How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went sideways
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The issue was twofold: 1. Repair cost and parts availability. Fleet damage was more expensive to repair and took longer. That means more of the fleet is offline at any given time and cost to operate is a bit higher. 2. Tesla lowered prices forcing them to recognize the depreciation. The cars resale value dropped faster than they anticipated.
Car and RV rental companies have this problem. People don't want to rent ragged out vehicles. In the case of RVs units for rental are built extra cheap so they don't last anyway. The model is get more in rent then you lose in depreciation then dump the vehicle. In the case of RVs they often turnover the entire fleet yearly.
The real killer was no doubt depreciation. That breaks the whole rental car model.
I am a very heavy user of rentals (300+ rentals last year, 200+ the year before - max status on National / Enterprise, Hertz and Avis) and I've rented an EV (Tesla Model 3) exactly once.
Most users don't have the time to think about places to charge and even more so, to bring it back at 80%
Not to mention, outside of major metropolitan areas (US and Canada), charging infrastructure is spotty at best (esp. if you don't plan for it).
This makes charging an added hurdle that takes away from the experience.
If you're a business user - you don't do it because you don't have the time and if you're a leisure user - you don't do it because your vacation time is valuable and spending time at charging stations that are usually out of the way is not ideal time spent for an expensive vacation)
With my own car, in my home town, it isn't a problem. My garage has a lvl1 charger for grocery getting; I know a few account-free fast chargers around town, and that's all I need. A multi-day trip, or a rental company putting the onus on me to return it full, just isn't worthwhile.
Nobody is forcing you to bring it back with 80%. Hertz's charging fees are not extortionate or unreasonable. If you don't have the time or inclination, just return it as-is and pay the per-kWh charging fee. It isn't all that much more than what it would cost you to supercharge it anyway!
(I don't disagree that charging is a problem when it comes to car rentals, but for the most part it's a psychological problem, not a real one.)
It's also a ridiculous stipulation since Hertz could easily charge the cars themselves. Instead they invested heavily in the EVs while keeping their archaic rule about returning at 80%. I wonder how much they could have made without this.
If they allowed returning at 20% it becomes less hassle than a gas car because many trips wouldn't require any charging at all and a much better user experience.
Filling up and then expensing gas while running late for a flight is super stressful, trying to charge an EV in that same scenario is like 10x worse.
EV owner here. It’s VERY state and location dependent.
Generally speaking, if you’re following an interstate, charging won’t be a problem even “in the middle of nowhere”. If you aren’t following an interstate, in general, “red” states that haven’t had any programs to build out infrastructure are a nightmare compared to “blue” states that have. Tesla in general is far better about charging in the boonies than CCS.
No one wants to hunt for a charging station when they need to get to a business meeting on time or enjoy their vacation.
It is also a change in consumer behavior. EV owners just aren’t that big a percentage of the total market, and ICE users aren’t going to learn EV on a business trip to unfamiliar territory.
Why wouldn't the rental car company charge it?
Worst case, it's going to lose 2 hours on a 1+ day rental, right?
The columnist concludes the sacrifices were worth it, given her dedication to environmentalism. The vast, vast majority of people would not choose her experience to be a little greener.
1: https://www.almanacnews.com/blogs/a-new-shade-of-green/2024/...
Does this mean the electricity you paid for went half as long?
(ev exp is ltd bc my cars are 30y-60y)
- It's a cold state in winter and there's at least the perception that you don't want an EV in places with cold winters. (I see few enough Teslas in the wild in exurban Boston.)
- It's a relatively poor state.
- I imagine pickups and the like are disproportionately represented.
- It's big and sparsely populated as you say.
A friend of mine who lives in Boston but owns a house on a bunch of land in northern Vermont finally got a Tesla when he convinced himself there was sufficient buffer for weekly trips between the two places.
TBH, the experience of most Tesla owners is just put the dest in the map and charge when needed on the way.
The one clear problem that is highlighted in that article is that hotel, or more generally destination, charging makes a huge difference. People think it is all about getting there, but it really is the being there that can be tricky.
Rental cars magnify this problem, which is why it was so strange that Hertz expanded the fleet so rapidly. Scaling the same move over 3 years would have had very different results(*).
(*) Maybe other than maintenance costs. There were odd rental effects in that from the stories that I've heard.
Do you think that's because it's far easier to charge your car at home while you are sleeping? And that renters who lack this convenience or face difficulty achieving it might be put out by the experience during a possibly expensive and rare vacation?
In fact, mid drive Tesla will auto-reroute you to a supercharger station with more open slots if the one you're going to gets busy while on the drive. The UI is extremely accurate (like I can see open station numbers increment when a car pulls out).
Are you sure you're not hearing complaints about non-Tesla chargers?
Equivalently, she chose a hotel without chargers, or without enough chargers. How much extra time and money would it have taken to find a hotel with/near chargers?
Which travel search engines/ OTAs/ directories allow you to find hotels with L1/L2 chargers? (Do they list number and ratio of chargers/rooms?) Just like how most of these allow you to search on free parking, breakfast, wifi, disabled access etc., I see this as a feature that will become common then standard.
EDIT: to the down-voter, this is on-topic and substantive comment. Per my other comment here, the onus is on the rental company to actively incentivize behavior modification in first-time-EV-renting customers, help them plan their trip, not just to merrily slam them for fees. Assuming Hertz want loyalty and repeat business (if not, then this is a wider issue with them, not with EVs).
Few want to spend that precious time becoming familiar with that cities charging network if charging is new to them.
I recently rented a Mach-E over Christmas in a large Metro, and stayed in a populous suburb. Charging & the states of chargers was no fun and really added a cognitive load.
However, I did realize I enjoyed EV's for some point in the future - somewhat curing range anxiety of my normal life routine.
A lot of hotels around here have 110v outlets in their parking lots for fishermen to charge their bass boats but I haven't heard that a similar ethic applies to EVs. :-)
I suppose I can't extrapolate this situation to everyone, but I have a feeling if you provide your own cord, most motels won't have a problem with you charging. Especially since it'll be uncommon. If everyone had EVs, then they might start putting a fee on it.
This future is probably not yet evenly distributed around the world. Sure. But fast charging might eventually come to something. Eventually.
But I've also rented EVs in metros with decent fast charging, but none at the hotel. It was fun, but charging was a notable downside.
If you buy an EV you hopefully do so knowing full well the vehicle's constraints. You've figured out those constraints aren't a deal breaker for your known use cases. When being offered as a rental most people have no idea what the constraints of the vehicle are nor can they make informed decisions about them. So having anxiety about any of those, including charging, makes complete sense. A rental car should be as flexible as possible, not have a care and feeding schedule like you're buying a Mogwai.
