 1-2 charge stops.
One problem with such a small battery is how quickly it charged. I was often done charging before I could make food, eat, and do dishes.
Because overall, if you ignore old and new and just analyze both on their merits, I'd say we have rough parity already.
We're not there yet, we will be, but it's going to take some time. The people who say 'electric cars suck' are the same sorts of people who leave negative reviews of a beta product, missing the forest for the trees in my book.
Same goes for the people who ignore critique and offer only praise. Gas/Diesel cars have a hundred years of engineering behind them. Their capabilities exist with purpose, and ignoring that is folly.
So yes, it sounds like your definition of "parity" means it can do everything a gas car can and more.
If electric cars were first, would you demand that gas cars need to be able to power your house to reach "parity"?
I don't think you're using a good definition of parity. Two things with different strengths and weaknesses can be at parity if they mostly even out.
For the record, my hotel did not have charging spots, and the only ones I saw driving around were at the Broadway Commons Mall[0]. All of them looked full. I'm very skeptical of "charging infrastructure" being a prerequisite to suburban EV adoption - you have a house with a spare 220V circuit, right?[1] - but in this case my home is an eight story hotel building. Either it has chargers or I'm not renting an EV.
[0] Specifically, near the back next to the Round1 entrance.
Said mall also has an Avis/Budget office. No clue if the LIRR lets you carry luggage onboard, but if they do I probably should just take that instead of paying extra to rent at JFK...
[1] "My landlord won't let me plug in my car charger" is the usual response to this
protip: lots of rental agencies only charge the premium for airport/train station pickup, but not for dropping off at one. YMMV.
I would've considered the EV if I knew ahead of time, so I could've researched the charging situation before the trip.
I've rented a lot of cars, but when I got this one I spent ten minutes completely dumbfounded trying to get it going. They gave me a key card but I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Swipe it, I guess, but where? I tried the door, but the pillar? Would've never guessed until looking online. Pretty much all other cars have keyless entry with a push button on the handle. I couldn't figure out how to adjust the side mirrors, which I always need to do in any rental, until I gave up and looked online.
Oh and when I got to where I needed to go, I left the car unlocked because I couldn't figure out how to lock it out or even whether I had locked it. I might have even left it running so that someone could have driven it off, for all I know.
I am very used to Android Auto in rentals, which I love because of easy access to the places that I care about (vs the last place than some other rental customer went to), the music that I care about, and the voice assistant that I'm used to. Instead I found the Tesla screen beautiful but distracting and useless without Android Auto.
It felt like a design very focused on eliminating hardware controls that are commonplace on most cars - very unusual - and with a strong proprietary, "we know better" bent.
So I feel like if you're going to have EVs in your rental fleet, maybe a Hyundai or Kia or Chevy is a better choice than Tesla.
Even opening the back door while inside is unorthodox. There’s not a handle to pull, instead it’s a push button that looks like it’s for the window?
(Also, the ride quality in the back seats is abysmal)
I'm not trying to fangirl here, but broadly isn't this seen as innovation when you design things in a new and different way compared to your competition?
[edit: never mind. they can, probably]
I thought the lack of stalks and a center screen was going to be an issue. Now I feel like it’s overblown and YouTubers/the media need something to complain about.
Not to mention the suspension issues (google "tesla whompy wheels"). After reading that junked the idea of buying it.
You either raise a stink about not following conventions and risk being fired immediately or sidelined forever, or you play along and the company finds out 5-10 years later that these decisions were really bad and it's not only YouTubers who hate the new designs. From a risk-reward point of view, I can see how employees decided that it's not worth it.
Fun car. Incredibly unintuitive. If you're renting an EV, make a checklist.
Just Tesla though. I have driven other EVs (Kia, Chevy, Toyota) and haven't had any of these problems.
I'd only ever driven an ICE. Connectors and apps weren't a thing I was prepared for.
Also they got a LOT of EV's, I give them props for doing so... but rental cars should be a little more diverse of fleets. I realize it's easier to maintain a few types of vehicles, but that's not the business they are in. Additionally, Tesla is not yet the type of company that can readily support fleet purchasers. It'll be a while before they are, so until then you're looking at a lot of pain.
Its really no different than buying Apple for business use in 2010 (give or take). Lots of companies were starting to do it, but at that time there were only 4 Apple stores in the US that even had a "business team". Apple was not setup to handle it and still, to this day, are very very slow to roll out business centric features and functionality.
Over time, one-way rentals tend to congregate specific vehicles in specific areas, and so you have to have ways of "undoing" that. Having EV cars slowly pool in an area is going to be perhaps MORE annoying than just having too many SUVs, because most people will say "ooo free SUV upgrade" but will balk at "ooo free EV upgrade".
That with the double-whammy of dropping resale value (because new ones are cheaper) along with additional customer complaints, means they really have no major reason to continue.
If the EVs were working for them, they'd buy more to replace the ones aging out of the fleet.
Why give them props?
It sounds like an obvious waste of their money and resources, one that could easily have been foreseen and calculated. How can a company that specialises in cars like they do, make such an obvious error, like buying 20k EV cars? They are not consumers making lifestyle decisions, they are meant to be running a business!
Because they were trying to be forward-thinking and do the right thing, environmentally speaking.
> they are meant to be running a business!
By this logic we should still be using coal for all power or maybe crude oil. And kids should still be working in factories. Not everything is just about running a business. You can be a successful business and still make good choices for the world.
Why do you say this? I get frustrated when I rent a car, not knowing exactly what I’ll get. It’s just another stressor while traveling. I’m actually a fan of Hertz being pretty consistent with their models across locations.
But the rental companies overshot a bit. They didn't keep their processes and infrastructure up to pace with the number that they brought on.
It isn't shocking that caused some issues.
This seems like a very basic process that should have been put in place for troubleshooting.
Hertz did it correctly, they use their account and just charge your credit card after your rental period is over. Just like they do with parking tickets or tolls.
Why Hertz’s Bet On Tesla Isn’t Paying Off In The U.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfbkvUXTV_I
"pricing troubles, skyrocketing repair costs and low resale value"... They turn their fleet over every 2-years or so, so resale value is important, and with prices of new EVs coming down, the resale value will be significantly lower than a new model.
Prices of new Teslas coming down. This is incredibly specific to Hertz's bet on Teslas.
If you're actually trying to sell them, it does. If you're marking your assets on a balance sheet, the "price" matters more than the price.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Most American company ICE cars are scrapped by then. Not to mention all the ICE related maintenance costs over that time like oil changes, transmission fluid, timing belts, hoses, etc. etc.
You can look at 6 to 10 year Model S cars.
Buying an EV with 100k miles and the original battery pack for 20k is a bad idea.
