- some markets don't have an abundance of fast superchargers. It can take > 1 hour to charge.
- vehicles would often get returned mostly discharged, which forces the next customer to deal with it.
- I rented a few that appeared to have been driven really hard, leading the remaining charge calibration to become mis calibrated, which caused me to have to stop for some unscheduled charges.
- the vehicles lose a few percent of charge per day even when not driven (worse in hot weather)
- Hertz locations are typically not equipped with any kind of charging infrastructure -- if they were, EVs would be far more convenient to rent.
I wish the program would continue, and I would still prefer to rent a Tesla over the other options, but I think the aforementioned things factored into the failure.
Is that a Tesla thing? Or does Hertz have some sort of battery draining telematics? I have a non-Tesla EV and even in warm weather (100°F+) that hasn't been the case for me. If the weather changes drastically the SOC might change ±2%, but when I've left my car sitting for weeks it seems to average out
With respect to telematics, I think the only change to the vehicle was that a few menu options were unavailable. I updated the software on one of the vehicles, renamed a few, added some to the app, etc.
In my opinion, a Hertz office with sufficient charging capacity could be great with EVs. (I also don't understand why traditional gas stations aren't already featuring a few high capacity charging stalls)
The columnist concludes the sacrifices were worth it, given her dedication to environmentalism. The vast, vast majority of people would not choose her experience to be a little greener.
1: https://www.almanacnews.com/blogs/a-new-shade-of-green/2024/...
Does this mean the electricity you paid for went half as long?
(ev exp is ltd bc my cars are 30y-60y)
Second battery efficiency goes down.
Finally, the battery usually is constantly doing the regen breaking thing but in cold weather it doesn't to save pack wear until you get the pack warm again
6kW is not enough to make a big dent in required mechanical braking, and it’s also not enough to quickly heat the battery pack, especially when operated intermittently.
A bigger battery/coolant loop heater sounds more straightforward — the mechanism to convert kinetic energy to current is already there.
Most of the range loss comes from climate control. In a combustion car, the majority of the energy in the gasoline is turned into heat. In cold weather, you just dump some of this heat into the cabin to keep it warm. An EV's efficiency is a disadvantage in this case, as it needs to use energy from the battery to heat up the cabin.
I don't have the exact numbers there but the HVAC system should draw ~2kW at full throttle. Giving an average of, let say, 160Wh/km (speaking of a recent Tesla M3 for example) at highway speed. Over an hour of full throttle heating you would have consumed in heating an extra ~10% of what you spent to move the car. So OK, maybe air drag increase is not the worst offender here but it's not just the HVAC system.
...
While writing this I searched a bit and according to this [1] when there is really cold temperature and the battery still haven't got warm, it can draw 5-6kW at the beginning. Anyway when driving motors heat up, the heat is used to warm the battery, the battery heats up as well and all that heat is used by the heat pump to warm the inside of the vehicle.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/452464/tesla-model-y-heat-pump-sy...
Gas cars lose efficiency in the cold too, but it’s less drastic. Only stats I can find are 15% loss at 20F (which is a lot warmer than -4F).
Also, charging tends to be much slower in the cold as batteries need to be warm to accept full charge rate. If you’re cruising on the highway it’s usually not too bad, but if you start from an overnight stop and then try to immediately charge the car you could be waiting for the battery to warm up.
No, the battery simply isn't able to hold as much energy because the chemical process that makes it work "slows" down (my basic understanding of electrons, someone feel free to correct me).
TBH, the experience of most Tesla owners is just put the dest in the map and charge when needed on the way.
The one clear problem that is highlighted in that article is that hotel, or more generally destination, charging makes a huge difference. People think it is all about getting there, but it really is the being there that can be tricky.
Rental cars magnify this problem, which is why it was so strange that Hertz expanded the fleet so rapidly. Scaling the same move over 3 years would have had very different results(*).
(*) Maybe other than maintenance costs. There were odd rental effects in that from the stories that I've heard.
Do you think that's because it's far easier to charge your car at home while you are sleeping? And that renters who lack this convenience or face difficulty achieving it might be put out by the experience during a possibly expensive and rare vacation?
I've tried 3rd party chargers a few times and gave up on them. They're often broken or extremely slow. They usually require installing some app, and you don't know whether they're occupied or not until you get there. In contrast, Tesla's chargers are a consistently good experience. Without them, I'd simply never use my EV for road trips.
