Hacker News Reader

Comment by skmexyz | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why you think charging is not the problem.

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)

View on HN

I own an EV, I wouldn't rent one except: single day, and don't make me recharge it. The infrastructure sucks. I don't install charger apps on my phone; the number of chargers that just take a credit card and don't require an account -- even my local power utility requires a special card to access their network!

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.

A thousand times this. Hertz dumped a Polestar on me on a 6 week trip in Britain and it was absolutely ridiculous. No cash option anywhere. Most charging stations didn't even accept a credit card, and those that did required installing a badly written app that only works 20% of the time. Most apps/chargers only link your bank account, and I'm a fucking tourist, I don't have a bank account. And to top it all off, absolutely no charger anywhere gives out receipts, so I couldn't present the receipts/invoices for tax purposes.

> Most apps/chargers only link your bank account

That's just not true of the UK market. Most fast chargers accept credit cards using a contactless reader - indeed, by law, they will soon all have to. Of the main charging networks app based payments:

Shell - charges to your credit card, BP Pulse - credit account topped by by credit card, PodPoint - credit account topped up by credit card, VendElectric - credit account topped up by credit card, Fuuse/evpoint - charges to your credit card, Mer - charges to your credit card, ChargePoint - credit account topped up by credit card

You probably know better than me, but in those 6 weeks I drove in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and I charged a lot, in many different stations. Many did not accept a credit card:

In Scotland, many chargers only accepted some specialty charging card that foreigners can't buy.

Many stations claimed they do accept credit cards, but when I got there, card payments were conveniently "disabled at this time".

Apps that did take credit card _all_ refused to work with non-British billing addresses. The only app I got to work was ChargePoint, and I only succeeded in that after many trails and errors, looking for ways to trick it into thinking I was British and getting it to successfully charge my card (which eventually I did). And they do not charge your card per session, they randomly bill your card based on usage predictions. They still haven't returned me the 75 pounds they stole from me on the last day of my rental, because they figured I was surely going to need them soon.

And again, no receipts anywhere.

All in all, it was an awful experience.

EDIT: I only now notice that I wrote _most_ stations only link with your credit card. That's most probably an exaggeration, I suppose that was just the impression I ended with. All in all, I wasted exorbitant amounts of time on that trip purely on charging. Quite a few stations also failed on me, now that I'm ranting. In Northern Ireland, chargers often could not be used because there was no cell reception so I couldn't use the app, and cards were not accepted. One charger abruptly terminated my session mid-charge and made a scary noise and refused to work again. Turns out the charger stopped because _it itself_ lost Internet connection.

Ah, Scotland is a whole different country... :) Charging networks in the UK evolved from a set of regional schemes commissioned by the Government under the Plugged-In-Places programme. At that time, it couldn't be assumed that drivers had smartphones and contactless payment was still fairly new, so RFID cards were the exclusive route for accessing chargers. Many of these networks then folded into commercial providers in time, such as Source East being taken over by BP Pulse. During the programme you'd pay £10 for the card for the year, then all charging was free.

Charge Place Scotland continued to be run by the Scottish Government.

> non-British billing addresses

I can feel your pain there.

>And they do not charge your card per session, they randomly bill your card based on usage predictions.

ChargePoint has an auto-topup mechanism when your balance drops below a defined amount. The trick is to set the top up amount to be small.

> And again, no receipts anywhere.

In the app go to "Account" then "Monthly Statement". Select the month you care about, then share it using your email client. A PDF will be attached.

> All in all, it was an awful experience.

The big issue we've had has been with broken chargers and, at least in the past, a proliferation of charge networks. There's more roaming coming now, partly mandated by law, but the reliability issue still remains.

And yes, renting an EV in a market you're not familiar with is a pain. I've had that landed on me when visiting the USA, too.

> I only now notice that I wrote _most_ stations only link with your credit card.

Right - that's what I was disagreeing with.

I take it you don't have a tesla? I've had a non-tesla EV and the infrastructure did suck.

The infrastructure for a tesla is significantly better, and you don't have to install an app - everything is right there built into the car. It will add charging stops as part of navigation if you want. The superchargers are plentiful, have lots of stalls (rarely full) and are very fast. There is no fumbling with apps, credit cards or payment authorization, you just plug in.