The key takeaway for me, they being wall street people - customer empathy was missing.
101 of salesmanship - understanding of customers needs, desires and then selling solutions for those. Here their customers were out of town weary travelers wanting to have a hassle free quick ride to a hotel or a meeting; have not used EVs before (perhaps never intend to), now have to focus on a new problem - how to learn a new skill of handling EV, how to plan for charging during their multi day trips.. etc.
> Hertz gave me a Subaru Solterra for a one way trip from Temecula to Vegas because it was their last car. Couldn't tell me how to start it or anything because they just got it the day before... and they didn't bother plugging it in so it had 20 miles of range. Couldn't tell me where to charge it so I wasted much of it driving around the mall looking for the charger.
> Four hours later I had enough charge to get to Barstow. Or so I thought. Had to charge in Victorville. Then get a hotel room because it was midnight. Put it on a fast charger in the morning and a full charge should have gotten me all the way back. Hit Baker and I knew it wouldn't.
> My five hour drive ended up taking 25 hours.
> Fuck Hertz.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1bi99tk/hertz_ceo_out...
If my total expected mileage is practical without charging and I expect the car to start adequately charged, fine. It’s like a free tank of gas.
If not, I can’t charge at home. Charging at a hotel is a PITA. Charging first thing in the morning in cold weather without heated parking is slooooow even at a Supercharger.
And I really don’t want to deal with the utter mess of charger networks and their ridiculous membership cards.
And the usual rental model of strongly encouraging customers to return the car with a full tank of gas doesn’t really make sense for EVs.
I had been planning to get an electric but now I'm looking at PHEVs. And I still need to get the wiring for my house fixed. There's an outlet but it was meant for some early gen electric vehicle and literally nothing uses that plug anymore (and now the wiring is probably not adequate gauge)
Assuming you're in the US/Canada or other country with 100-120v service, a standard wall socket is sufficient for many full EV users and plenty enough for a PHEV which has a much smaller battery. Think about how much time your car spends sitting in your driveway/garage...and if you don't get a full charge, so what? The engine kicks in.
The wiring gauge is good for a certain current. That affects what sort of plug is installed in the wall, as they're keyed according to current limits. The EVSE can be programmed to not exceed the appropriate current, which is 80% of the breaker's rating.
If it was wired for an EV, it's almost certainly not 100-120v but 208 or higher, in which case even if it's a 15A circuit, that's definitely enough for a PHEV and sufficient for charging all but the largest EVs practically overnight.
A 208v, 15A circuit is good for 2.5kW. If you get home at 7PM and go to work at 7AM, you'll be able to charge 25kWhr each night, roughly. Average EV efficiency is about .35kWh/mile, so that's sufficient for 70 miles of driving.
I had to make a trip from Tucson, AZ to Bisbee, a super common route you would make as it's a popular tourist destination. Bisbee is about 80 miles from the supercharger down Interstate 10. By default, the cars are configured to stop charging when they get to 80% or something like that. Your average consumer is not going to have a clue because that's not how gas pumps work.
There was 0 public charging infrastructure after the Supercharger, not so much as a public J1772 charge point (It might look like it using an app, but they are broken or nonfunctional). The Model 3 gets under 200 miles of range going the pace of traffic, which is 80-85 MPH. Then they take a wrong turn or drive around at the destination and burn up the last 30-40 miles.
The poor sucker that rented the Tesla was told it would get "270 miles of range". When he left the charger it said he had over 200 miles to go. But reality sinks in, and at some point in the journey, if they get even slightly distracted, they will find themselves 50 miles from the charger with 30 miles left.
And the reason gasoline took off as a fuel was because it was frequently used as a degreaser before we decided to burn it instead, so you could buy it in tins from the blacksmith in whatever town you found yourself stranded in. There's nothing analogous to that for EVs.
This is just a different way of saying "If people put in more work this wouldn't be a problem", but you're ignoring the context - people who rent cars are often in a hurry, need transport now and need to get someone now. This all indicates that they are busy, and your suggestion is that they should work harder to get the same result?
It's not just Tesla either. All major EVs come with route planning. If you have range anxiety you're using it wrong. This isn't even the driver's fault, how can they know about these features if nobody tells them? I don't even fully blame Hertz for this. Tesla should be marketing the route planning nationwide. Show people how life with EVs actually is instead of leaving them in the dark and letting them think that owning an EV means a roll of the dice every time you get behind the wheel where you might not find a friendly plug in time and be stranded on the side with no way to jerrycan more miles.
I'm surprised Tesla and Hertz couldn't work out a deal, e.g. reimbursement or a large discount on additional purchases that would wipe out the accounting charge. Rental vehicles are a sales channel for new vehicles. And every Hertz Tesla being dumped on the secondary market is new-vehicle profit Tesla could have booked.
Now they get more bad news "rental company dumps Tesla because of XYZ", the used market took a big hit as well pissing off existing owners, and I feel like this pushes newer buyers even more away.
Oh no, poor wealthy Tesla owners loosing value on their car. /s Since when are ordinary cars appreciable investments?
It's been well known cars tank in value, especially when you're an early adopter of new tech in a market that's in constant disruption. Your 1999 GeForce 256 also lost most of it's value in a year compared to other later GPUs, it's the nature of tech in a rapidly changing market.
People who expect cars to hold/go up in value need to buy limite edition exotics, not mass produced commodities.
EVs tanking in value on the used market is good for EV adoption as non wealthy people can afford them.
Tesla doesn't believe in PR[1].
[1]https://electrek.co/2021/04/28/elon-musk-no-new-tesla-pr-dep...
Depending on when they negotiated the relevant stuff, Tesla might have thought they needed to contribute more to the deal to sell even the cars they ended up selling already.
I assume things are better with a Tesla but if somebody reasonably tech savvy like me has problems, I can’t even imagine how difficult it will be for many less tech savvy and less tech interested people I know to deal with an EV.
That statistic from the article shocked me.
Four times?!
They send you a bunch of "Explore your upcoming rental" emails when you rent a tesla, with video tutorials [1]. I've rented plug-in hybrids before and had pretty much the same experience as you, but for a tesla rental I watched the videos and all worked well.
- some markets don't have an abundance of fast superchargers. It can take > 1 hour to charge.
- vehicles would often get returned mostly discharged, which forces the next customer to deal with it.
- I rented a few that appeared to have been driven really hard, leading the remaining charge calibration to become mis calibrated, which caused me to have to stop for some unscheduled charges.
- the vehicles lose a few percent of charge per day even when not driven (worse in hot weather)
- Hertz locations are typically not equipped with any kind of charging infrastructure -- if they were, EVs would be far more convenient to rent.