I still use other charging networks from time to time. The best that I can say is that they are usable, but they are often frustrating in various weird ways.
But that's not why I mentioned Tesla. I mentioned them because there's so much weird industry caused complexity that they avoid. Need to charge the car you've just rented? Just find a supercharger and plug in. Not ideal necessarily, but at least it isn't hard.
Got a non-Tesla and need to use EVGo or EA? If you're lucky the card reader isn't broken. Then there's a decent chance it times out while communicating, because the order of events isn't intuitive for first timers. Cancelling the session at this point sometimes gets tricky too. Oh, and all of this is assuming the unit itself wasn't broken. If the card reader was broken, now you are downloading an app, tapping in card details, trying to figure out which stall to active, etc. And finally, you find out that the Bolt might require you to hold the cord just right for it to activate. EA used to have a whole video just on this detail. :facepalm
It can be a really terrible experience.
In fact, mid drive Tesla will auto-reroute you to a supercharger station with more open slots if the one you're going to gets busy while on the drive. The UI is extremely accurate (like I can see open station numbers increment when a car pulls out).
Are you sure you're not hearing complaints about non-Tesla chargers?
- It's a cold state in winter and there's at least the perception that you don't want an EV in places with cold winters. (I see few enough Teslas in the wild in exurban Boston.)
- It's a relatively poor state.
- I imagine pickups and the like are disproportionately represented.
- It's big and sparsely populated as you say.
A friend of mine who lives in Boston but owns a house on a bunch of land in northern Vermont finally got a Tesla when he convinced himself there was sufficient buffer for weekly trips between the two places.
That's in spite of the range issue, and is due to the Norwegian government carrot-and-sticking heavily towards electric. Maine has no such incentives, and is sparsely populated, which doesn't play to the strengths of electric cars.
Norway shows that you can have EVs in a place that is very cold if you shovel cash at buyers. It doesn't prove that weather wouldn't be a central factor in a place like Maine.
1: https://www.oecd.org/climate-action/ipac/practices/norway-s-...
Makes it much easier if there's already infrastructure.
Bar Harbor, the destination of most of the out-of-state Teslas, has almost nowhere to charge. I went to a hotel once which promised to have 4 level-2 Tesla chargers. All of the spots were occupied by ICE trucks. I went in to point out this problem to the clerk. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "they're probably our customers." Apparently the chargers were just there to lure in suckers. "Yes, we have chargers, but good luck using one. They tend to be parked in by ICE pickup trucks. We're helpless to do anything about this." I failed to check to see whether the trucks had Maine plates. They didn't look like typical customers of this hotel.
Around Portland things are a bit better. And new stations are being put it. It's just behind neighboring states.
Equivalently, she chose a hotel without chargers, or without enough chargers. How much extra time and money would it have taken to find a hotel with/near chargers?
Which travel search engines/ OTAs/ directories allow you to find hotels with L1/L2 chargers? (Do they list number and ratio of chargers/rooms?) Just like how most of these allow you to search on free parking, breakfast, wifi, disabled access etc., I see this as a feature that will become common then standard.
EDIT: to the down-voter, this is on-topic and substantive comment. Per my other comment here, the onus is on the rental company to actively incentivize behavior modification in first-time-EV-renting customers, help them plan their trip, not just to merrily slam them for fees. Assuming Hertz want loyalty and repeat business (if not, then this is a wider issue with them, not with EVs).
Few want to spend that precious time becoming familiar with that cities charging network if charging is new to them.
I recently rented a Mach-E over Christmas in a large Metro, and stayed in a populous suburb. Charging & the states of chargers was no fun and really added a cognitive load.
However, I did realize I enjoyed EV's for some point in the future - somewhat curing range anxiety of my normal life routine.
A lot of hotels around here have 110v outlets in their parking lots for fishermen to charge their bass boats but I haven't heard that a similar ethic applies to EVs. :-)
I suppose I can't extrapolate this situation to everyone, but I have a feeling if you provide your own cord, most motels won't have a problem with you charging. Especially since it'll be uncommon. If everyone had EVs, then they might start putting a fee on it.
This future is probably not yet evenly distributed around the world. Sure. But fast charging might eventually come to something. Eventually.
But I've also rented EVs in metros with decent fast charging, but none at the hotel. It was fun, but charging was a notable downside.