The Prius battery is far smaller (about 5-10x smaller) than a Tesla battery, so it is cycling charge / discharge far more often.
So you'd expect the same quality battery to last 5-10x less miles in a Prius than a Tesla driving the same distance. It's likely that Tesla's investment in battery quality and active temperature controls mean the Tesla battery is also treated better and higher quality.
Topping that battery up with a generator in the Prius complicates things, both reducing kWh used per mile (some from generator) but also allowing a discharge - recharge cycle to occur multiple times in the same trip.
I don't think you do. Prius's have only recently started using lithium ion batteries, for one. And they cycle the small battery a lot faster than a BEV. Everything we've learned from hybrids suggests BEVs will get hundreds of thousands of miles from the battery (and so far, from the cars which haven driven that far, this has proven correct).
I have a Tesla, and I use it in the worst possible way for the battery: road trips with deep discharges and frequent 100% fast charges. I'm at 100k miles, and it degraded by 9%.
Politics.
Right now if I had to pay that out of pocket it would be more than a new engine, but not by a huge amount. By the time I don't have a battery warranty, the cost will most likely be in line with a used engine for a similar ICE car.
[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/187618/finding-comb...
Tesla, however, has a ludicrous parts system compared to any traditional car company, for parts that have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the car is using an electric powertrain. Ask for the cost of a new front bumper... it's not pretty.
And as far as fender bender risk goes, it also doesn't help that a Tesla is, in practice, far more powerful at low speeds than the typical car the renter is used to. Pressed the gas pedal when you meant to brake? You'll be in for a surprise. They are also probably unaccustomed to the car's behavior when you lift the gas pedal completely: Being able to do one pedal driving is great if you know the car, but probably a big surprise for someone renting.
It's been at least 4 years since I drove an EV so I don't remember what they do. I expect the car to slow down and eventually come to a halt. I remember that I wasn't surprised by anything in particular so it's probably what it did. What do Teslas do?
Teslas do aggressive regen braking when you lift your foot. And it's not possible to disable that behavior, unlike other EVs.
So-called single pedal driving isn't very familiar to most drivers, making it unsuitable for rentals where users would prefer not having a learning curve.
Also if you ask the community how to disable regen braking you'll be told that you're driving it wrong, see:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/zswnhi/anyone_...
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/s3xy-buttons-regener...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/14r90q6/disabl...
If you dig deeper you'll find that:
- most of their EV's were rented to Uber drivers. - All Uber rentals, gas and EV, have higher milage, higher maintenance costs and lower resale values.
In other words this state of affairs was highly predictable. That it wasn't taken into account is the fault of Hertz executives. They're trying to shift blame off of their own shoulders.
Wait, what?
Hertz was basically bankrupt, and suddenly was a "good business" when it bought a bunch of Teslas. It was always a stretch.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38052601/hertz-buying-100...
I had another idea about it and I'm wondering what other people think: by buying Twitter/X, Musk has waded deeply into the culture war, and we see on HN plenty of people who just can't stand to see his name. It seems a sizable community, could the supposed downward trend in the industry simply be a lot of refusal to buy Teslas? It would not necessarily reflect directly in Tesla sales because reduced demand for Teslas could be made up on margin by other undecided EV brand buyers seeing more availablity of Teslas and switching because they feel Tesla is an upgrade. In a like manner, some of the former Tesla buyers might not be willing to downgrade from a Tesla, so they hang on to their car longer, get a hybrid, etc.
- We're in a recession (at least if you aren't upper middle class or above)
- Dealers are still acting like there's a supply shortage, so prices are still up but lots are full
- Everyone (pretty much) but tesla has commited to migrating to NACS, so if you buy a car now you'll need an adapter, and depending on where you are tesla's chargers are have half the speed if you're using the adapter (like if you're on a 800v based car)
- Gas prices seem less volatile at the moment (we'll see how much that stays as the election gets closer)
I hadn't heard this.
For high end cars like Porsche Taycan you can configure the rated wattage of this DC-DC converter.
I guess it comes down to what "reliable" means. In my opinion if it has a failure but runs, drives, is safe and comfortable it's "reliable". For example I read lots of complaints about squeaks or rattles when music is played. I don't call that "unreliable"
My impression is very much the other way around: EVs are more reliable across the board for all vehicles (especially over ICE; most of the categories of unreliability that ICE invented don't exist at all for most EVs; catalytic convertors, belts, transmissions, spark plugs, ...) and somehow Tesla has managed to be the least reliable EV manufacturer despite their head start and despite some manufacturers intentionally sabotaging their EV car efforts to try to sell more hydrogen (Toyota) or dumber reasons.
ICE is more complicated - more moving parts - but manufacturers have had 100 years of experience building them.
Yes EVs should be more reliable on paper, but Tesla's aren't.
https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-reliability-and-repair-costs-....
No, NACS is CCS with Tesla's plug on the end. All that's happened is that the plug has been standardized as CCS type 3 (aka J3400).
Some older Tesla's don't support CCS and need a CCS retrofit before they'll work with CCS chargers (including ones with Tesla's plug).
I'm sorry, what recession?
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-a...
> In the year ending in November, real wages grew by about 0.8 percent for all workers and 1.1 percent for the 80% of workers who are production and non-supervisory workers. Further, wage inequality fell. The ratio of wages at the 90th percentile compared to the 10th percentile fell by nearly 6 percent over the year.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/12/19/...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/strong-wage-growth-gave-ameri...
My use of recession there may be a bit glib and poorly chosen, but people are feeling like job security is way down, and finding a new job is a way slower prospect than it has been. Every non-upper middle class and up person I regularly talk to has locked down their finances, upper middle and up seems to be less effected but still less likely to buy big purchases with interest higher than it has been in 15ish years.
I do thank you for your links though, those recovery stats are better than I thought they were, I probably should have put that reason on the bottom of my list with a disclaimer, I try to be much less doom and gloom than some of my family but it came across stronger here than I meant it too.
You can see a similar dip at approximately the same point in other EV adoption curves, such as Norway: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/norway-electric-vehic... ... That green line, we're in the dip right now.
Since the US is such a big market you can't look at it holistically. You have to look at it regionally (the US has 60x more people than Norway):
https://insideevs.com/news/688779/california-tops-us-ev-adop...
We're talking about the markets with high pickup rate which have recently seen a downtick.
It's only unexpected if you don't study literature of market adoption behaviors of emerging technologies. This lull absolutely was coming. It always does in behavior-based products, especially those with infrastructure requirements. Here it was in broadband for instance at about the same point in 2004: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad...
The reality is that Tesla aren't very good cars from both reliability, price and range perspective. Musk has done a brilliant job hyping the car, but reality starts setting in. For example, FSD will likely remain in beta for years.
Isn't that better? Even if it's not /good/, it seems /better/.