I wish the program would continue, and I would still prefer to rent a Tesla over the other options, but I think the aforementioned things factored into the failure.
Is that a Tesla thing? Or does Hertz have some sort of battery draining telematics? I have a non-Tesla EV and even in warm weather (100°F+) that hasn't been the case for me. If the weather changes drastically the SOC might change ±2%, but when I've left my car sitting for weeks it seems to average out
For a while last summer, EVs from Hertz were the cheapest cars you could rent in the Seattle area because they had many and customers didn’t want them. Sounds like they’ve been selling them off.
I'm not sure what that means in the end :-). Maybe predicting the future is just hard? Maybe it was a 30-60 bet and they just got unlucky? In that case what they did was not unreasonable and had it worked the same journalists that cackle at them with schadenfreude would be singing their praises.
I'm sure they never asked "how fast can they be repaired?" "What will the customer experience be when a car has to be paired with your phone and you need a Tesla account?" "Are the maintenance claims put out by the manufacturer reasonable?" etc. etc.
Elon should have kept prices high while giving deep discounts and priority on parts to fleet purchases. That is what a sane car manufacturer does. To keep cars moving for retail you can have limited sales for holidays and seasons with "cash back" (not officially changing base price) and buying the loan APR to a lower rate.
Instead Elon crashed the price of Tesla's entire lineup.
In other words, you gotta be stupid to rent a Tesla unless you do it just for fun.
Huh. Did you rent a Tesla and then have to pay separately for the privilege of using Tesla's charging network?
I've had a Tesla for years and what you paid for 3 weeks is comparable for what I've paid at superchargers the entire time I've owned the car (I mostly charge at home). It seems you did get ripped off, it just seems like it would be difficult to pay that much in three weeks at superchargers alone. There must have been some special surcharge (as it were).
Maybe it was just idle fees, that seems like it could go up by a lot if you leave the vehicle on the station:
>For every additional minute a vehicle remains connected to the Supercharger, it will incur an idle fee.
I know it would have been a whole lot cheaper if I had my own charger though.
Not that you actually incurred them necessarily. There've been cases of them billing hundreds in idle fees by mistake.
$900 of supercharging would typically be >6k miles. Possibly a little less or a _lot_ more depending on the exact costs in your area.
A hypothetical Toyota Camry, btw, would have consumed more than $900 worth of fuel.
Charging was absolutely the worst part. And most of the charging stations were full at any given time.
Range was extra bad due to the cold as well.
I understand the EV model for home use, but it makes 0 sense for rentals today. It's vastly less convenient, even ignoring the other factors like depreciation
last year i went on a trip to LA and got a polestar for 4 days! car was fine, but finding a working and available charger was a nightmare. after spending 10m on one charger that would take my CC but not connect to the car, i moved to another spot and tried again. that charger would actually connect to my car, but it wouldn't take my CC. a few minutes after that, i called chargepoint tech support but neither of us could understand as i was in a parking garage.
after 15m on the phone before giving up and about to punch something, someone left and a new charger spot opened up. that one worked, but it wasn't chargepoint so i had to download a new app.
so, it took over 45m for me to get the car plugged in and a ton of stress for the ONE charge i needed to perform. i can guarantee that my experience is far from out of the ordinary, and i will never rent an EV again.
Yep. It's not just about rental income - it's about acquiring fleet at bulk/discounted prices and then reselling quickly before they lose too much money. Tesla's drastic price cuts have been annoying to consumers who just bought cars whose resale value plummeted overnight, but a complete deal breaker for a company like Hertz, only exacerbated by unexpectedly high repair costs.
I'd imagine charging must have been a demand factor too - people might like to experiment with an EV rental if they don't own one, but on business or vacation the last thing you want to be worried about is finding a charger or range-anxiety. If you have an EV at home, then part of the convenience, and a mitigation for slow charging, is overnight charging. Many hotels (often used by rental customers) are starting to have chargers too, but it's not something you can depend on.
Side note: when renting in other countries, I always ask for the worst looking beat up car that they have. Really is less stressful to drive around.
I used to do zipcar and I would always do a full walk-around and email zipcar support a set of photos of any and all damage I'd find before I'd even unlocked the vehicle so there was proof the damage wasn't caused by me.
I did this after Zipcar claimed a dent that was already on the car was put there by me, because a prior renter didn't disclose it, or zipcar was double-dipping.
Finding a clean, undamaged car was a relief because I knew I could take photos afterward
It got particularly annoying because after the first 4-5 years zipcar clearly cut back on maintenance and repairs. Cars kept getting dirtier, more damaged, more "weird noises from the suspension", etc. Cars would be overdue for oil changes, have check engine lights on, etc.
Last fall, I got an almost new Mazda SUV from Avis. I was 3 miles down the road when a Service Engine Soon message took over the entire center of the dashboard. I hope they got it serviced after I returned it the next day.
I agree about driving a brand-new rental being stressful. I don't to worry about little scratches and dings, especially when you're driving an unfamiliar car in a foreign place.
The purchase discount (maybe fleet rate) is usually wrapped in a contract - the car must NOT be sold within a certain time or under a certain mileage - and in this way does not compete with the manufacturer's car dealers.
Hertz and Tesla did not have any sort of contract like this. This means that Hertz did not have any concessions from Tesla. Instead of Tesla having a special relationship with Hertz - a car discount, guaranteed quick repairs, possibly special rental-car software helping renters onboard with the car - Hertz got NOTHING.
It should have gotten something, at minimum some sort of fleet rate. It was a VERY good customer. Instead Tesla gave nothing and got a lot of bad PR in the end.
How isn't it?
It's literally the first reason why people avoided renting electric cars according to pretty much every poll out there. Not even the polls, it's literally what Hertz that commissioned studies on their low rental rate found out.
And you can count me as one, I would never rent an electric car in a place I don't know, especially when on vacation/work, where I don't know where and when I will be able to charge and I'm busy already.
I'm more prone to owning, but renting will be a no for quite some time.
Do car rental companies even bother to fix collision-damaged vehicles? I assumed they would just sell them off.
A Tesla after a minor collision might disable itself entirely until inspected by a Tesla technician, and it might need a whole new (and very expensive) battery pack - no one would(or should) take a bet on such a car.
So it's a lot less attractive thing to buy over regular cars.
Charging and long drives, both tough conditions somewhere that isn't my home city both would be major issues. They sold off the cars at a low cost so not sure how they amended depreciation doing that.
1) I'm likely driving more than I do at home
2) I don't know if my hotel/s will have chargers
3) I am cognizant of my time and don't want to drive out of my way to sit in parking lots while my car charges
4) I might be travelling to rural areas where chargers are infrequent
Not saying that the issues you brought up are invalid, but I do think there's a demand problem.