The key takeaway for me, they being wall street people - customer empathy was missing.
101 of salesmanship - understanding of customers needs, desires and then selling solutions for those. Here their customers were out of town weary travelers wanting to have a hassle free quick ride to a hotel or a meeting; have not used EVs before (perhaps never intend to), now have to focus on a new problem - how to learn a new skill of handling EV, how to plan for charging during their multi day trips.. etc.
> Hertz gave me a Subaru Solterra for a one way trip from Temecula to Vegas because it was their last car. Couldn't tell me how to start it or anything because they just got it the day before... and they didn't bother plugging it in so it had 20 miles of range. Couldn't tell me where to charge it so I wasted much of it driving around the mall looking for the charger.
> Four hours later I had enough charge to get to Barstow. Or so I thought. Had to charge in Victorville. Then get a hotel room because it was midnight. Put it on a fast charger in the morning and a full charge should have gotten me all the way back. Hit Baker and I knew it wouldn't.
> My five hour drive ended up taking 25 hours.
> Fuck Hertz.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1bi99tk/hertz_ceo_out...
Take a look at a major airport. They could average a hundred rental cars arriving, with peaks into the hundreds. Even assuming every can arrives at a half-charge, the power requirements would be immense. At 50kwH per car, charging up 100 cars every hour would require, at an absolute minimum, a 5000kw/5mW connection.
The rental co really needs to provide reasonable charged cars, and so long as charging infrastructure is dicey (especially with hotels in the mix) they could provide peace of mind to their customers by providing a known charging spot.
Put it wherever, I'm not Hertz, the airport is not Hertz's customer, but I would have a pretty strong bet that Hertz's customers would expect this sort of thing.
The power requirements were not drawn up with the car rental agency in mind. Maybe you can get the airport to cooperate and ask the utility to expand capacity - how many years of planning do you think that takes?
They have the added challenge of people dropping off cars at a different place from where they started, so they can’t necessarily say “we’re going to start with EVs at our new facilities where we can design that capacity from the start.” They needed fast charging everywhere for this to go smoothly.
Do you have any reason to believe car rental companies maintain onsite fuel stations? Have you ever seen one? Why don’t they let customers use it?
There are already gas stations near airports. If a car needs gas they pay someone to drive it there and fill it up. That’s the source of your inflated prices.
Plus, often when I rent a car, it isn't full. I'm sure they still charge the person "to fill the tank," but they don't actually fill it, so the total they'd have to store on-site is even less than if they were actually filling the cars.
I also assumed they had somewhere to store siphoned fuel, because every car I've ever driven has at least a gallon before the needle moves off of "F," but rental cars drop below F immediately. I've always assumed they were siphoning out a gallon or more any time someone did return the car all the way full.
How long do cars sit in the lot? Do you need to send cars out at 100% full? Is it good enough to make sure the cars leave the lot with 50-80% full?
They're returned, inspected, cleaned, put in the "outgoing" queue. I suspect having DCFC for just the cleaning area and then 16 or 20 or 24a /240v posts for L2 charging the cars as they sit waiting to be rented would more than suffice.
Other big issues would be around having to have dedicated parking for EVs and also having charging posts sticking out of the ground all over.
50kWh is not the charger, half the battery capacity for the cars (as decided by GP).
And 50kW would not be a huge charger, or even a large one, it's the bottom end of DC charging.
> I suspect having DCFC for just the cleaning area and then 16 or 20 or 24a /240v posts for L2 charging the cars as they sit waiting to be rented would more than suffice.
Aside from not being very efficient, 24@240 is not really a thing that's used. 32@240 is relatively standard but it's 7.2kW and generally considered a residential AC charger, acceptable when 3-phase is not available (or too expensive). It needs 7 hours to half-charge a 100kWh battery.
A car rental setup would benefit from having a couple big DCFC setups where cars are inspected / cleaned.
EVs charge fast if the battery is empty (and warm) -- so the car comes in, is inspected and cleaned and put on a fast charger, and in 20 minutes will get to ~50% charge (regardless of battery size).
As far as "not efficient" or "nobody uses" well, 240 (or 208 if you're in a commercial setup with 2 legs of a 3 phase) is "normal" and a 16a / 20a / 24a AC charger will put reasonable charge on the car while it's just sitting there waiting to be rented again. EV's don't need to be fully charged to be useful so you don't need to put the battery back to 100% before sending it out again.
