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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting that a bunch of finacial careeerists decided to jump on EVs without thinking - "Hey, we are going to need chargers as convenient as gas stations, or else people wont use them!".

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.

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They didn't even install chargers at their own parking lots. The end result is getting an EV from them would easily mean getting a flat battery if the previous driver didn't charge it or the car was in the lot for a while.

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.

I got a plug-in hybrid from Hertz a month ago. Delivered with a full tank of gas an a 100% empty battery...

Good thing I noticed it and charged it with my own charger before going for a trip.

I'm a bit confused, isn't the point of a PHEV that the battery charge is optional?

Optional, but a full charge saves around $10 of gas depending on the PHEV.

How much does a full charge of electricity cost in order to save $10 of gas?

My Volvo XC60 costs about £1.50 to fully charge(at home) and easily saves ~£6 in fuel cost for the amount of miles you can cover. I drive daily and fill up every 2-3k miles on average, it's a massive saving over a regular car(for me anyway).

But even if it didn't save us any money, it's still worth charging as driving in EV mode is just such a luxurious experience, it's completely quiet inside and that's what elevates the whole experience. If you don't care about it, why buy/rent an PHEV in the first place lol.

PHEVs tend to have 10-20 kWh batteries.

That is impossible to say in a general way but generally speaking: significantly less.

On our PHEV minivan, the electric range is ~30mi, and costs ~$1.50 in electricity (12 kWh usable, ~13c/kWh). On gas, it's ~$3. (30 mi/g, $3/g). Some places you'll save substantially more (cheaper electricity, more expensive gas) or less (vice versa).

Spotted the Pacifica driver ;-)

And yeah the calculation varies, here in Québec it's about $1.20 CAD to charge it at home(10¢/kWh), and about twice that to charge it at a public L2 charger (1$/hour). I save about 4 liters of fuel with that. Fuel right now is ~1.60 so I end up saving around $5 everytime I charge.

Adds up pretty quick, and the vehicle is actually cheaper to purchase initially because of the government subsidies. Makes me wonder every time I see a gas Pacifica...

Sounds like you'd have to do 7 full PHEV battery cycles to save the upthread $10. (I'm pretty sure your math is correct and upthread claim is...optimistic.)

Gas costs about 2€/litre here. So if we go by that, you'll get 5 litres for 10€. That'll take the average gasoline powered family car around 100km.

The current price for electricity is 0,07€/kWh. My car uses 15kWh per 100km on average, which costs me 1,05€.

That's 90% cheaper and as such a complete no-brainer on which to choose.

Same goes for PHEVs, driving on electric is just so much cheaper it's not even funny.

When your electricity costs 0,07€/kWh, I can see it being cheaper.

Mine is currently around ~0.45€/kWh which takes the shine off it quite a bit, and makes gas a much more appealing option.

pure greed

Comparing to the following, chargers might not be the biggest issue...

> 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.

I got a "free upgrade" from Enterprise to an EV with 20% remaining battery. I took it because I knew I had L2 spots at my hotel and wasn't driving much anyway.

So it's not just Hertz.

Doings this would deny the reality of the car rental customer. People don't rent cars to commute between their house and work, or to run errands around town. They are travelers. Either they are renting the vehicle to get from A to B during a vacation or such, or they are from out of town and need the vehicle to travel between the airport to the hotel/relative's house where they are staying. Neither of those groups will have ready access to chargers, nor do they want to drive all the way back to Hertz to charge the car.

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 think you’re overestimating what most car rentals are used for. Often it someone that just got into an accident and needs a car while the body shop fixes the issue or they shop for a new car. As such it is driving to work or doing errands is common and an EV owner may simply prefer an EV.

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.

Maybe I just have a warped view of the market. I use rental cars about a dozen times a year. Inevitably, I am picking up the car at the airport, at midnight, and then driving 100 miles to the place I need to be. In a few weeks I am going with a team to the UK. They have us landing at Heathrow, picking up five rental cars, and then driving three hours north. (That was deemed cheaper than a more direct flight.) There is absolutely no way I would accept EVs for this trip as I have zero confidence that we would have access to chargers. We normally end up fighting just to get our cellphones working properly. Paying for parking with an out-of-country credit card is bad enough. I don't want to attempt getting a charging station working after midnight, in the rain, after already spending a dozen hours on planes.

Teslas don’t have issues with superchargers, they’re billed straight to Hertz and reflected on your final bill. They’re everywhere.

>> They’re everywhere.

Lol. Maybe in the UK or California. Google maps tells me the nearest Tesla charger to my apartment is 114 miles away, as the crow flies.