The vehicles are sold after use, not disposed of.
-The car was not charged fully when I rented it.
-I had to park in a pay parking lot at a shopping mall to charge the car. Charging to 100% cost me $7 but took 30 minutes of my time.
-The UX of most of the basic car functions was much harder to learn than a typical rental car. I'm sure that Tesla's UX quirks start to feel normal after a while, but I had trouble locating basic car functions and had to text with Tesla-owning friends for advice.
None of these things made me want to rent a Tesla again.
This was also my experience: "you'd only know if someone told you or you looked it up, and late at night after a cross country flight with two tired kids while poking at unfamiliar menu options on the dashboard tablet I was pretty frustrated with their minimally discoverable approach" https://www.jefftk.com/p/tesla-model-3-review
> I was in the rightmost of two lanes and an SUV was parked in the breakdown lane with its hazards on.
Why was this a false positive?? This is what you are supposed to do if you don't get over to the left.
- Rented Model Y. Show up and no Model Y. “We got a 3”. I’m driving to Vermont with snow but no choice now. “Ok sounds great.”
- Have to stop every couple hours to charge.
- Multiple times the GPS plotted us a route which would have battery hit 0% before arriving to charger. Nerve wracking.
- Most of the full speed charging stations had lines and if we did the slow speed ones our entire weekend trip would be spent charging.
- Regenerative braking is cool till you’re going down hill in snow with all season tires. Then it’s a great way to lock up and slide. Thankfully I’m not a noob. (Also not that I expected winter tires from a rental, even in Boston, but cmon Hertz.)
My biggest takeaway is that if where we stayed had a charger for overnight charging it would have been fine. Without that it was undeniably worse than renting a gas car. We basically had to plan our days around the rental which is a bit insane. I don’t doubt that having one to whip around local with a charger at home would rule but for anything more than short drives I don’t think a rental electric makes sense.
I don't understand how this isn't considered fraud. If you try to cancel your trip, they want to charge a crazy fee, but if they don't have the car that you reserved, sorry maybe we can offer you another one. Rental car companies need a good lashing from a government regulator.
Isn’t the 3 and Y mostly equivalent, one just slightly larger? There is big difference in clearance, 2/4wd or anything else that would make them different in a cold climate drive? Or am I missing something?
Kia.com -> View Inventory -> within 50 miles:
EV9 = (263) 246 Available, 17 Arriving Soon
EV6 = (153) 151 Available, 2 Arriving Soon
Niro EV = (39) 38 Available, 1 Arriving Soon
They all have $XXXX discounts on them. I'm not sure the market is falling all over itself to buy them.
the UX was a bit of a pain at first and I didn't understand the regen braking, but I felt that I at least had menus instead of buttons with symbols in weird places. I have a theory that I'm not as good at remembering where my buttons are as other people because i've never thought twice about the buttons being on a screen instead.... I always have to glance at what i'm setting
All that said: I would never want to drive or own one of the teslas without the turn signal stalks on the steering wheel and all that.... just seems like asking for trouble
We had similar UX issues. It's crazy. I'm all for a very clean interface, but the affordances for very basic functionality are limited. It started with just getting into the damn car. I felt like an idiot just trying to unlock the door. After we struggled for a few minutes we finally had to ask a Hertz attendant. Similarly, there were a lot of cabin controls which are buried in the touchscreen UI. Because I like to play with new toys, I was willing to take the time while parked to watch some videos and figure things out, but a Model 3 is not an easy car to just get in and drive without some prior knowledge. What's also kinda crazy is all the ways that things can be customized (e.g. one pedal driving). I wonder if Hertz resets any of this to the lowest common denominator after a rental?
Charging was a bit of a pain without access to charging at our hotel. There was a supercharger site not too far away, but sitting for 20-30 minutes in a mall parking lot is not my idea of fun. We definitely want our next car to be an EV, but only because we would install a charger in our garage. I'm still not sure I would make the EV choice without that.
I rented a Model 3 again another time, but through Turo, and had hardly any issues, but that's because of this prior experience.
These days, Elon Musk has turned into (or exposed himself to be?) such a nut job that I can't see buying a Tesla. It's very frustrating, because overall I still like the Model 3 better than most other EVs.
I don't own a Tesla and I'm not a fan of their extremely minimalist interior, but those two things should have at least been the easiest to do.
Strange there is no voice control, I mean the car is smart enough it can drive itself .... right?
Did you really charge to 100%? I guess people unfamiliar with Teslas aren't used to the idea of charging to 80-85% as a default
In an alternative world, Hertz could have become _the_ EV rental company if they turned every rental office they have in the US to a fast charging center, and told customers "Look, just drive this thing and dont worry about returning it at a certain charge level". Such an action could have actually had a positive impact.
Instead they focussed on "technology that will automatically open the doors for the users, adjust their seats, adds their favorite playlist"... I mean... Darwinism and all.
The cheese brains thought just having an EV on the lot was all that was needed and that they could charge ice prices for things like half filled batteries.
I drive an EV and would not rent one from Hertz.
> Sometimes the kludgy system erroneously showed cars as missing, resulting in hundreds of innocent Hertz customers getting arrested on charges of stealing rentals they’d actually returned.
Good thing I noticed it and charged it with my own charger before going for a trip.
So it's not just Hertz.
Rental cars are just not a good match for EVs. The best are use cases involving repeated short trips to known locations such as mail/Amazon delivery, school busses and commuters. Suburbia is where EVs thrive, the land of owned private charging stations and routine short commutes. EVs are not suited for hurried tourists.
I've done this before. Different country, car brand I've never seen, never even charged a car before. But my travel itinerary was less than the range, and it was fine. (I tried for fun to charge in a garage in Bruges; could not figure it out. Good thing I didn't need to.)
It's not appropriate for every rental, and there's some customer information and education requirements that are new because of that, but it's quite plausible to have a decent portion of a rental fleet be electric.
Even for vacations you don’t really need level 2 chargers at most locations. A normal outlet can take a model 3 from near zero to full over a long weekend let alone a fast charger. Many camping stops even have RV hookups which are much faster.
I think you just demonstrated exactly the thinking that got them into trouble. EV rental business, turns out, has superficial benefits, but major underlying issues. They failed because of the basic economics of EV rentals: maintenance costs and depreciation. Also, there are massive challenges with building out a charging network as well. And yes, they pretty much have to give the option to customers to not return car fully charged, especially business customers. For business, taking 15 minutes to tank up is reason enough to overpay for the option to not do that, and that's 15 minutes - for EVs, charging up is a 3 hour exercise. Who would sit at a charging station for 3 hours (so now you need to be 5-6 hours before your flight at the airport?)?