"your car is at 60% charge and has 180 miles of range right now; your car's nav will tell you where to charge if you need more range to get to where you're going. We'll bill for the power if you bring it back to us at less that 60% full. Have a nice day!"
I'm not sure what the turnover is for a rental lot -- I suspect "it depends" but I suspect it's not unusual to have cars on the lot for 6-12 hours before they're sent out again.
IMO As long as the car has 60% or better charge (or, 150-180 miles of range) it's "good to go". At least for most "airport rental in a major metro area" situation.
As far as charging efficiency -- anything charging at 240/208v is "good enough" -- the differences between 16a or 20a or 24a or whatever are minor relative to the bump from 120v to 240v.
(I had a friend joining me on a trip a number of years back. We wanted to add them to the contract once they arrived. I had to patiently explain that we could do it with a company that also had an off-airport location but we couldn't drop by the car rental center at the airport. I've had other experiences with how car rental companies really don't have good mechanisms to change things once you've signed and initialed the contract.)
EA's charging here is priced at $0.44 per minute, so with that budget you can charge for 3.70 minutes.
Assume it spends that whole time at 80 kW. This is probably optimistic, it will take time to ramp up to that. But we'll forget about that, and assume the car starts from near empty because the Solterra's charging curve is trash and will begin throttling the speed down when it's about 35% charged.
3.7 minutes at 80 kW gives us 4.93 kW of charge. EPA rates the vehicle at 3.23 miles/kW, so for the equivalent price of 20 miles of gas we've added... drumroll
15.9 miles of charge.
With other vehicles or in an area with different gas/charging pricing, your mileage my vary. And if you look at a straight ICE competitor of the same size as the Solterra as the MPG reference it will be worse than 35 MPG (requiring more gas and giving you a higher charging budget), so basing this on my smaller car did limit that. But regardless, fuel price isn't necessarily a huge advantage for a rental EV.
If I were talking price for L2 charging at home in my garage then I'm sure the EV would be way cheaper, but that's now how anyone will be using a rental.
I had been planning to get an electric but now I'm looking at PHEVs. And I still need to get the wiring for my house fixed. There's an outlet but it was meant for some early gen electric vehicle and literally nothing uses that plug anymore (and now the wiring is probably not adequate gauge)
Assuming you're in the US/Canada or other country with 100-120v service, a standard wall socket is sufficient for many full EV users and plenty enough for a PHEV which has a much smaller battery. Think about how much time your car spends sitting in your driveway/garage...and if you don't get a full charge, so what? The engine kicks in.
The wiring gauge is good for a certain current. That affects what sort of plug is installed in the wall, as they're keyed according to current limits. The EVSE can be programmed to not exceed the appropriate current, which is 80% of the breaker's rating.
If it was wired for an EV, it's almost certainly not 100-120v but 208 or higher, in which case even if it's a 15A circuit, that's definitely enough for a PHEV and sufficient for charging all but the largest EVs practically overnight.
A 208v, 15A circuit is good for 2.5kW. If you get home at 7PM and go to work at 7AM, you'll be able to charge 25kWhr each night, roughly. Average EV efficiency is about .35kWh/mile, so that's sufficient for 70 miles of driving.
If you buy an EV you hopefully do so knowing full well the vehicle's constraints. You've figured out those constraints aren't a deal breaker for your known use cases. When being offered as a rental most people have no idea what the constraints of the vehicle are nor can they make informed decisions about them. So having anxiety about any of those, including charging, makes complete sense. A rental car should be as flexible as possible, not have a care and feeding schedule like you're buying a Mogwai.
I had to make a trip from Tucson, AZ to Bisbee, a super common route you would make as it's a popular tourist destination. Bisbee is about 80 miles from the supercharger down Interstate 10. By default, the cars are configured to stop charging when they get to 80% or something like that. Your average consumer is not going to have a clue because that's not how gas pumps work.
There was 0 public charging infrastructure after the Supercharger, not so much as a public J1772 charge point (It might look like it using an app, but they are broken or nonfunctional). The Model 3 gets under 200 miles of range going the pace of traffic, which is 80-85 MPH. Then they take a wrong turn or drive around at the destination and burn up the last 30-40 miles.