However, in this specific case, avoiding buying a car because you don't like the CEO, it doesn't make a difference. Most CEOs are psychopaths.
That was true when we got our 2018 Model 3, and when we got our 2022 Model Y, and likely will be until full NACS adoption.
Will I consider another EV brand? Sure, but I also enjoy the Tesla infotainment and driving experience.
If you own your own home in an urban locale with a garage and drive more than 12k miles a year an EV is probably perfect for you. If you live in a condo good luck dealing with the condo board to install a charger. If you park on the street tough luck charging. If you don't drive enough gas is cheaper. If you drive too much you will spend too much time charging.
The problem is that the number of people that fit in this category isn't that big. The market may be saturating.
The other issue is modern cars generally. The average age of a car on the road is going up because modern cars are too complicated and too expensive.
A large reason for this is IP laws. I can still buy parts for my 90's car because the aftermarket still supports it. Modern car parts are full of computers and the aftermarket will never support them because they can't ship copyrighted code. After 10 years they will be scrapped because there will be no parts available. We will end up with a bimodal car market. 90's cars and cars <10 years old with nothing in between.
Everything in a car used to be covered by patents but they mostly expired in the 70's. Now it's copyright which will outlive us all.
https://finance.yahoo.com/average-age-vehicles-u-roads-13030...
Once a car gets older, there's usually no shortage of the electrical components on the secondary market as they're getting scrapped. And they're easy to ship. Or someone figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.
We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts together and you can't swap in a headlight from another vehicle because the VIN doesn't match the computer's. Fuck you Apple.
Usually the lifespan limiting component is the same on all vehicles of a type so there's a shortage of exactly the part you need which makes it economically nonviable.
>figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.
Car PCB's are often conformally coated or require destructive disassembly.
>We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts
Already happened.
Varies across a country/continent. I'm in the salt belt so it's the body/suspension that gives first while it's whatever heat-deaths first in the US south.
And we have bad drivers in north america which helps the market for non-front/rear body components.
Someone ought to disrupt this…
Gas filling is dead simple and fast even though I have no 'account', but filling up our EV at an Electrify America station takes considerably longer to start even with an account already present. The UI on the charging station is really clunky and slow, with some extra steps there for apparently no reason.
I've also heard plenty of stories of persistently broken chargers on various networks, only Tesla seems to have their shit together for EV charging.
More range, more charging stations, faster charging, easier charging, more reliable charging, these are all necessary imo.
1. The interior quality was shit. By 10k miles everything was rattling and the quiet nature of the car meant even with bass thumping everything was just annoying af.
2. The car software felt like it got worse. I had bought FSD for $2k back in 2018. I thought it worked fine for that price. As it became more expensive, and pretty much 5x in price, I thought it was a ripoff. Around 2021 it felt like FSD had gotten way worse. More phantom braking, more getting tripped up and literally pulling into another lane for no reason, etc.
3. Going somewhere farther away became a huge PITA. It was fine waiting at a supercharger 20-30 minutes the first like two months. After that it became a hassle and eventually something I would dread. What a collossal waste of time.
I ended up going back to ICE and I probably won't ever get an EV again unless there are substantial improvements or even hot swap battery stations.
Yeah EVs are "cool", but at least for me if I'm being completely honest and not lying to make myself feel better, the allure wore off pretty quick.
Now? You have a choice as a carmaker: invest 50 billion dollars into PHEVs which will be mere stepping stones to then having to invest ANOTHER 50 billion dollars into EVs, or you just bite the bullet now and do the 50 billion ICE-EV upgrade. Figures obviously arbitrary.
If our government was smart, it would have taken one look at the Prius/Insight, realized that every single commodity consumer vehicle should use that architecture (for the regen braking alone) and mandated it to be in all cars/trucks by 2010.
Oh well. It's too late now.
For me the thought of plugging in my car at home and cutting gas station visits by half or more sounds great! Yet I road trip frequently and if I'm paying tons of money for a car the experience better match that of an ICE car(no problems working in cold weather like Fairbanks AK, EV chargers need to be in every nook n cranny of this and other countries like gas stations are & most importantly don't inconvenience me making me wait 15 to 60 or more minutes to charge my car on one of my road trips when I paid thru the nose for an EV/Telsa).
The really wild part about the world today is that is true of literally everything you ever hear. There is a very good chance there are billions (trillions?) of dollars on the other side promoting whatever narrative they want to further their own goals.
"Fake news" was just the first thing out of Pandora's Box that I doubt we'll ever close.
The EV is a company car and policy bans non EV, not even hybrid are allowed. For a 4 hour trip to a customer in winter cold, if I am lucky, I charge twice. A minimum of 20 minutes per charge. And no wait times on a good day. Waiting 30 minutes to charge for 20 minutes. Well you do the math.
In my old car Id just drive the car on full tank the 4 hours front and back. Maybe 1 short rest stop on the way back. Now with the charge max to 80% hysteria and battery range being non existent in cold weather and endless lines in the charging stations I am starting to hate the EV. I do have a home charger but we do not drive only 20 minutes per day. We live outside the main city and works as consultants.
I am seriously considering changing employer because of this.
The repair costs and turnaround time seems like Tesla's achilles heal right now. Insurance costs on a Tesla were the primary deciding factor in me putting off a Tesla purchase. From my preferred insurer, the premium was 50-60% higher than for a similarly priced ICE vehicle. And Rivian is way higher than Tesla to insure.
I really think EV makers need to prioritize repairability in their next push. It's more important to me than extra range. It will both lower initial costs and reduce EV depreciation. An out-of-warranty EV has to be very cheap for it to make sense.
I'm going to avoid Hertz from here on out as much as possible. Especially if I want an EV. Perhaps the problem isn't Tesla, but Hertz. At least based on my experience, that's what it was.
Which is why it's almost best to just rent the lowest, cheapest thing, because they'll give you whatever they have.
This stops working when you need a particular aspect of whatever it is, especially if it's an aspect nobody really "cares" about - like whether it is EV.
Most people care it has enough seats, and enough luggage room. So a larger SUV works as well as a car for them.
Nitpick: unless I just popped into an alternate timeline, Kauai is American [1].
A lot of the "don't do this" rules on a rental are just so they can stick your insurance with the cost if you break it.
In reality, if the damage is very slight and the person checking them in doesn't want to do the paperwork, it's going to slide.
If you do drive off-road in a rental, wash it before returning it.
Not so long ago Ireserved a car, from a large national company, to go on a backpacking trip. I picked an early pickup window, so I would have time to drive a substantial distance, hike, and get to my desired stopping point before nightfall. I arrive at the rental place at 8a, and find that they're fully staffed but had only a a single large van available for rent. If I waited around until mid afternoon, I was told, _maybe_ something would show up. One of the staff told me that the prior week corporate had decided to open up that site even though there were no cars.