You only need high speed charging on a long trip at which point having one by your house is useless.

Pick somewhere 1000 miles away then see how long going several super chargers adds to the trip. They are along interstates, that’s ‘everywhere’ in the US when you actually need one.

> Then driving 100 miles to the place I need to be.

Driving 100 miles in an EV isn’t even close to needing a recharge. The UK is covered in chargers and 3 hours is again fine on a single charge for any decent EV. So what exactly is your concern here?

Three hours and the cars will be nearly dead. And the hotel will not have a charger, not for all of us. So we are going to be up all night at commercial chargers, reducing our sleep time before our first meetings from a few hours to zero. And that is if we can find working commercial chargers. The UK is notorious for needing various apps for parking/charging. The headaches are just not worth our time. Maybe if we were on vacation, but this os work.

UK national speed limit is 70, 75 MPH * 3h is only 220 miles so hardly nearly dead.

Not having a full charge or renting something with an anemic range might be an issue if the rental place isn’t handing you a fully charged long range car that’s on them not the technology.

This was almost exactly my last UK rental car experience - something like 4 hours north (380 miles). For some reason I booked an electric car first, and then saw sense and changed my mind.

People claim that the UK is covered in chargers - but all the big ones seemed to be at least about 20 mins off of the motorway, then waiting to charge, then driving back to the motorway (burning up the charge to get there and back). On my holiday too, there's a long list of things I'd rather be doing.

I was there last week too (not driving) and I saw so many 'chargers' in public car parks that were just either covered up or needed some specific app to work - no way to use a credit card.

The whole thing is improving and if you had a house in which you could fit a proper charger then owning an electric car wouldn't be too bad, but actually renting one and driving it on a long trip - no way. It's not specifically the UK either, I'd say the same for most places I've been in and had a need to rent a car.

Surely cars are rented far, far more often for travel reasons than car repair reasons.

I think I've only ever rented a car for car repair [mechanical or body] reasons once, at that was a mechanical breakdown while I was about 350 miles from home, so I had to leave it at a shop and rent a car to continue the trip. Meanwhile, I've rented cars almost once a month for business or personal travel reasons.

There’s 6.1 million police reported vehicle accidents in the US each year with most involving more than 1 vehicles. Average to say 1 car for 1.5 weeks for 6 million accidents which then cluster around snowstorms etc and you easily need 200,000+ rental cars just for that purpose.

But let’s take your use case, how many of those involved driving more than 300 miles per day? Or even total?

US passenger embarkations are around 800 million per year. For business travelers, that's likely a car rental per 4 flights maximum (most of mine are one rental per two flights). For leisure travel, it might be one per 10 flights (families probably rent only one car and might be more willing to take connecting flights to save money). I think these are orders of magnitude more common in use case than car repair related rentals.

> But let’s take your use case, how many of those involved driving more than 300 miles per day? Or even total?

Less than 10% of them. We would sometimes fly into one city and drive around a country or into Fort Lauderdale, rent a car, drive to Key West, and make our way back over the following week. But even if I don't drive more than an EV's range, I would still need to be certain that the EV left Hertz fully charged and that Hertz was OK with me bringing it back empty. The former sure doesn't seem to be happening based on discussions in this page and if they allow the latter, the former becomes harder to ensure.

(I daily drive an EV, have for almost a decade, and love it. Even I don't want to rent an EV when I travel.)

Hertz completely fucked up renting an EV. There’s zero question about that, but pick one up at 80+% bring it back at 5% should definitely be the plan to pull it off successfully. If you can’t guarantee the car is mostly charged I’m not going to rent an EV.

> per 4 flights

> it might be one per 10 flights.

Both of those seem like massive overestimates to me. I’ve flown for business and pleasure and never rented a car after flying. My sister probably does 100 flights a year and rents a car once or twice when traveling with her husband. I know plenty of people who’ve completely given up on renting a car on vacation.

Uber or public transit is just far less of a hassle, and when visiting family why have a car? Run the numbers for 1.5 hour long Uber ride vs 4 day car rental and you might as well just relax.

Further most travelers aren’t going to rent for as long. Few business travelers are going to use a car for a full week but repairs or finding a new car takes a while.

PS: In support of my point compare the relatively tiny space for rentals at airports with the vast number of people parking their cars, going through loading or unloading from public transport, cabs, or people picking them up / dropping them off.

In your model there should be what 1/2 the people at an airport taking a rental at their destination and the other half being at home. When instead it’s closer to 1/50th, which granted is still lots of people just far less.