The poor sucker that rented the Tesla was told it would get "270 miles of range". When he left the charger it said he had over 200 miles to go. But reality sinks in, and at some point in the journey, if they get even slightly distracted, they will find themselves 50 miles from the charger with 30 miles left.
And the reason gasoline took off as a fuel was because it was frequently used as a degreaser before we decided to burn it instead, so you could buy it in tins from the blacksmith in whatever town you found yourself stranded in. There's nothing analogous to that for EVs.
You could certainly offer to pay someone for electricity from their home or business, but then you're parked in their driveway for a period of time waiting. And the social aspects of this make it a lot more challenging than simply walking up to the local blacksmith and buying a gallon or two of solvent off the shelf so you can get to the next town.
You're at that point relying on the kindness of strangers.
On the other hand, I've had the "I noticed an external outlet near my parking spot, do you mind if I plug my car into it while I shop/stay at this hotel/eat at this restaurant?" conversation plenty of times and there's no "challenge" to it nor "transaction". The most common answer I've got has been "I don't see why not" because it's not really a transaction for most businesses, whatever extra they spend on electricity they easily make back in making a new customer or keeping an existing customer happy. In a few times I got back "there's a Level 2 charger hidden at the Library across the street and the fees support our local library" or "we have a deal with this parking garage a block away that has chargers and we can validate your parking for you when you get back", which just goes to show how normalized it already can often be as just another "parking consideration" of "where to park" when you ask businesses about it. Most businesses are used to answering "is there a good place to park?" questions. Parking is normal operations for a business, not "relying on the kindness of strangers". Electricity is "just" an amenity of parking, already in some businesses' minds. (Not enough businesses yet, sure, but more than you might think.)
To be fair, I've never been in a "life or death" situation where a "No" would have been some terrible catastrophe, but I've also never known anyone in my lifetime that had to buy gasoline from a small town Blacksmith or Pharmacist either.
A model 3 realistically gets 4~4.5 mi / kWh, US 16A@120V is rated for 1500W continuous, so that's about 6.5 miles per hour of charging. 20A@120V is close to 2000W continuous, so that's about 9 miles per hour.
In that situation you might start knocking on doors.
I know this thread is entirely about comparing apples and oranges, but the historical examples weren't getting a full tank from a small local Blacksmith back then and so it doesn't make sense to worry about getting a full charge in this situation either.
This is just a different way of saying "If people put in more work this wouldn't be a problem", but you're ignoring the context - people who rent cars are often in a hurry, need transport now and need to get someone now. This all indicates that they are busy, and your suggestion is that they should work harder to get the same result?
It's not just Tesla either. All major EVs come with route planning. If you have range anxiety you're using it wrong. This isn't even the driver's fault, how can they know about these features if nobody tells them? I don't even fully blame Hertz for this. Tesla should be marketing the route planning nationwide. Show people how life with EVs actually is instead of leaving them in the dark and letting them think that owning an EV means a roll of the dice every time you get behind the wheel where you might not find a friendly plug in time and be stranded on the side with no way to jerrycan more miles.
I'm not claiming that the systems are hard to use, I'm saying that it's an additional friction over ICE cars, in which you don't need to put in extra work to learn a piece of software, you don't need to wait for the rental assistant to explain how it works and you don't need to plan refuelling stops to coincide with rest times.
As a renter, I give them my booking number, my drivers license and my credit card, then jump in and head straight to my destination. All the other stuff that the Tesla's required may be easy, but we go from 2 steps (pay and drive) to 5 or more steps.
TBH, if Hertz had wanted this to be a success, the biggest thing they could have done was made sure that the cars were always fully charged before the customer drove off.
Route-planning is kinda irrelevant when you're doubling the friction required to rent a car.
Sorry but that is a hyper-obnoxious comment. I've never yet driven an EV, and range anxiety is undoubtedly something I will experience when I eventually get to. I don't want that in the context of being away from home on work or holiday.
If my total expected mileage is practical without charging and I expect the car to start adequately charged, fine. It’s like a free tank of gas.
If not, I can’t charge at home. Charging at a hotel is a PITA. Charging first thing in the morning in cold weather without heated parking is slooooow even at a Supercharger.
And I really don’t want to deal with the utter mess of charger networks and their ridiculous membership cards.
And the usual rental model of strongly encouraging customers to return the car with a full tank of gas doesn’t really make sense for EVs.
