Hertz's CEO to Step Down as Car Renter Unwinds Bet on EVs

If you have an idea, even if it is correct, for most things it won't work just any old time. There will be a certain optimal time when it will work, and it won't work either before or after that.

In this case, even if evs are inevitable, where at some point it will absolutely be a win to switch a rental fleet to evs, that time is not today. It didn't work. So "you can't be too early".

Then later, if you're hertz, and enterprise switches to evs before you, maybe strikes a plum deal from a manufacturer or charger network that isn't available for any 2nd and 3rd comers etc, you lose for being too late. so "you can't be too late" In this case I'm not sure how much being 2nd or last to go ev would actually hurt a rental fleet, but that's the idea regardless of the details. Someone else captures most of the market and the 2nd mover has a much harder time.

Try to be a 2nd OpenAI or nvidia today. Everyone's trying to do something with ai today, and in the hardware arena AMD and Intel will certainly manage to stay in business, but nvidia has scooped up the whole table for this decade at least already.

And both cases are true at the same time. You can't simply ensure you're first, nor simply ensure you're not first. You want to figure out when is the time it will actually work, and try to be ready to go so you're first at that time.

enterprise is happy not to be fitst in this case because hertz jumped too early, but only because hertz jumped too early. If contitions were a little different (if the cars worked better, if the charging network was better, if the cars were cheaper, etc) it might have been a big win for hertz to preempt everyone else.

Another example is Tesla. They were not remotely the first to try to make evs, and all attepmts before them failed, and the conditions weren't right yet for Tesla either, but in that case rather than identify the right time and wait for the conditions to be right, Elon actively changed the conditions and made them right by building out the charging network. Now it's too late for everyone else. Oh everyone else will make evs of course, even better ones, but even if Tesla loses it's shine, it's already run away with the pot for years.

(I'm not an Elon or Tesla fan, this is just a thing that happened in the world.)