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.
So it's not just Hertz.
Good thing I noticed it and charged it with my own charger before going for a trip.
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.
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).
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...
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.
Mine is currently around ~0.45€/kWh which takes the shine off it quite a bit, and makes gas a much more appealing option.
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.
That said, many Hertz locations do have way more chargers than they did before starting this gambit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
But let’s take your use case, how many of those involved driving more than 300 miles per day? Or even total?
> 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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
So sure many people use rentals at airports, but the overall business model looks very different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If that was the core issue, that's solvable. They didn't fail because of that either.
It didn't work out because of real world execution is harder than just saying that they are going to do it.
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.
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 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.