I'm surprised Tesla and Hertz couldn't work out a deal, e.g. reimbursement or a large discount on additional purchases that would wipe out the accounting charge. Rental vehicles are a sales channel for new vehicles. And every Hertz Tesla being dumped on the secondary market is new-vehicle profit Tesla could have booked.
Now they get more bad news "rental company dumps Tesla because of XYZ", the used market took a big hit as well pissing off existing owners, and I feel like this pushes newer buyers even more away.
Oh no, poor wealthy Tesla owners loosing value on their car. /s Since when are ordinary cars appreciable investments?
It's been well known cars tank in value, especially when you're an early adopter of new tech in a market that's in constant disruption. Your 1999 GeForce 256 also lost most of it's value in a year compared to other later GPUs, it's the nature of tech in a rapidly changing market.
People who expect cars to hold/go up in value need to buy limite edition exotics, not mass produced commodities.
EVs tanking in value on the used market is good for EV adoption as non wealthy people can afford them.
The sticker price isn't the issue. The issue is ironically fuel costs. Anyone who doesn't own their own house will rely on commercial chargers. In many circumstances a commercial charger can cost more per-mile than gasoline, and certainly they take much more time. So the non-rich, people who rent apartments and don't generally have spare time, cannot afford a used EV despite the sticker price.
Not-rich people also generally own only one car. They cannot "afford" a vehicle that is expensive to fix, both in time and cash. A couple days waiting for a part is a couple days missed work. A few weeks without a car (ie most any Tesla repair) could mean a lost job.
Cars are commodities, like microwave ovens or washing machines, not houses. You won't get any sympathy because your risky economic bet didn't pan out the way you expected it to.
No one is offering sympathy, we're just saying that when buyers are considering a car, depreciation is a consideration.
Because, you see, no one simply burns down a 3 year old car when they want a new one - they use whatever equity in their existing car as part of the payment of the new car.
They depreciated like a rented Uber, which seems entirely predictable.
If a value of a vehicle can drop $40k over a period of a month, it is too volatile and I will never purchase such brand.
And why is this bad? Who said a brand/company is entitled to a certain amount of sales just because they exist? Aren't we in capitalisms where it's sink or swim and the market/customer is right? If a product is volatile maybe it's not good and people should orient to other brands, no?
If Tesla bins it, other better manufacturers will pick up the slack if the EV demand is there according to market forces. If the EV demand isn't there, maybe the EV hype was a bubble that was gonna pop sooner or later?
It's not bad that it happens, it's bad for Tesla if they are marketing their product as high-end/luxury while their product very obviously lacks the attributes, such as a stable/predictable value over time, that competitors' luxury products have. Someone deciding not to buy a product, for whatever reason, is the system working as intended. If Tesla can't produce a product people want to buy, Tesla will suffer the consequences, as they should. If they don't change their marketing or improve their product in the light of low sales, that's on them.
Nobody is asking you to cry for Tesla owners or feel bad for them. If anything, this is more of a Tesla problem to solve as it reduces the likelihood of those wealthy buyers buying another Tesla in the future as it's another negative data point to consider.
People want to know what they can expect when making a huge purchase. When the pros outweigh the cons, and I would say worse than average depreciation is a pretty big con, then buyers will look elsewhere.
Where am I hostile?
>and I would say worse than average depreciation is a pretty big con
Depreciation accurately reflects current market demand. People need to take a good look at this and learn valuable lessons.
If demand for Tesla dropped then it's Tesla's problem. If demand for EVs dropped maybe it's time to reflect on why it dropped.
Your entire comment is hostile and outside the guidelines for this site. We’re in this for honest discussion, not “let me play you the world's smallest violin for them” or “Are Tesla owners gonna starve or become homeless”.
And that is exactly what "I won't buy a brand whose products have volatile value" is.
-Elon Musk, 2019.
Whether you believed him or not is a different matter but that's what he said at the time.
Tesla doesn't believe in PR[1].
[1]https://electrek.co/2021/04/28/elon-musk-no-new-tesla-pr-dep...
Elon does that. Tesla doesn't have a PR department to spend the time thinking about the things that the OP suggested they should consider.
Also, look at website content like this: https://www.tesla.com/about
That is PR, regardless of whether you want to call the people doing it "PR" or not.