Thanks, but I've read their ad copy before.

With a Tesla you don't install apps or use a credit card. You just plug into their Superchargers (which are automatically added to your route if the car needs to charge to get to your destination). In the US, the largest gap between superchargers is Coeur d'Alene, Idaho to St. Regis, Montana (94 miles). I've gone on road trips all over the western US and never worried about charging.

1. You're talking about Tesla ownership, not rental.

2. You still need a very specific payment source, even if it's not physically on you at the time of purchase. If you're a foreigner, this may be literally impossible for you. Many places only work by linking with your local bank account. Tourists do not have local bank accounts.

Hertz just adds the charging costs to your rental bill. You don't set up any sort of payment in the car. The experience is the same as owning a Tesla.

I see, as far as I know that is not possible with Tesla rental in the UK (where my experience was). This is nice, but does it work with non-Superchargers? I wouldn't want to be tied down to one provider on vacation. Superchargers are rare in some countries.

The article is about Hertz renting out Teslas in the US. That's what I was talking about, and that's what I thought you were talking about because you didn't mention that your experience was based on renting a different brand of EV in a different country.

Teslas work fine with 3rd party chargers. It's just that (as you noticed with your Polestar rental) 3rd party chargers are inconvenient and tend to be poorly maintained.

That's cool, but I'm not a tesla owner and I don't live in your country. When speaking of an international rental firm, I hope you understand that I'm going to base my expectations on past experiences, and not the best-case story of a tesla owner in a country I actively avoid traveling to.

The experience of renting a Tesla from Hertz is the same across countries. You can use Superchargers just like if you owned the vehicle. Hertz adds the charging costs to your bill. And looking at Tesla's charging map, the density of chargers in Europe is greater than in the western US. When I drove to Salt Lake City (800 miles), there were 14 Superchargers along the route. A similar trip in the EU or UK would have twice as many.

Basing your expectations on past experiences makes sense, but it also makes sense to update those expectations based on the reports of people who have been there and done that, so to speak.

Between the site guidelines and Tesla's (in)famous lack of PR, I am compelled to assume that you are not a shill.

But it always astounds me how reliably Tesla owners attempt to convince me that water isn't wet. It really feels like you're trying to sell me on renting a Tesla from Hertz. But Hertz has written down their Teslas and they're replacing them with ICE vehicles. So why are you trying to convince me that renting a Tesla from Hertz is a good experience, when I can't even do that today? If it's such a good experience, what is this article about? What do you know that the finance wonks at Hertz don't know?

Sell to me. Why do I want to rent a car that's renowned for its big-screen touch interface, drunk&stoned UX decisions like the yoke, hitting parked emergency vehicles, and uploading livefeeds from the cabin for Tesla employees' amusement? What's the actual valprop over a Yaris, which has never tried to steer me into oncoming traffic? (message between the lines: attempt to entice me with FSD, or autopilot, and you will only undermine your case)

Because right now you're trying to move me from "charging a rental in a foreign country isn't stress I need in my life" to "this guy on the internet thinks that charging a Tesla is almost as easy as gassing up a Yaris." And that's still a million miles from sold.

First, you said that EVs don’t have enough charging infrastructure for road trips, and you complained about charging apps, so I explained how that wasn’t a problem with Teslas (which is what this article is about). Then you said that it was different for rented Teslas in other countries, so I explained how that wasn't the case. Now you claim I’m trying to get you to use a Tesla. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ve never driven a Jeep. I don’t particularly care for Jeeps. But if someone says to me that they own a Jeep and it can do X, I’ll give that some credence. Sure they may be a Jeep fan, but they also have lots of experience with Jeeps. I definitely wouldn’t say, “That's cool, but I'm not a Jeep owner and I don't live in your country. I hope you understand that I'm going to base my expectations on past experiences, and not the best-case story of a Jeep owner in a country I actively avoid traveling to.” That would be rude and unproductive.

If the Jeep owner ignored the insult and said, “Actually Jeeps in other countries are quite similar and can also do X.”, I definitely would not reply by talking about how Jeep fans always try to convince me that Jeeps are great, yet they refuse to acknowledge Jeep’s poor reliability, lack of curtain airbags, rollover propensity, etcetera. To a neutral reader, that might come off like someone who is incapable of changing their mind.

