Stuff like this is easy to charge back with your credit card company.
But in this case, the article makes it clear that the people were able to get the charges reversed by talking to Hertz. It wasn't necessarily convenient, but the funds were returned when a human saw the mistake.
> If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
If you entered into an agreement with someone to do business and then accidentally charged them the wrong amount, you would not go to jail. That's what happened here, as annoying as it is.
I know this is HN and we're supposed to get our pitchforks out any time a company makes a mistake, but your analogy doesn't hold. Legally, intentional theft is a higher bar than a mistake. You're right that you'd be in trouble if you just started charging random people's credit cards fraudulently, but you're not going to jail if you're doing business with someone and you occasionally make a mistake about the amount when it's time to bill them. (FYI: Billing mistakes happen all the time at scale)
If you could prove that someone in Hertz was diabolically masterminding a scheme to knowingly milk money from customers by charging EV drivers for gas, you could have a case. But if Hertz is just accidentally charging a couple people here and there for gas (as appears to be the case from the article) then that's not "stealing". It's just a mistake.