I'm surprised that Turo/Getaround/etc don't message more aggressively about "you'll actually get the car you want, when you want, which somehow most car rental companies think is unachievable."
And while they do run out, most of the time you will receive what you booked, and at larger airport locations they'll typically substitute something close in size and nature to what you booked if they do run out of your specific class.
See:
https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/vehicleguide/index.jsp?target...
Turo is much better if you need a specific vehicle. In Alaska, Hawaii, and Utah I've rented 4WD vehicles when I needed 4WD. They almost all still say in the contract that you're not allowed to take it off road. I always contact the renter ahead of time to make sure it's okay if I go on dirt mountain roads that need 4WD and I've always found someone who approves. I'd guess you can get what you want on Turo.
Now if it were "exact model or your rental is free", that would be something to behold
Hertz having a history of unrepentantly reporting their customers as having stolen returned rental cars is another reason to avoid them.
The fact that CostcoTravel.com does not have Hertz as an option also tells me that Hertz is not a good business.
https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/herbert-alford-hertz-l...
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/hertz-false-arrest-cla...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/03/02/rental-car-h...
This is good advice for everyone. Hertz is the company who likes to lose track of their cars and then call the police and report the car stolen by the person renting it. They're a truly shitty company, not worth the hassle.
But if I'm traveling to a new city that I'm not super familiar with, I do not have any desire to plot out where charging stations are, is the hotel going to have charging, is it going to be operational, etc. Too much headache and cost of public chargers on top of premium cost to rent an EV just doesn't make much sense.
Remember when hotel wi-fi was like that?
I expect this situation to change (slowly) over time.
Amusingly the rental place told me as we were returning the car that it had been sold in the interim.
It's amazing to me how little effort these companies take to resolve the charging questions - there wasn't even a charger at the rental place.
It is pretty easy for them to fall behind on charging vehicles during peak periods, especially something like the Leaf.
this from someone who has a model y at home as my daily driver and I love it.
This all reflects on Hertz's accountants, who should have seen this coming.
[1] https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/misc/index.jsp?targetPage=ube...
Plus I can really only think of two types of vehicles that I’d ever want to rent - either an econobox to get me from point A to B to C in an area underserved by Uber/Lyft where I could not care less about what I’m temporarily driving, or a convertible. I guess maybe also an SUV - but in any event, those three categories are (as far as I am aware) just not yet well matched by any EVs on the market.
(Where could I charge it? The hotel? Do I need to find a super charger? Etc. Just more headache than I wanted on a vacation).
Even if the edge case is only 1% of your travel, do you want to buy a car that can't do it?
It can be anything. You're living in Minnesota and your dad in Chicago had a heart attack. An ICE can get you there in about ~7 hours. An EV... you're going to need 1 supercharging station at a minimum, probably 2. Or, you just decide you want a road trip from Minnesota to Texas. You pull over to the nearest supercharger in Arkansas to discover you're forced to hang out in a town where you really don't feel safe for an hour or two. That's great.
EVs make far more sense in Europe than America, with the current range they can offer, combined with general proximity of relatives. I'm not saying they don't have a future in America, I just won't be surprised if we are the slowest adopters.
In my experience, most people outside of the EV bubble underestimate how much infrastructure is already there.
At least for Tesla. For CCS cars in the US, it isn't so great.
Yeah, if you spend 4.5 minutes goofing off.
I had to rent a 3-row SUV one time and refilling that thing was torturous, thankfully I only had to do it once.
For many people/families, an EV could be viable. For an even larger percentage of people or families with 2+ vehicles an EV could be very viable. Still, in most scenarios the ICE vehicle is the safe choice, with the pros and cons well understood.
IMO some of the EV pushback is from people (like me) who have nothing against EVs, but feel they are still a solid decade away from being a no-brainer choice, with much of the holdup being infrastructure related.
I'm all for saving the planet (note: I don't believe that EVs overall are as net environmentally positive as they are portrayed), but I'm not going to do it while stranded at a charging station.
But not everyone can afford a new EV. If you buy almost any EV on the used market, such as a used Tesla...
Edit: a different commenter says you need to return at 75%. That's reasonable.
Or I might want to do same with some client or relative there.
Train station is very near, but not that near... And it still means connection to get to actual airport...
And new EVs are pretty expensive, compared already paid car...
My family has neighbors that just buy and repair older cars and sell them pretty low cost. The quality of their work has been considered very good by third-party mechanics. My parents recently bought a 2005 Pontiac with a V6 from them for about ~$4K with 135K miles. One accident (deer sideswipe), only body.
Do you know what a 2013 Tesla Model S with 135K miles goes for around here? About $17K. If we're lucky, we could maybe negotiate it to $15K-$14K; but that's still almost four times the cost. And sure, the Tesla is eight years newer, but I make a similar comparison because it was very much a 1st-gen product... My money is on the Pontiac lasting longer.
Why not? If my car covers 99% of my needs, that seems fine. I can rent a vehicle for the other 1%.
As an European, no they don't. Europeans often use their cars for long travels cross borders for work, vacation or visiting relatives where public trasnportation doesn't serve them, and the lack or underdevelopment of charging infrastructre makes them viable only for people with their own house, garage and charger at home or for businesses which do short trips around town like deliveries or realtors. Everyone else has ICEs.
They charge you $25 if you return it not fully charged, which is bananas, because why couldn’t they just plug it in while they’re cleaning the car? It’s not like gas where they have to drive the car to a gas station.
It's likely similar where if you receive it at 100% and return it at 98% you're getting charged the full $25. It's just another revenue source for the company.
From the start, refill charges have been an utter scam.
[1] https://www.geratech-tankanlagen.de/tankanlagen-diesel-adblu...
I think it was $25 flat if not as same level, so I can fill it to the level I received it and hope they kept accurate records (ie knew it wasn’t full).
I think if I had ample time during all this an EV would be interesting but I just don’t want to make a mistake and make this repair even more expensive.
I recall a similar rule the last time I hired a gas car, but feels like for EVs it could use a tweak or two.
(This is my personal experience of a straightforward theft case where I was the victim and the police actively wanted to get the person behind bars)
---
This is concerning. These cars are essentially delicate ipads with wheels and repairs for them are costly and specialized. Driving, in general, is dangerous and accident prone. Waking up to twice your repair cost or insurance premiums must not be great for Hertz.
Also the article doesn't mention the EV value cut-off unrelated to MSRP. When the battery reaches 50-60% of its top capacity, then range anxiety is back. No one wants a 150-100 mile Tesla, or worse in the winter with the heating on.
