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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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