An "about" page is bog standard stuff and a pretty paltry effort in the grand scheme of the things a PR department at a company the size of Tesla would otherwise traditionally be doing. It's like, yes, technically that's a form of PR, sure, but it ain't much.
That's why if you're involved in a Tesla accident, even a fatal one, Tesla will have no hesitation holding a press conference, pulling vehicle telemetry, to make sure that (rightly or wrongly) blame goes to you as the driver and not Tesla.
They'll make statements like "Autopilot wasn't to blame here. The vehicle had warned the driver of his inattentiveness", and the Tesla fans will nod their heads, reassured.
What will later come out will be that Autopilot was active, and that while a driver attention (steering wheel) warning had occurred on the fateful trip, it had happened ONCE, and that that one time was EIGHTEEN MINUTES prior to the collision.
But there won't be a press conference to correct those details.
"Autopilot crashes car, kills family!"
to (with much less fanfare):
"Actually, it was a drunk dude driving manually and wrapped his car around a tree at 120mph in his own driveway"
You know, it's hard to know what sources other people consider to be "reputable" these days, so perhaps you could put on your big boy britches and google the subject to find a source you like rather than expecting us to know what you trust and don't trust? I mean, shit, if you bothered to look at the Verge article you'd have seen the link to the NTSB report. Here ya go...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/ntsb-finds-no-evidence-tesla...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-crash-spring-texas-deaths...
https://fortune.com/2024/03/17/ntsb-fatal-crash-automated-dr...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/02/autopilot-had-no-involv...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-pro...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/driver-was-behind-wheel...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/automobiles/tesla-texas-c...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/driver-was-behind-wheel-...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/autopilot-engaged-texas-tesl...
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36387950/ntsb-investigati...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2021/05/10/ntsb-p...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39933859
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34731013
Would you like some more?
So, Google's results only seem interested on showing the articles about the NTSB's ultimate findings, not the ones that were originally reported immediately after the crash. I then assumed that some of the articles I had linked in that post would probably link back to their own previous articles about it, and figured I'd just start by going through that list from the top down.
Sure enough, the second one I linked, from CBS News, linked to their older article on it, entitled, "No one was driving Tesla before fiery crash that killed 2 passengers in Texas, authorities say".
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-crash-texas-no-one-dirvin...
Edit:
>The assertion had two parts and these stories only reflect the latter.
They don't, actually. Take this line from the Ars piece (though Ars isn't the only one that says something like this - most of them do! :D), for instance:
>The possible involvement of Autopilot was suggested in the wake of initial reports that one of the two occupants—specifically the driver—was found in the back seat of the car.
If you click the Ars link, you'll notice that the phrase "initial reports" also links to their own article written immediately after the event, titled, "Cops 'almost 99.9% sure' Tesla had no one at the wheel before deadly crash".
Depending on when they negotiated the relevant stuff, Tesla might have thought they needed to contribute more to the deal to sell even the cars they ended up selling already.
Side note: when renting in other countries, I always ask for the worst looking beat up car that they have. Really is less stressful to drive around.
But I think they've "pivoted" to just another rental company since then. Looking at their website and Google maps reviews the cars now look new, and indistinguishable from what you'd get from Eurocar, Hertz etc.
I had to turn down the first car due to non-functioning wipers and a broken door handle.
Ended up with a Subaru Forester that had definitely seen a lot of miles and had its share of minor issues, but was a beast in the surprise blizzard.
Shame if they pivoted but their office was a pain to deal with and last thing you want after a red-eye is to be worried about the car maybe not actually working properly. Decided next time we'd just rent from a more established brand.
From their FAQ:
> However, we decided to use the name to make it more memorable as our cars used to be older in the beginning but it's been many years since we stopped using old cars and now all our cars are new, or one or two years old
This is true of all businesses and all capital. It's a great big tax cheat, centered around companies getting to claim that their capital is worthless after just a few years.
I can see how it lets you move tax around in time a bit but that's it (and it's often allowed explicitly anyway).
Am I missing something or is this the common "tax write-off = magical money" misunderstanding?
I agree about driving a brand-new rental being stressful. I don't to worry about little scratches and dings, especially when you're driving an unfamiliar car in a foreign place.
I used to do zipcar and I would always do a full walk-around and email zipcar support a set of photos of any and all damage I'd find before I'd even unlocked the vehicle so there was proof the damage wasn't caused by me.