>Instead they focussed on "technology that will automatically open the doors for the users, adjust their seats, adds their favorite playlist"... I mean
They didn't fail because of that.
I think a big part of the problem is that Hertz did a terrible job of instructing people new to EVs about the quirks of the platform. Charging to 100% is almost never necessary or even a good idea. It takes so much time that you're better off just making one more charging stop instead. The built-in computer in the cars is excellent at figuring out where to charge and even does stuff like pre-warm the batteries right before you arrive to make the charging go as smoothly as possible. But of course if Hertz doesn't tell you this you instead have a panic attack as you suddenly realize you have no idea how to find a charger in your area. It doesn't help that there are two competing standards currently so you have to know which kind of plug your car has and where the available chargers are. Of course the on-board computer has all of that information, assuming you know to ask.
Given how many stories there are of people wandering around looking for chargers, it is clear that Hertz did a terrible job of informing customers of how their cars worked.
That sounds like a Tesla problem, not an EV problem.
There's no particular need for body work on an EV to be particularly expensive, and the depreciation issue is from Tesla changing their new prices.
It didn't work out because of real world execution is harder than just saying that they are going to do it.
They did build out fast charging – but at some locations, the local electric utility couldn't support it:
> While the company had installed its own charging network as part of the electrification push that started in 2021, some older airports, such as New Jersey’s Newark, don’t get enough power from the electricity grid or lack the infrastructure to support the number of so-called Superchargers that Hertz needed to get EVs back on the road in a half-hour or less. Once a Tesla was returned to those locations, Hertz employees often had to drive them for miles to find a Supercharger[…]
The image of Hertz staff driving around Jersey, searching for an open supercharger any time a Tesla needed a fast turnaround … tragicomedy.
I would think that only a gradual pilot rollout of Tesla rentals could have saved this from getting out of hand. Instead they ordered 100,000 full-price Teslas, and congratulated themselves on getting a lock on a market … a market which proved to be much smaller and more expensive to serve than they'd imagined.
What went wrong with Tesla and Hertz relates to poor financial planning, poor execution combined with a Tesla specific problem of poor repairability. All of that is fixable. But maybe Teslas aren't the ideal vehicle for this. Having driven rentals, people using their bumpers for bumping into things is something that is a given. When those bumpers are really expensive to repair/replace, you have a problem.
Charging infrastructure is actually a minor issue. The real issue is drivers having to figure things out for the first time in a rental car. That pain is easily offset by the low cost of charging. But of course you have to make that matter for the user and really deliver on that.
Hertz made a mistake there by not just including that in the rental price. Just plug it in and don't worry about it. Electricity is cheap and Hertz is charging a premium so what are we talking about here? They should have just done a deal with Tesla on this. Tesla actually used to do include free charging and it helped them grow their customer base enormously. Don't worry about returning the car with a charge either. Herz can plug it in while they clean the vehicle. And so what if it isn't at 100% charge? Probably better for the battery if it isn't. This is both simple to do and it totally removes charging as a friction point because it is cheap, easy, hassle free and there's no pressure to top it up.
That said, many Hertz locations do have way more chargers than they did before starting this gambit.
After all, commercials are very often just like this. Sadly, a vast majority of people have no interest in real information, and to be fair, the main purpose of a commercial is to stick the brand in mind.
And as memory is amplified by emotion, humour helps.
The real problem is range anxiety I think. PHEV is what we need now, as a transition path. With one, people can plug in for almost all uses, and still be OK if surprise usage means they won't have charge.
Other comments in this thread highlight this. Primary, because when traveling you have no idea about the local infra.
Where can you charge? What companies are cost effective? What hotels support charging, and for real, not just saying so on their website.. but only having one or two of them?
When you travel, all the knowledge which makes EV usage at home easier, are gone.
And so Hertz should have done PHEV.
But Norway is probably one of the most saturated with chargers, and i still almost had to call service at some point because i went to zero, a bit nerve wrecking.
This was because there is so many different apps and 20% do not work for foreigners, then 10% just don't work for anyone - so eventually you'll experience a small city where you can't charge, then have to re-route, and if that city also isn't working or isn't providing service then things can get tight.
I'll say we are very close, but the "signing up for 10 different services" and following instructions on so many chargers, giving no service to foreigners because of some weird banking setup is what makes it not feasible yet.
I could manage because im an IT pro, i couldn't imagine my mom figuring this stuff out.
All chargers should have the same system by law, just beep your credit card and it starts charging, instead of requiring you to sign up through brittle interfaces in some weird app with bad cell service.
I skipped the Tesla because it seemed cheap inside, had no speedometer (this is so weird), and the buttons on the steering wheel would drive me crazy, the Citroen was great though!
So, kind of cold comfort for existing ones, but this should sort itself out over the next few years.
My Toyota has both a dial speedometer [hidden behind right hand/wheel], and a large numeric speed display that is easily-viewable. Unfortuneately, if there is any status update (e.g. cruise control, low gas) then the numeric speed digits disappear (replaced with whatever status/issue) — at which point I then no longer know how fast I'm going.
Fortunately, I believe both infotainment displays are running an open Linux distro — perhaps the numeric speedometer can be made permanent?
There’s no hunting involved, you go where the nav tells you.
This isn't an insurmountable problem, but most people don't like any additional uncertainty when traveling and that extra little bit of friction is probably enough to make travelers want gas powered cars. But I can also see that changing over time as more chargers come on line and especially if hotels start becoming reliable charging destinations. If I could rent an EV and charge at my hotel, that's way more convenient than looking for a gas station.
That's only true in certain situations: longer trips with superchargers. If you are renting a Tesla for a trip across the country, you're probably golden. If you're renting it for bopping around a city, it's not going to work as you propose. Even if there's a convenient Supercharger, you're likely to be doing enough short trips that you never trigger it to hit a supercharger.
On longer trips though: the Supercharger experience has been exceptional.
For reference: I've had a Tesla since 2016. Just last weekend I was in "the big city" coming home, and turned on navigation and it told me "You don't have enough charge to make it", and I had to do "navigate to supercharger" instead.
It could be so simple: side payment card and done, with the only worry being the power output. (Still a worry that gasoline doesn't have, but OK, I understand that that's a fact of this infrastructure.)
I'm not going to be interested until I am not required to install random proprietary apps on my phone to charge, but I can just use my payment card.
I understand that but you won't get there by expecting it day one. These things take time.
It's amazing to me the Tesla was able to roll out the best and most ubiquitous charging network in the US despite being a newcomer in a field that had absolutely no guarantee of catching on any time soon.