Road trips?? The article is about rentals! I didn't say a thing about road trips. Glad we cleared that up.

Still have to wait in a queue though

> "The infrastructure sucks."

This depends a lot on where you are. I rented >10 times from Hertz in the UK last year, got an EV every time (mostly Polestar), and drove thousands of miles. Chargers are, now days, pretty much everywhere that you need them to be. Absolutely no issues charging, aside from the extortionate cost of a few of them, perhaps!

UK law requires that all new chargers support "ad-hoc" payment with a credit/debit card, which makes everything very easy and convenient (although often you can get a discounted rate by using membership-based apps).

I'm trying to imagine having to have an account or install an app to gas up my Pontiac and I'm like ... gulp I better take really good care of this car.

On top of this, most times when I am renting, is via an airport. Airports are everywhere, but not everywhere. They're 1-6 hours from whereever you're going. And if your destination is say 4 hours from the airport, necessarily one is going to be worrying about charging as such. That alone slaughters the business model.

Easy solution for Hertz: don’t require it to be changed upon return. Where I live a full 100% charge from zero at residential prices is $8. It’d also improve the customer experience I bet, especially over gas cars where you either need to refuel or get nickel and dimed on yet another thing

From Hertz perspective, that car is now out of commission for half a day. Car rental companies rely on getting cars back on the road as quickly as possible once a rental period ends. A fleet that is parked, charging or waiting to be charged, is actively costing them money.

I’m pretty sure that if they’re using even remotely fast chargers, cleaning and inspection (and associated queuing) would take most of that time. I also suspect that most rental places aren’t so close to capacity that someone returning a car a few hours late would block a customer from pickup. There’s a certain amount of slack in the inventory.

I rented from an airport car rental once and the lot was _full_ of unused cars, and this was RDU which is a fairly high-volume airport. I can imagine you’d maybe have issues if you wanted a very specific kind of car, but even then I doubt you couldn’t find something comparable for around the same price

It's going to get charged to 80% only. That takes half an hour if they install DC fast chargers. That's how long a walk around inspection for damage and cleaning of the car inside/out takes.

That costs money of course. Let's pretend we're NOT on hackernews where we all love to talk technicalities.

This isn't about tech or practicalities. This is a decision about money. It's not worth installing all the infrastructure, it's not worth getting repairs slowly done out-of-house, it's not worth taking on depreciation of epic proportions, it's not worth having to educate customers and employees on how to use new cars and new processes.

It is just not cost effective for them.

What “half a day”? With proper infra it takes less than a couple of hours to charge even when charging 2 cars per charger.

2 hours is still a lot longer than 5 minutes. Rapid turnover is important for these folks. I've seen rental companies run out of cars numerous times. Two hours is tough. Plus, how about when dozens of cars have been turned in and are waiting on a charge? If anything, they are most likely to levy a higher fee for returning uncharged because of their lost time.

The article pointed out that some airports don’t have the electrical infrastructure to support enough super chargers. It’s partly a charging problem

No one said "supercharger."

If I can get a Level 2 charger installed at my house, surely it can be installed at at car rental business?

No way my house has better electrical infrastructure than an airport.

you still have to clean and process ready for next customer. adding 2 hours to other work may make it half a day

You can't clean the car while it's plugged in?

It would seem ideal to have the line-up area where cars are turned in, inspected and cleaned set up with a bunch of retractable charger leads in the ceiling, ala shop air. As soon as you pull up, the attendant pulls down a lead and plugs the car in. Bam.

Out of commission? Is this some kind of joke? You know you can just charge money for the services that you are offering, right?

It seems like the same economics of tweaking the size of the fee for returning a rental Tesla uncharged, which is a flat $35 fee ($25 for Hertz Gold Club members) [0] vs the much higher rental cost ~$60-200/day [1], then most customers will skip recharging and pay the fee; just like returning an ICE car without refuelling (or comparable to returning it 1-2hrs later than the agreed time). Then it's Hertz's business model's challenge to figure out how to incentivize/penalize their customers. (If you return it at 79% do you still pay the same fee as if 10%? This is harsher than the unfuelled ICE penalty).

If Hertz has a "morning/evening rush hour gap" between when uncharged EVs are returned vs when they're charged and cleaned and available again, then (just like surge pricing, or same-day standby offers that airlines make when oversold) maybe send individual customers $$ incentives the evening before to charge it or return it earlier.