Range issues aren't a big deal with regular owners as with regular use they only lose 10-15% range in the first few years, but Hertz drives theses hard everyday, unlike someone with a suburban commute who gets groceries on the weekend. Who knows what their internal data is suggesting. Id be very, very hesitant to buy a Hertz used Tesla. I'd want to see how bad the battery is first, especially what its real world range is in the winter. I wouldnt be surprised because how hard these cars are run, they'll have more battery degradation per year/per mile than a well kept car babied by someone who loves their Tesla.
I just took a look on their website and the long range sedan I'd be interested in at that trim level 2024 model is going to be about $50k. Hertz has a 2022, a less than 2 year old car, with 80k miles for asking $31k. A 40% depreciation in 2 years is very rough.
Their resale value is particularly punishing. Hertz doesn't keep cars for all that long, so a tough depreciation isn't something they can ignore.
I'd probably go for a hybrid, since it doesn't have any downsides like that, but not for fully electric. Of course, it's just my own opinion, but I suspect there are a lot of casual renters that are like me, and Hertz is seeing that.
And it's all because of the consumable nature of batteries. Consumers don't buy used phones for the same reason
The ship of theseus doesn't really work for EVs (yet)
You want to see depreciation? Go look at an Audi. The phenomenon probably has more to do with market position than technology. More expensive cars typically depreciate faster unless they are supply constrained.
> Consumers don't buy used phones for the same reason
Ah, you sound like an Android user ;-). iPhones have pretty good resale value.
The agent said people used to EVs loved them, and almost everyone else wouldn’t touch them with a 10’ pole.
Between the cars dropping significantly in value (all EVs have), the lack of maintenance savings if no one is driving them, the cost to repair body panels when hit, and most people not wanting to touch them I can’t blame Hertz.
Just too early for the mass market in most places and the wrong brand choice due to repair costs (though choice was very limited at the time).
An EV you buy yourself seems to be a short week of frustration as you learn where the charging infra is, get 100 new apps for charging, learn the quirks of a car UX the manufacturer thought they might as well change since everything else changed and the car is now apparently a phone. But at least after that frustration it can be a good experience. But with an EV you rent for two days, you can't have a week of frustration. It just doesn't work.
> Besides costing more to repair when they’re damaged in a crash, Scherr also said, EVs are also getting in more crashes.
then
> Our work with Tesla is to look at the performance of the car, so as to lower the risk of incidence of damage
I'm curious if they are working with tesla to <reduce> the performance? Are people getting into accidents because they aren't used to teslas' acceleration vs. a typical gas car? Or are people getting into accidents for other performance reasons, eg: cornering / braking?
Most likely. Even the lowest end Tesla can scare the pants off of a passenger who has never been in an EV before. I know this from personal experience. An EV driver noob who stomps on the pedal has a chance of panicking and death-stomping on the pedal more.
Edit: this is a joke, by the way
It was just the way the car hit it I guess, CT was basically untouched, everyone was fine, but it was high enough speed to total the other car.
It's not really an indicator of anything, just an interesting happenstance.
CT didn't crumple because it wasn't hit where it needed to crumple.
Postulate two spherical cybertrucken in a vacuum suspended from the same point by wire under Earth gravity acceleration. After contact each vehicle moves away from the point of contact with the energy equivalent of 1/2 the sum of each vehicle's input kinetic energy.
An unstoppable force hitting an immovable object.
Once again the HN community fails to spot obvious sarcasm. Y’all really need to get out more.
Otherwise it was great and I would love to rent a Tesla from Hertz again.
But plenty of hotels still don't have that.
Tesla is very strict about their parts distribution. They will only send parts to authorized Tesla service centers, of which there aren't that many.
This is extremely unfortunate for rental cars, as they get beat to absolute shit and are in a near constant state of repair.
I've rented several Teslas from Hertz and Avis. Almost all of them have had at least one visible non-OEM replacement part on them, and half of them had that part installed incorrectly. Examples:
- A replacement backup camera that was pointed way too far downwards. Because this car didn't have ultrasonic sensors, it couldn't do distance estimates reliably. Parking that thing was like going straight back to 2006 every time.
- A passenger-side window that didn't align with the top of the window frame, causing air to leak into the cabin and kW/h averages to skyrocket.
- Heaps of el cheapo tires. This isn't a problem specific to Tesla, but it's a worse problem with Teslas since their cabins are already loud as they are and non-EV-rated tires throw off energy consumption.
It's not _as bad_ with Hertz since they are a Tesla partner, but it's the wild west with other rental car companies. Teslas offered by Avis are almost entirely bought individually from who knows where and I think every single Tesla I've rented from Avis has had something up with it.
I can also believe their claim regarding low customer adoption. Most of Hertz and Avis's customers are business travelers on corporate expense accounts. When they want to rent a car, they need a car _now_ and do not want to worry about things like fueling and parking the car.
Teslas are a completely different experience from a "normal" car. Their interior is also very polarizing, especially now that Tesla is experimenting with a stalk-less steering wheel cluster. This makes it not only more difficult for rental car companies to put those cars to work, but it also adds toil in the backend from dealing with car returns and clogging the (almost always understaffed) reservation desk with exchanges.
Non-Tesla EVs are also impacted by this. Many business travelers just _won't_ with charging apps, especially when they only fuel the cars either just after getting them or just before returning them.
That'd be enough to make me avoid them on business travel, even though I also tend to rent EVs when traveling for leisure.
I like EVs and have a charger at home for my own car, but maybe due to that I also understand the difficulty of finding a reliable charging situation in a new place. On top of that I was visiting and parking at my parents house, and they don’t have a charger installed.
Yeah, and hertz doesn't tend to give you a mobile charger. I can't blame them, they are a separate cost and they tend to "get lost" with rentals, but it makes the EV option a lot less practical.
I wonder if that means insurance, frequency of collisions, average damage in a collision, or cost to repair disparity
When Ford started making putting aluminum bodies on their F150s, they had special training programs for doing bodywork and repair on them. I guarantee that cost was passed down to you.
It may not even take longer to do the repairs, it might take the same amount of time once you learn how to work on them. That said, I guarantee the shops and insurance companies are recuperating the costs of that extra training.
If you rent a vehicle out for $75 per day, and it needs a $1000 repair, and a repair takes 2 weeks, the loss of use is more expensive than the entire repair!
Repair times have been getting longer across the entire automotive industry, as parts availability hasn't been great, but Tesla vehicles are notorious for long wait times for parts availability and availability of the specialized labor sometimes required.
Rental cars get dinged up all of the time and you can get a new fender on a Malibu in under a day.
Is that because Chevy makes the more available or because they're much easier to find at a part reseller?
Even my parents Leaf leaps like a fish when you start it, I can only imagine how many people get into fender benders when driving a Tesla for the first time without really having a chance to get used to the feel.