It's fine if that time is while you are asleep, or at your destination - but the last thing I wanted to do when returning the car before a flight would be to wait for ~30 mins for the thing to charge up, no matter where the app would direct me to.
Logically you'd have a supercharger at the car rental depot to try and relieve this problem, but alas, the last time I was renting a car, and was considering an electric one from Hertz, this was not an option.
You don't need to use any brain power to fill up a gas tank. I've never driven an EV before. When I'm on vacation or business trip, not sure I'd be in the mindset of learning how to find a charging station and charging a car for the first time in my life.
I'm traveling to a foreign country and renting a car in a few weeks and this is the main reason I don't want to rent an EV. I know I can work out how gas stations work there, I have no idea if can work out how to charge a car (Do I need an app? will that app work on a foreign phone? Do I need a local address/credit card to create an account with that app etc. etc.)
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1094356_how-to-recharge...
Gas stations are all over. I have high confidence in most places that when I notice the gas gauge is getting low I will see a gas station in about 10 minutes without a any detours. By contrast EV chargers exist but you will not see every 10 minutes no matter where you go.
Here in the UK at least, you still don't reliably get (b) or (c) with non-Tesla chargers. Though that is seemingly starting to change.
Perceived SEO
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger...
A few months old, but I doubt that much has changed. I think I heard a few came online, so that's over $1B per charger. Maybe they are made out of solid gold and sculpted by hand.
The problem as usual is that we can't build things anymore. This is a civilization scale existential risk problem at this point. It's not just EV chargers. I wonder how many decades (plural) the Baltimore bridge will take to replace?
Edit: I still don't fully understand why we can't build things anymore. It's tempting to say regulation but the EU has a lot more regulation than we do and they at least seem capable of building things when they feel like it. Neither China nor Russia are paragons of free market liberalism, and they are able to build things. India is known for batshit crazy levels of bureaucracy and they can build things.
We have some private companies that can execute, of course, but overall our society seems to excel at rent extraction and delaying things for more rent extraction.
Now some will rightly point out that there are faster ways of doing the above like using modules with modular certification, but you need to pay $$$ for this.
Folks don't see UL, PTCRB and carrier approvals as "regulations" because they are not government mandated. However, they are just as detrimental to innovation as anything that is driven by government.
As a developer of technology products, I also see more and more that US customers are terrified of custom hardware, or even anything physical - they just want to create cloud-based software systems that site in a datacenter that they do not own, running on virtual servers. They are often quite happy to give loads of margin over to folks selling and installing off-the-shelf hardware solutions that are often sub-optimal in terms of functionality, just so they can stay away from the scary physical stuff.
Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations. Then you have 17 states that have not yet issued proposals.
The remaining 2.5 billion is allocated for DoE, which will allocate funding based on proposals it receives.
The other half of this is often we do not want. Many things that you think we should want to build are not important to the people in charge, and so they don't do anything. What matters to congress isn't that we build something it is that we use a lot of consultants and union jobs to build it - both those groups donate a lot to campaigns. (I call this corruption - you decide what you think). Note that congress doesn't care care what gets built in the end of it serves a useful purpose, just that we use a lot of consultants and union labor to build it. Blow up the costs by building a massive monument - this looks great at the ribbon cutting so congress loves it never mind that the costs mean we can't build very much.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-s-75-billion-i...
Then there's state regs with some states (like Ohio) already well along before the bill passed.
And you have to plan the network and manufacturers have to ramp up.
We can build it fine, eventually.
Dictatorships perform exceedingly well in executing top-down schemes.
In the lands of the free that is the US and most of the western world, we can pass laws and dangle bags of cash to entice society, but the executive can't do much beyond begging for everyone to please spend the cash before the legislature comes to ask questions.
Meanwhile over in the land of the dictators, if the dictator wants five bajillion chargers by tomorrow then bah gawd you will build five bajillion chargers by tomorrow because you won't exist tomorrow if you don't.
Building things is easier with cheaper labor, fewer environmental and safety concerns, and fewer property rights, all of which the US does not have anymore.
Autocracy certainly makes it easier to build some types of things like trains, but EV chargers do not require autocratic land appropriation. Hell it'd be pretty easy to sell stores and restaurants on allowing them in their parking lots because customers are likely to come inside and shop or grab a meal while the car is charging. This is why you can very often find chargers in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
If all hotels had as many charging spots as they did hotel rooms then no issue, but as soon as they don't then customers end up needing to spend a bunch of time at charging stations unnecessarily.
That might still be a problem if they're driving farther than half the range of the EVs, but it's extra troublesome if they can't even get a full charge overnight, or if they're picking the vehicles up not fully charged.
This is incredibly true. I travel a lot for work. Many (MANY!) of my colleagues don't want to deal with electric cars. They (Teslas) are too different, and charging them (non-Teslas) is an ordeal.
This was (and still is) amazing for me, as I can rent very nice EVs at low corporate rates, but there is no way this is good for Hertz or Avis.
> Hertz’s Teslas got into accidents four times more often than the company’s other vehicles
This is a wild, but very unsurprising, stat. Teslas are so, so, so different from regular cars. You have to _want_ to get plugged into this ecosystem. It's great for Turo (where you know what you're getting into) but horrible for the salesperson who has a meeting in two hours and needs a car RIGHT NOW.
I drive a Model 3 and it took some getting used to, but that as my car. But recently I had to drive a friend's Model X (to take him to the doctor twice), and I felt so lost EVEN coming from a Model 3.
The first hour of driving feels so distracting cuz you're just trying to figure things out. I can imagine it being doubly frustrated in a work/sales meeting situation. You're already stressed about your meeting, without having to also worry about how to drive this TOTALLY DIFFERENT car.
So there are various functions that are on the X's main display (but not on the side display). I was used to keep checking my speed and all that on the 3 on the center display, but instead had to keep checking in the main one.
Same with nav showing the next turn with your perspective. In the X it shows in the main cluster, but not in the MASSIVE map on the huge display. So I initially kept feeling unnerved not knowing when to turn.
The 3 uses one stalk on the right hand side of the steering wheel to handle autopilot, Park, Reverse, everything.
The X has another stalk for autopilot and cruise control and it's hidden behind the steering wheel. (my friend had to show me) so it's not obvious.
The doors on the X open up differently, and by themselves. That's just weird. I don't like that the door auto-opens when I walk up to the car.
It's a thousand papercuts. But that's for me as a Tesla driver where I already understand 95% of the concepts (even if I can't find the Autopilot stalk for example).
I can't imagine how complicated it is for a first-timer who isn't playing with it in their garage for a couple hours.