And as for improving first-time customer experience of renting EVs, Hertz has an incentive to do better with steering them towards reserving a hotel/motel with L1/L2 chargers (give them a coupon for the price premium), or at least nearby ones. At least on their last night before returning. Or help them plan out which nights it'll need recharge, based on their itinerary, then factor that advice into suggested hotel booking.

And another idea: the Hertz app could set reminders the day before for "If you want to return your car at 8am charged, and you estimate the return trip will take 45min and 8% of battery, then you need to charge overnight, or else start charging by (say) 5am, to 88%".

I don't see any of this as a limitation of EVs, just figuring out how to incentivize behavior modification in rental customers, improve the app, teach customers how to plan for it, give coupons, do hotel partnerships etc. If the Hertz app won't, then a calendaring or driving-directions app could.

[0]: https://www.hertz.com/us/en/vehicles/tesla/faq/your-first-dr...

[1]: https://www.way.com/blog/how-much-to-rent-a-tesla/

> "Not sure why you think charging is not the problem... Most users don't have the time to think about places to charge and even more so, to bring it back at 80%"

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.)

I'm curious, what's the point of renting 300 cars in a year? Why not just buy a car? That's close to renting a car daily, no? Unless you're flying to different places and renting cars there every day?

it was mostly for work (I was home for less than 1 month including weekends) & some vacations (~15-20 rentals for vacations). My car was also stolen and wreaked and due to the auto shortage, it took insurance 3 months to get me a new car (meaning, 3 months of rentals - each for 1 week term).

Never rented a Tesla through Hertz, but I did rent one through Turo once. The owner did stipulate that I return the car fully charged. However, he pointed out hotels in the area that offered charging. So, I just charged the night before I returned the car; couldn't have been easier. Not sure if Hertz has/had coordination with hotels that offer EV charging, but that would help in a lot of cases.

Since they can just install chargers at the rental location, you would think they wouldn't need to make renters worry about that like gas.

Yes, I think this was the primary reason actually. It only takes 1-2 times renting it before you realize that returning at 80% is a major hassle.

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.

I rented a model 3 twice. One time I brought it back charged. The other time I dropped it off uncharged. I think it was $25? I didn't think it was that big a deal, doing the same with a gas car would have been 3-4x the price.

>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).

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.

What in the world do you do? 300 rentals a year and you are range limited on those trips? Genuinely interested just can't even imagine your life!

I used to essentially be a consultant (left that life behind this year). My title was Junior Partner / Assoc Director.

I'd on one hand advice executives (public, private & gov) on strategy (usually focused on tech but also growth, finance etc.) and work with on-the-ground staff to figure out what was going on & implement changes (meaning tons of travel between my home base - Toronto, to on-site - all over US / CA, to engagement HQs - usually NYC / Washington / Chicago / Seattle / Nashville etc.)

I also took tons of (very-short) vacations in-between because I used to get super burnt-out (eg. my last day was Dec 31, and I ended up working at a client from Dec 5th to Jan 1st and flew back on the 1st to start my new job on the 2nd) and I love driving so I'd rent cars and drive all over (eg. Toronto to NYC to DC or Seattle to Vancouver to Whistler to Kamloops to Edmonton to Calgary, Toronto to Halifax etc.)

I used to joke that in general, any car I rented would come back with at least 1k km if I had it for more than 2 - 3 days)

Fun life (I'm just turning 29), enjoyed my job (tons of perks like I earned points for a lifetime on Air Canada and Marriott - my family used to joke that I'd treat my home as a hotel as I spent more time in hotels than at home), but I was grossly underpaid (I gave up a role that paid me 2x what I would have made for this) and I ended up on the wrong side of the politics at the consultancy (big 4) so I left on my terms (for a much better role) before I'd have been forced to.

The other issue is people rent cars where they do not live and are unfamiliar.

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.

It's interesting Tesla did not take the opportunity to install chargers at the rental dealerships at no cost or reduced cost, and have the rental company offer "no need to charge before you return it" deal.

> to bring it back at 80%

Why wouldn't the rental car company charge it?

Worst case, it's going to lose 2 hours on a 1+ day rental, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com