You're just not going to rent EV's to many non-owners, even if they are going to be driving less than 100 miles (typical business trip where you fly then rent a car).
disclaimer: havent owned. but i disagree with this, and others have mentioned in thread already. range anxiety dissipates for most people because 1. they mostly drive daily commutes of areas they know and 2. they become intimately familiar with the Tesla and how it finds the next supercharger for you on route. Both of these dont apply when renting a car most times.
The EV renting experience is bad. I got one though Avis, I believe a Kia Niro. I was told that I’d be charged if I brought it back under 80%. It was at 81%. Ok fine, I’m driving less than 50 miles and returning it. I’ll find a charger, since my AirBNB didn’t have charger.
We tried to use the on board map to find a charging station. It took us two tries to find on that was actually public, which was at a fire station. It took over an hour to go from 70% to 85%.
I never had range anxiety about the car itself, but trying to return it full enough was anxiety inducing, even though it wasn’t that big a fee.
I feel my experience would have been really improved if 1) they made the fee be a sliding amount based on how close you returned it to where you checked out and 2) there was an onboard L1 charger you could use with a normal plug.
Not to mention the annoying logistics question of how Hertz would deal with EVs returned with a low charge. With gas vehicles they can happily charge you an excessive fee and spend a few minutes filling it up. With an EV they can still charge you, but the next customer may not be able to use the car for hours. I assume Hertz would ultimately have to float more unused vehicles at busy locations to cover for EVs charging after they were returned.
At the same time, I don't think I would ever want to rent an EV. Do I know that wherever I'm staying I'll be able to charge? Sure they said they had a charger but what if it's busted? Also, these days if I'm renting a car (as opposed to just Ubering) I'm usually going to use it quite a bit - having to deal with range anxiety or planning out charging stops is the last thing I want to do.
EVs are great, but the broader infrastructure is still not as convenient as gas. When I've got a car at my house I know when and where I'll charge it, but when traveling it's just an extra hassle I don't want to deal with.
Things that increase the riskiness - unfamiliar area, unfamiliar car, non Tesla, not knowing EVs.
So rental non-Tesla while on a vacation is probably the worst possible scenario.
BS. Cheaper by far than any gas car, in time and money! Half the cost to fuel. No more emissions check. No more oil changes. No more visits to the gas station.
As the article says, collision repairs are extremely expensive
I suspect this is also BS. That's par for the course with media outlets w/Tesla.
A newer luxury SUV with an MSRP 2x of our Model 3 had a lower collision premium on our car insurance policy.
As for the fuel cost, it depends where you live. In California, if you have PG&E, it's roughly a wash despite our very high gas prices (electricity is even more outrageous)
EVs are already not a good fit for rental cars - I don't think travelers on vacation want to figure deal with a charging plan. It's also really hard to sell even a luxury sedan as an upgrade when everyone wants an SUV. I'd be curious to know if something like the Rivian would fare better as a premium option.
I don't want an SUV. I get angry at rental companies when they try to give me one.
I increasingly don't recognize this country I grew up in with the car culture. In the early 90s nobody wanted SUVs either. The truck and SUV craze was apparently sparked by an emissions regulatory loophole, where larger vehicles were excempt because they were meant for work.
The only thing I can think of is to emphasize their superior fuel economy and get people to appreciate the superior handling.
Make people drive an obstacle avoidance course in both a small car and a huge SUV. Maybe some people would accept that the safer car doesn't have to be the bigger car, but the one with enough agility and stability to avoid it completely.
Many times people that prize handling of the car end up pushing the limits and driving dangerously aggressively accelerating and braking, following closely, aggressively lane swerving.
When travelling, I tend to prefer public transport, except when in a group or when I need to carry a lot of stuff, and again, for that I need a big car.
And not an EV. EVs are ideal when you can charge at home. When renting a car, it usually means I don't have a "home", and planning for charging points in a place you are not familiar with is a hassle. And EVs are not ideal for road trips where each leg typically exceeds the maximum range.
So yeah, I understand why rentals would be dominated by large gas cars and trucks.
Car enthusiasts still like small sedans with handling and looks and etc. But the average person just wants the biggest, most comfortable car they can get for the money.
I had a millenial co-worker ask me why selling a 2-door car was even legal these days.
They want the biggest, because it makes them feel comfortable, despite objective data and car parts that SUVs are more dangerous and less comfortable.
One theory is that millennials have been taught that higher and bigger is better because of age related vision deterioration by their parents and it has now caught on.
Anecdotally, I asked this line of questioning recently of family that had the choice of a 20 hour road trip - 2 people in (solid rear axle) Cadillac Escalade versus a similar year Mercedes Mid Size SUV. The reasoning given was comfort. But objectively, the mid size has independent rear suspension, more responsive steering, quicker pickup, lower weight (and better center of gravity), lower miles, fewer maintenance issues, fits in more parking spaces, is not as tall to get into comfortably, better fuel economy, and more comfortable seating. The conclusion that the extra large SUV is more comfortable perplexes me.
2) cargo cult culture in literally everything these days, including what some less-than-bright footballer buys for a car (or some famous dev or company uses for building their products), so these 'suv' are seen as luxury, and not garbage dump of companies making real cars (TM) like BMW.
Severe rolling risk, slow reaction times and generally just a bad drive thanx to basic physics, high consumption and overall maintenance... not that great a choice for many
But because their profile is much more aerodynamic and they are lower to the ground, they just drive very smoothly. Especially when covering long distances on the freeway.
It's also amazing to be able to open every door and control every feature with a physical button on the dash and be able to haul full sheets of plywood in the back.
My personal cars have all been sporty little manual hatchbacks, but if I just wanted all out comfort it's really hard to beat a well equipped mini-van.
Maybe I just had bad luck with the rentals I chose?
I think a fairer description would be that American culture values space, personal property ownership, and independence. Car ownership is a means to an end.
Our fridge/freezer is on the larger size, but is also usually pretty full, so we definitely get good use out of it. Our washing machine is reasonably large, but, frankly, not large enough, as I can't fit our king-size bed's comforter in it, and have to use a laundry service to get it washed. Our couch is a pretty good size, but my partner and I want to be able to stretch out on it (at opposite ends) simultaneously, which doesn't seem like a wild or unreasonable thing to want to do.
And I prefer a smaller car! I refuse to purchase an SUV, despite my need to drive in snowy mountains several months out of the year (I of course found a sedan with a 4WD option). I hate driving SUVs; they feel bulky, unwieldy, and unstable to me. Before I bought my current car, I would rent a 4WD SUV when I needed to drive in the snow, and I hated the experience every time.
Modern "compact" or "crossover" SUVs are just hatchback cars. Some are quite small, they're just named differently to make people buy them.