Wonderful car, I love it. I quickly adapted to one-pedal mode where instead of using brakes the car's motors become generators that recharge the battery when slowing to a stop. The quiet ride and instant throttle response beat gasoline cars by a mile, I'll never go back. GM engineers did a wonderful job with the ergonomics, it has just the right mix of traditional buttons for AC/heat and radio, speedometer cluster, and a large easy-to-use and responsive touch screen. The only drawback is it is slow to recharge (about 9 hours), making long trips impractical. For us it's a great second car for local and regional use.
It's like they're paying you not to charge it.
And presumably it's just pure gouge often because people will overfill.
How do you unlock it? Turn it on? Put it in reverse? Use the turn signal? Open the door from inside? Etc. All need to be learned; all unlike other cars.
Others I agree with.
As the population ages, maybe the current "Tesla norms" will become "car norms" and this will be a moot point.
Agreed on the other points though, EVs are very different to what ICE drivers are used to.
They should have treated these like any other car in the same class and done a market price fee for the battery.
Incidentally, in that same trip I took public transit most everywhere until the last day when I needed more mobility.
They also mention at the beginning of the article the numerous failed CEOs and attempts to turn around the company over the last 20 years.
All I need to know about Hertz is that their quality or prices are so bad that costcotravel.com does not list them.
Costcotravel.com is the way we do it now, too.
Ok, let's say they have been through this cycle annually. That would make it about 1/31,536,000 Hertz?
That being said, I would never rent or drive for more than an in town errand, any other brand of electric vehicle that doesn't allow the use of Tesla's superchargers and it is obvious why that would be a completely egregious breach of customer service to rent such a car to an unsuspecting customer.
I am not looking forward to going back to Yaris.
Honestly, its not that much worse than my prius with the goofy shifter. Knowing what to do with the keycard was confusing until the screen lit up to show me
There was no real reason electric cars had to be more expensive than gas cars, other than market positioning. Tesla does not get to have Apple-sized margins, just car-company-sized margins. Once reality set in, electric car prices started to come down. That Hertz's finance-type CEO didn't see this coming is his fault.
The other big problems seem to be that "Hertz’s Teslas got into accidents four times more often than the company’s other vehicles", and getting Teslas fixed takes far too long and costs too much. Maybe Hertz should have had a software change installed to limit acceleration at slow speeds, or at least a more conservative pedal effort curve.
Most charging networks require a specific app, that often can only be downloaded in that country's App Store. If you do manage to download the app for a network, signing up can fail because it requires a local address or phone number. Eventually, you'll find a network that does allow foreigners to sign up, but realize that their closest charger is slower and 10 miles away. Often the chargers will show up as available in the app, but actually not be functional and there is no-one at the site to help, even if it's a gas station. They'll just roll their eyes and say it's not their charger. Call the network.
At least gas you can buy with cold hard cash or by simply swiping your credit card at a gas station. No need to input your pronouns into an app.
A good example how society sometimes regresses on some fronts.
But it all changed when typical greed came to play and they started requiring a full charge on return which is frankly impossible. Rentals stopped having the adapter either from the facility not putting it in the car or simple theft.
The other problem is app access. They really needed to work out a deal with Tesla to make it easier to grant temp access.
The technology is unusable. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out simple tasks like how to lock the doors, open the trunk, or use the windshield wipers. The cars don't support Carplay, so I had to figure out how to log into some app on a touch screen. Eventually, after much frustration, I could get bluetooth to work so it could function like a car head unit from 2007.
Then the charging experience.
I was in Tucson, a metro area with a population of over a million people. There were two Tesla chargers TOTAL. What they don't tell you is those chargers don't support full charging speed when they are congested, so prepare for hour-long charging sessions. Which makes sense because the laws of physics, they don't have a nuclear power plant on standby to charge dozens of cars at 200KW.
The driving experience, was huge regression. I used to own a Bolt EV so that's my reference point for "cheap, utilitarian EV". I expected Tesla would be some kind of luxury vehicle. Wrong. These cars have the suspension of a base model mid-90s corolla, and the road noise too. The Model 3 was the loudest car I've ever driven, louder than modern pickup trucks.
Of course they failed. Anyone who has ever rented one of these things would pick up on it pretty fast.
Coming from a place of genuine curiosity, why would you prefer CarPlay over logging in on "some app"?
I currently have two cars with CarPlay and a Tesla and I _personally_ find the Tesla infotainment system works better than CarPlay (probably because of the integration).
On the other hand, I can imagine on a rental car it'd be easier to just plug your phone in via USB and have all your apps & whatever on your phone ready to go. I guess CarPlay is better if you switch cars a lot and (potentially?) the Tesla system is better if you have the same car all/most of the time?
For a counter anecdote - my tesla went in for some minor service the other day and they gave me a loaner, the loaner worked exactly like my personal car, logged into all my apps and whatever, seat, mirror temperature, drive mode etc all synchronized. I wonder if more people owned Teslas as their personal vehicles switching to another Tesla would feel more normal?
We love electric cars.
For convenience we only rent gas powered cars.
They let me cut in front of them to charge it up but I can see why they ditched the concept, lot of labor in charging vs gas fill ups if that’s what they’re doing.
Scherr is a lawyer [1].
If I needed a longer trip or more travel I wouldn't have done it, but it was perfect for this.
On an earlier occasion, I wanted to try out a Tesla Model X and so I rented one through Getaround/Turo (I forget which) and honestly I disliked spending all this time at the charging station. It's possibly user error but the charge rates at the supercharger were inconsistent and I had to spend 30 minutes there. So for occasional use where I need to charge, I wouldn't do it because I clearly don't know how to charge these well. For occasional use where I don't need to charge, it's great.
I was extra careful because I heard stories. I took pictures of the car from all sides and notified the Hertz employee about super minor scratches that I found just in case. I drove it very carefully through my stay in Switzerland and returned it to the airport.
Unfortunately it did not occur to me to take pictures of the interior of the car.
They charged me 800 euros for missing rear trunk cover. I am 100% sure that I did not take that piece off, I simply failed to notice it was missing (I was not familiar with the brand of car they gave me, it was different than the one I requested) when took the car. They charged me 800 euros for that piece. The missing piece's price in Switzerland is around 100 euros. I offered to buy it and to organize a transport company to get it to them, to no avail. I felt scammed.
So I will be watching how this develops while relishing the schadenfreude.
I guess I've been lucky over the years. I've managed to avoid an actual accident but I've always gotten away with the odd scrape here and there. Never too bad but multiple things I could have been dinged for.
Doing it on the outside saved me last time from Enterprise claiming I damaged TWO tyres. Nope mfrs, here is the video evidence it was like that when I got it. Oh, and does that mean you sent my family out on tyres you deem illegal too?