> I think you’re overestimating what most car rentals are used for.

The fact that most large international airports, worldwide, have absolutely huge car rental operations on site, along with partnerships with airlines, hotels and such, to me suggests something different.

The vast major of rental locations are far from airports and there’s vastly more people leaving using public transportation/Uber/someone picking them up at every airport I’ve been to.

So sure many people use rentals at airports, but the overall business model looks very different.

When I rent a car, it's rare that I use more than a tank of gas or full charge. The only time I need to refuel is when I'm returning it to the rental company.

It’s not as practical for the rental company to deal with the car as a gas one though

Travelers are in a particularly poor position for charging. You're on a schedule, you don't have the accounts, you don't know where things are, you don't know how the car works, etc. But your latter group is a fine match for an EV. I'm not going to do 300 miles driving from the airport to the convention hotel and back. As long as you don't have to charge it before you bring it back, there's no problem.

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.

They also should have made deals with hotels. When I travel for business, I’m not going to allow for delays for finding and waiting for charging stations. They should have made a deal with Hampton Inn. Hertz kept trying to push EVs on me and I kept asking where I would charge them and the clerks had no idea.

>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.

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.

A 3 hour charge is pretty far out of the norm in the modern world. Most EVs will go from 20-80% in 20 minutes or so if you're at a reasonably modern fast charger.

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.

The problem is these companies ask you to return the car at at least 70%. Or levy a 20-30 dollar charging fee. So that only leaves say 10% of margin between the optimal charging level (80%) and the minimum level at return. I won't want to take the risk of being charged a charging fee and so will instead try to over-charge.

I am ok if they charge reasonable rates (like say $2 per 10% of battery) for the recharge. But that's not what they do.

>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.

If that was the core issue, that's solvable. They didn't fail because of that either.

> They failed because of the basic economics of EV rentals: maintenance costs and depreciation

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.

They did think about it and that was their plan? It would be helpful not to strawman arguments that can be directly refute by reading the article.

It didn't work out because of real world execution is harder than just saying that they are going to do it.

> Hertz could have become the EV rental company if they turned every rental office they have in the US to a fast charging center

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.

In the real world, commercial fleets (lease cars, uber drivers, delivery vans, buses, and increasingly trucks, etc.) are electrifying very rapidly. Reason: the economics have proven to be better. That debate was over years ago and it was very brief. Most car leasing companies are pretty much done switching to EVs at this point. TCO is way better for them. The market is bottle-necked on production volume. There is no demand problem for EVs at the right price point. Of course there are some manufacturers unable to meet those price points. And there are lots of attractively priced products in the market now.

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.

The article says they tried to do exactly this but many of their largest locations (like Newark-Liberty International Airport) didn't have the infrastructure to accommodate that.

That said, many Hertz locations do have way more chargers than they did before starting this gambit.

I disagree. The problem with Hertz is I primarily interact when them after flying. They’re always at some terribly inconvenient lot near the airport that takes a long time to get too.

That is normal with most companies at most airports in my experience, (in major cities in the US). Phoenix was nice because it had a train from the terminal to the rental lots, but usually IME it's a shuttle bus .

I'm not sure the last time I flew into a US city of any size that you didn't have to take a bus or other transport to the rental car center.

No, because the first lesson in bankruptcy clearly didn't Darwinize any of them manage by numbers, 1-2-3 peeps...(easy as a,b,c - thank you Sting) ;-)

I wonder how much they paid Tom Brady to be their spokesperson. They decided to market their EVs by just having a celebrity act cool/funny. Not by, you know, telling the customer why it's a good value, or why to choose their vehicles/service, or any positive aspects of their business. No, their strategy was to just push out commercials where Tom Brady would do something stupid/funny like have a power cable plugged into him, to promote EVs. It's so baffling to me that that is the strategy of a multi-billion dollar corporation. It's also depressing to think that it probably does work on at least some portion of the population. But apparently not nearly enough.

I don't necessarily see a link to the advertising and the borkedness of this rollout.

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.

Do you know why there aren't any PHEVs with a more reasonable electric range? Something like a 100 mile range with backup gas tank would let my family do most of our driving on the electric battery while still being a usable car for roadtrips. But nothing like that seems to exist.

They ae improving, as battery tech improves. Some now boast almost 70 miles, whereas 35 miles was common a decade ago.

This is such a terrible take. In any market with Chicken or Egg problem, someone needs to move first. Sure, they could have been more conservative in their approach (easy to see in hindsight), but to say they jumped in "without thinking" is pure nonsense.

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