The real loser has been minivans, station wagons, and actual hatchbacks. There's no reason to buy a sedan when on the same footprint you can get an SUV with more room.
Tesla Model 3 length: 185.8″
Volkswagen Taos length: 175.8″
This is a popular opinion, but there are still advantages to a sedan. e.g. driving dynamics, weight and aerodynamics and therefore fuel economy, price, etc.
It's just that many buyers don't prioritize these things.
Most buyers only really compare efficiency after narrowing down other things they deem "irreplaceable".
USED buyers, of course, are much more flexible because the main thing they care about is price. But nobody builds used vehicles, only new ones.
Sure there is, fuel efficiency being one.
Also I just do not at all like driving SUVs. I like to be closer to the road, and sedans just feel more stable to me.
The proliferation of SUVs is so profoundly disappointing.
This tax remains in effect to this day with that trade war a distant memory.
Same, but I think the GP is correct to say that most people do want an SUV, in the US, at least.
But they wanted more than twice as much for a model 3 than any other compact sedan, so I ended up with a gas powered Kia instead.
depending on the branch they absolutely do. Many now have requirements you have to return it charged to a certain % or be charged just like gas.
I mean, they were only going to charge twice as much for a car that costs 3x as much.
bollocks. they absolutely do, and I've been dinged on it before. last time I rent an EV
I don't think I've ever rented an SUV in my adult life. Other than the one time I needed a vehicle to go to the snow (and in that case, we ended up with an AWD equipped minivan anyways).
I would much prefer a Tesla Model 3 to most SUV options. Granted I have an EV so it doesn't scare me, but that's not everyone. A rental fleet should be diverse. Just because I don't want an SUV doesn't mean others don't. Different people, different wants and needs.
Agreed. Travel already involves enough work of having to figure out how to operate in a different location. Gas stations are everywhere and the time to fill is predictable across all ICE cars; I don't want to have to plan EV charging into my trip as well.
As an aside, I was also surprised that they had a special line/desk that was only for Uber/Lyft drivers and there were people in that line. I guess I would've thought that by the time you paid for the rental costs you wouldn't make any money driving for Uber or Lyft.
The only thing really of note is that they're not buying more of them, selling off cars that are 2 years (or about 30k miles) or so old is standard rental car policy. Sell it whilst they can recover much of the capital outlay.
It’s important to note that they have been renting half this fleet to Uber drivers at approximately 1/2 their consumer rental rate, according to TheVerge:
> Hertz is scaling back its EV ambitions because its Teslas keep getting damaged / Also, Uber drivers, who are using about half of Hertz’s Teslas, are damaging their cars more than Hertz expected.
And:
> repair costs are about double what the company spends on gas car fixes, Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told Bloomberg.
Apparently they tried to pull more vehicles into the leisure category (aka consumer rentals not Uber driver rentals) to mitigate repair costs, but it didn’t work.
Also, the price cuts Tesla has been making are turning the company off on renewing:
> Price cuts have taken another toll on Hertz. “The MSRP [manufacturer suggested retail price] declines in EVs over the course of 2023, driven primarily by Tesla, have driven the fair market value of our EVs lower as compared to last year, such that a salvage creates a larger loss and, therefore, greater burden,” Scherr said.
Your analysis seems spot on.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/27/23934691/hertz-tesla-ube...
I honestly can't fault them, they tried a thing and they ran into real issues.
I suspect that Tesla themselves could manage a (smaller) rental EV fleet for those who wanted them, and do decently well (they could rent out used cars they've prepped for sale).
Most of these hertz teslas were barely driven and those with defects are generally pretty easy to catch and they're desperate to get rid of them at bottom of the barrel prices.
It almost makes me want to quit my dev job and start a plumbing or electrical biz.
Ummm...I think there's a little more to running a plumbing company than the type of vehicle you're driving to service calls in.
Why? Because I’m not yet 25.
Of course, the website let me book it even after I entered my age. Really horrible user experience and customer service.
On the other hand, I think it's insane and a real shame that they just handed unsuspecting people who booked the cheapest car an EV. That's a flat out deception and a major hassle if you aren't ready for it.
As is usually the case, Hertz may have raced into the trend a little too quickly, and now they will back off for a period of time. I don't think this says much about the long term trend under which we all end up driving EVs in another 15 years.
I'm a Gold member through Delta status (which is 1000% better than trying to use Hertz without the status), so they had an upgrade for me - a Tesla Model 3, which was by far the cheapest option.
I live in Utah, drive a (hybrid) F-150, and had never driven a Tesla. It was fun and novel but a PITA to figure out charging (at Disneyland no less).
When returning the car I was a little surprised to see what seemed like hundreds of Teslas on the lot.
We have another SoCal vacation this summer, and I expected to see a Tesla at the top of the list again, but I was surprised to see that it wasn't even an option, and the other EV (I think a Bolt) was 50% more to rent than the standard Jetta. So we got the Jetta /shrug
Even if 10% of the customers would be fine with it (I'd love to rent one to see what it was like) it's not worth bifurcating the fleet.
1. The number of public charging points available is very small compared to the number of gas stations. Very difficult to use EVs outside very urbanised areas because of this one reason.
2. Even at the base, you will need a large number of charging points and also access to much larger electricity load - all of which costs a lot more money and infrastructure.
3. It takes time to charge - and even the fastest charging units are usually a bit slower than doing a gas refill.
4. The costs can easily jump if the batteries need to be replaced for whatever reason.
5. Very difficult to put out fires etc.
- Our hotel (and many others) did not offer EV charging. In most places, there was no assurance that the chargers would be functional.
- Oahu has very limited level 3 charging. Finding a supercharger meant driving out of the way.
- Hertz wanted me to top-it-off before returning. I was mindblown when I realized that they had a fleet of EVs but no in-house charging equipment.
Had Hertz offered to charge it themselves upon return, I would have still taken it, but asking me to sit around for a few extra hours at an L2 charger just before returning the vehicle was definitely a deal-breaker.
23/01 -> 30/04 C$10,952.88 (C$111.76 / day)
... but pick it up a day earlier and it's C$4,000 cheaper:
22/01 -> 30/04 C$6,777.00 (C$68.45 / day)
Also:
13/01 -> 15/02 C$1,747.00 (C$52.94/day)
... but split it into two rentals and it's C$400 cheaper:
13/01 -> 01/02 C$727.00
01/02 -> 15/02 C$619.00
Total: C$1,346.00 (C$40.79/day)
Nothing makes sense.
Also, I need winter tyres. That'll be C$25/day extra... No discount for monthly rental. Doesn't make sense. I'm here with my money Hertz, but there's no way I'd deal with such a cluster-fuck.
The electric cars were never powered up. Even when parked beside a charger, people simply wouldn't plug them in. When they did, the cars would charge for lengthy periods of time, and hence be unavailable. Gas won.