After that, I received a letter for a missing cable in the car and I have been charged 950€. I told them they didn't mention that cable anywhere but they refused to cancel that fee.
Don't rent an EV, it doesn't worth the price.
You didn't mistype an extra zero on the end?
Long Tesla: If prices are falling, costs must be falling. Surely the $4500 USD Chinese EV represents close to the true long term minimum cost of producing one of these. Margins compared to ICE are going to be awesome and only get better.
Short Tesla: In 10 years, we'll look back at taxpayer funded lithium ion EV as policy failure, as well as an unmitigated environmental disaster from heavy metals mining and battery disposal, as well as a structure and vehicle insurance disaster due to adverse collision and fire risk. If the technology is so great, it should stand on its own merit, without the excessive subsidies. Failure of FSD isn't helping.
As for Hertz, sucks to suck. Not much silver lining for the company. Sounds like they need to die and get replaced by manufacturers going direct with rentals.
The company bought a mixture of Teslas and misc. other EVs. In addition, they ignored installing any charging infrastructure at their smaller locations. The EV can't be rented below 80%, and the operator does not have the ability to charge the EV onsite. This takes the EV out of the fleet until either the company sends a driver to pick up the EV or the local operator takes the car somewhere to charge it. The location that I am very familiar with just let most returned EVs just sat unused.
At one point this local operator had 10 EVs waiting to be charged. Eventually the company sent a driver to pick most of them up.
This isn't the only problem with rental EVs, but the lack of forethought in deployment cost this rental company a fortune.
There are a lot of questions that the general populace simply doesn’t know the answers to. It’s really easy for me to believe what was said about range anxiety as a serious contributing factor to the programs lackluster performance. It wouldn’t have undone the damage the extra depreciation cost, but commercial/popular success would’ve come with rewards.
Price. The combination of the covid supply chain dislocation and resulting car inflation, combined with mainstream early adopter enthusiasm fooled EV makers into thinking they don't have to be super tight on price just like every other car in what has always been a super competitive market. EVs are superior to ICE cars in almost every way including cost to build, but you'd never know it. EV makers need to wake up quickly before the Chinese eat their lunch and dinner. Without a strong EV product now in 10 years time you'll be out of business.
Mis-features. After Apple introduced the iPhone everyone fell in line behind their design. But Apple largely got it right. Unfortunately car makers have done the same with Tesla but to their great detriment. Tesla's design swings wildly from being user hostile (no physical controls) to techno-wank (features that mostly serve as gimmicks or just Musk's whims). Now otherwise sensible car makers are putting huge screens in cars and shoe-horning everything they can into them. Tesla thinks that colored lights around the cabin are a more important feature than a stalk for indicators or wipers, or even engaging the drive train, just swipe on the screen instead! But if that doesn't work, you've got physical controls... on the ceiling. They built a truck with no rear visibility most of the time, so use the screen way down below the rear vision mirror. Perfectly natural! Your average buyer wants their EV to be familiar to their ICE car. They don't want "the future" they just want a good car they like.
After Sales. Some car makers seem to think that once they've got your money they're done. Tesla is the worst with their parts stinginess and remote disabling of features and lack of service and warranty support. More generally making cars repairable, be it due to panel design or parts availability is really important to the consumer and has a huge impact on costs, be it maintenance, repairs or insurance. Even price stability is very important since the used car market is key for all participants. This is the day to day reality for buyers and owners of cars that EV makers can't just pretend doesn't exist. You're not selling exotics to millionaires you're selling workhorses to ordinary people.
That will probably change in the future, but it feels like it's too soon for EVs to be the default rental option when they aren't the default purchase or lease option.
But it doesn't help that Tesla is a tech company and their product is sold as a tech product. No one wants to buy a 3 year old used iPhone, either.
You'd just get an option: among the 20 different vehicle types listed, one would be an EV. I'd look at it and think "yeah that might be interesting", but as a non-EV-owner I have quite a few questions. Do I need to bring it back charged? Do they have an agreement with charger-folks to use their charger? Am I going to be gouged on electricity the same way they gouge me on bridge tolls? Can I even drive an EV? (I guess -- probably, but who knows?). I therefore conclude that the EV option is only for someone who already drives an EV, and has rented one before.
It had the feel of some bean counter or senior executive decided on a whim to stick a bunch of EVs into the fleet, but no person with a brain at Hertz had done anything whatsoever beyond parking them and adding some records to a database table.
They could have had content on the web site "click here to learn more about the EV rental experience". They could have had an "EV concierge" experience where someone walks you to the vehicle and answers questions. A dedicated 1-800 number to call if you need a charger. They could have sent out offer emails in advance "we'd love you to try an EV on your next rental, here's a discount and some FAQ answers and we'll make it really easy". Nope, none of that.
With electric cars, is the expectation I charge my car 30 minutes while trying to make a flight? It just doesn’t work. Hertz didn’t try and make their policies work with Teslas.
> ... the members-only Manhattan social club frequented by Kim Kardashian and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, were greeted with flutes of Champagne. Offerings of sliced raw tuna on crispy rice and roasted maitake mushrooms awaited them as heads turned to admire an Andy Warhol and a Keith Haring, while New Order throbbed in the background.
These "gasp, look at the fancy menus!" intros always serve the same purpose, which is to caricaturize the people involved as "out of touch rich guys".
There is plenty in what happened here to simply highlight the mistakes these people made. Plus, as other commenters have mentioned, the bigger issue which the article doesn't quite grasp is depreciation. I tend to immediately discount stories that start with "look at these fancy things rich people do" because it almost always indicates the article author is trying to get the facts to fit their predetermined narrative.
"One former colleague said he had off-the-charts “EQ and IQ.”
"Scherr didn’t want to give up his New York existence and move to Florida, where Hertz was based, and the board agreed that was fine"
About West:
"In December, GM dismissed him along with eight other executives in the struggling unit"
About O'Hara:
"The warnings Wagner and O’Hara had brushed off were proving all too prescient."
"Meanwhile, little of the $150 million in profit O’Hara forecast from rentals through Amex GBT had materialized, and O’Hara himself had moved to Italy"
What a joke these men are.
Mark Cuban often says on Shark Tank that every billionaire is just incredibly lucky and that luck doesn't translate to knowledge in another field. Yet year after year people give these "smart" men (mostly investment bankers) the reins of failing companies that fail even harder under their watch and they just golden parachute their way to another grift.
And the two "successes"? No numbers of course, just vague statements like this:
"Uber drivers have put more than 1 billion miles on EVs rented from Hertz. Carvana has helped the company recover more value from used vehicles."