Despite eletric being half the cost, and more covenient as a one way option, people chose to willingly pay more, and use gas.
Today, the same system is gas only. Electric isn't suitable for this use case.
Does the same (or an equivalent, eg: Plug it in to charge upon return) requirement not apply to electric cars?
When they tried this with the pay per minute vehicles (both electric and gas) the reality is the time to fill electric made them completely untenable.
They also tried battery swaps, that was truly disastrous.
Anecdotally, the exception was Japan, where my wife and I rented a pristine ten year old Aqua direct from Toyota, but that sort of vertical integration seems to be rare here.
1. EVs are more expensive up-front (supposed to pay for it through reduced opex)
2. ex-US/Canada, MSRP includes VAT, inflating it.
3. Nobody effectively pays MSRP for EVs because of various tax credits.
4. Every CC's CDW policy I've read said that they don't cover you at all if you exceed MSRP
Maybe my insurance will think #2 is an oversight, but I don't want to test that. Some say "MSRP exclusive of taxes", but again, I don't want that fight.
Interestingly, they seem to be selling off more of the 3 than the Y too.
It ended up being an SUV that even being hybrid consumed more gas than an average non hybrid sedan.
I had a feeling they didn't want me to rent an electric, or the clerk was pushing me away from it.
IIRC correctly this was mainly Tesla EV's (?) which hard a high cost of replacement parts | long waiting times.
Some of the other EV models are better situated re: spares and legacy gas vehicles have decades of replacement part infrastructure already in place.
> Also, Tesla should theoretically lasts for million miles while gas vehicles rarely go beyond 2k.
Here in Australia all our family cars since the 1980s have had at least 600,000 km on the clock before being sold on (a couple hit one million km).
The improvements include an on-display tutorial for how a Tesla differs from other models in their fleet (including door operation, use of keys and charging) and the ability to use your phone as a key. This last is very nice quality of life improvement.
That said, I can absolutely understand why a person wouldn't want to rent one: lack of charging at hotels or places you're likely to visit. At home, I know I can charge at home, at the office, and I'm familiar with the supercharger locations. In a strange city, I just don't want to have to worry about it.
I eventually found the adapter in the trunk, and I am confident there were a dozen “right answers” I ought to have known about, but it was a rental and I didn’t at the time own an EV myself.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/08/sixt-dumping-teslas-due...
Too much uncertainty in a new area to rent one when on business travel with strict deadlines.
Resale value is a big aspect of rental car companies' profitability models.
In addition to that, they gave me a model 3 when I was trying to rent the most basic gas model (for the same price). I'm glad I got to try it but never again. I thought I was getting a good deal...
How can the economics come even remotely close to working out? I was under the strong impression that Uber drivers make dirt and that it's difficult to do much more than break even, assuming you own/lease your own car.
Either Hertz is insanely cheap or Uber pays more than I thought.
I completely understand why they don’t work well as rental cars.
Very puzzling that Hertz + Tesla hasn't streamlined the charging process for rental vehicles.
The Hertz charging fob is quite expensive though, cheaper to signup to something like EnBW, which you can use for almost all charging stations [0].
Supercharger in Germany are almost all open to third-party cars as well, though not as cheap as EnBW.
[0]: https://www.enbw.com/elektromobilitaet/produkte/ladetarife
Nearly stranded at a rest stop, spent 2 hours trying to charge, apps wouldn't accept payment, apps wouldn't activate Ionity charger, spent an hour on long distance cellphone call to Ionity call center where they manually activated a charge for me after great difficulty.
The other thing for people who think they can plan around it is that remember with typical rental agency you have no idea exactly which EV model they are going to give you at check in.
So could be the one with 220/240/280mi highway range. And then they might hand it to you with the battery at 80% full.
Your plans to safely get to your destination on 100% of the 280mi battery may be quickly spoiled by getting a a 240mi EV at 80% full and being -90mi short.
And a week after that, Elon started selling Tesla shares.
It’s pretty unfortunate they were too short sighted to see the irony.
So read another way, they mispriced their repair plan and it’s costing them money.
https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/vehicleguide/index.jsp?target...
So it's moreso that they can't find a profitable price point to justify keeping it in the general car pool.
Europe is so far ahead of us on this one it hurts.
People tend to treat rentals with not a lot of care. That seems like it could certainly add up.
Besides the body damage repair cost mentioned in the article, one other reason for Hertz' decision has to be customer complaints. Car rental agencies frequently have to give people a different car than the one they reserved and for whatever reason, a lot of Americans have a bone to pick with electric vehicles. Having traveled extensively for work over the years, I've seen some pretty stunning meltdowns from the people ahead of me in the Hertz line when they got, e.g., a Traverse instead of a Tahoe (i.e., a marginally smaller SUV than the one they reserved).
Imagine the theatrics that ensue at the Honolulu airport when an entitled boomer out of central casting (sorry to stereotype) gets a Bolt instead of the Malibu they reserved. I could totally see how such incidents, at scale, would bubble up to Hertz leadership and drive decisions.
It doesn't seem like there are any electric-only agencies out there except for the Tesla plan to let owners monetize their vehicles during owner downtime. Feels like a good market opportunity and the US Gov would probably subsidize the shit out of it.
Last summer I was attending a wedding in slightly-upstate New York. I flew into Newark airport, and went to rent a car that I'd pre-reserved. They tried to give me an EV. I had no idea what the charging situation would be where I was going, so I declined and asked for and ICE car instead. Good thing, as I didn't see any kind of charging infra at my hotel or at the wedding venue, or anywhere nearby.
Renting an EV would mean planning ahead of time and becoming familiar with the charging infra in whatever place I'm visiting. That seems not worth the effort or potential stress.
On top of that, I've read of plenty of situations where people go to rent an EV, and find that it's barely charged, and then have to waste an hour or more finding a place to charge it before going about their day. The rep at the rental place will just shrug and say they didn't have time to charge it fully after it was returned.
> Tesla has been aggressively cutting its vehicle prices leading other automakers to do the same for their electric vehicles. When automakers reduce the prices of new vehicles, that pushes down the value of those models in the used car market, causing rapid depreciation.
How dare Tesla reduce their prices without asking Hertz first
By the same token I would never rent a diesel or a manual transmission vehicle...I don't want to learn about them via the rental experience
As more and more people have electric cars, it makes sense for the rental companies to transition to them, so that renting doesn't feel like you're being offered a horse and buggy.
Hertz apparently doesn’t use standard classifications and it was actually a sub compact suv - the Chevy bolt euv.
Their counter person was strangely gleeful in explaining how I would not be able to find a charger for it.
I get the feeling hertz and car companies just hate electric vehicles