I did this after Zipcar claimed a dent that was already on the car was put there by me, because a prior renter didn't disclose it, or zipcar was double-dipping.
Finding a clean, undamaged car was a relief because I knew I could take photos afterward
It got particularly annoying because after the first 4-5 years zipcar clearly cut back on maintenance and repairs. Cars kept getting dirtier, more damaged, more "weird noises from the suspension", etc. Cars would be overdue for oil changes, have check engine lights on, etc.
Last fall, I got an almost new Mazda SUV from Avis. I was 3 miles down the road when a Service Engine Soon message took over the entire center of the dashboard. I hope they got it serviced after I returned it the next day.
The vehicles are sold after use, not disposed of.
These Teslas should also qualify for the $4000 used EV tax credit as well, which could make them quite an affordable option.
Well, obviously not in this case. Battery health would be the only real concern, I suppose, and that hasn't proven to be an issue so far.
Do car rental companies even bother to fix collision-damaged vehicles? I assumed they would just sell them off.
otoh Hertz have twice billed me for damage I definitely did not cause. In one case for a scratch on the front air dam that you had to lie down under the vehicle to see (which their agent in fact did when I returned the car). So now I use Avis.
90% of their fleet at that location might sit unused for a week or more, and most of their rentals are steeply discounted from the standard rate - but that car you backed into a pole? Why, that one would have been earning them the standard rate, every day.
I'm not sure how they handle cars damaged under those sorts of policies. I do know those policies are also wildly profitable (I've never come close to approaching eqv. $7300/yr for insurance, despite a horrible driving record when I was younger). Rental cars don't even crash 1.5x as often per mile, so a 5-20x multiple on your premium is noteworthy.
The coverage you buy from the rental company is a massive rip-off, that's why credit cards can offer it for free as a perquisite.
A Tesla after a minor collision might disable itself entirely until inspected by a Tesla technician, and it might need a whole new (and very expensive) battery pack - no one would(or should) take a bet on such a car.
So it's a lot less attractive thing to buy over regular cars.
Rich Rebuilds has covered this extensively. Sometimes he comes across a heavily damaged Tesla, still on their network that hasn't been disabled. Other times he comes across one with minor damage that has been disabled. I believe one of his rebuilds, he took some of the guts from a heavily damaged car that wasn't deactivated to transplant into the guts of a car that had easily repaired damage that had been.
I once rolled a vehicle in Nevada being stupid with friends. Airbags deployed. The radiator was crushed and leaking. We strapped the radiator support to another vehicle and bent it back out. Took the other vehicle into town and bought a radiator at AutoZone. Installed it and drove it an hour home. The steering wheel was only slightly off center.
That’s the same thing. If the owner isn’t disabling the car, then it is disabling itself.
In other words, you gotta be stupid to rent a Tesla unless you do it just for fun.
Not that you actually incurred them necessarily. There've been cases of them billing hundreds in idle fees by mistake.
$900 of supercharging would typically be >6k miles. Possibly a little less or a _lot_ more depending on the exact costs in your area.
Huh. Did you rent a Tesla and then have to pay separately for the privilege of using Tesla's charging network?
I've had a Tesla for years and what you paid for 3 weeks is comparable for what I've paid at superchargers the entire time I've owned the car (I mostly charge at home). It seems you did get ripped off, it just seems like it would be difficult to pay that much in three weeks at superchargers alone. There must have been some special surcharge (as it were).
That's kind of a key point. It may not be possible with a rental.
Maybe it was just idle fees, that seems like it could go up by a lot if you leave the vehicle on the station:
>For every additional minute a vehicle remains connected to the Supercharger, it will incur an idle fee.
I know it would have been a whole lot cheaper if I had my own charger though.
Yep. It's not just about rental income - it's about acquiring fleet at bulk/discounted prices and then reselling quickly before they lose too much money. Tesla's drastic price cuts have been annoying to consumers who just bought cars whose resale value plummeted overnight, but a complete deal breaker for a company like Hertz, only exacerbated by unexpectedly high repair costs.
I'd imagine charging must have been a demand factor too - people might like to experiment with an EV rental if they don't own one, but on business or vacation the last thing you want to be worried about is finding a charger or range-anxiety. If you have an EV at home, then part of the convenience, and a mitigation for slow charging, is overnight charging. Many hotels (often used by rental customers) are starting to have chargers too, but it's not something you can depend on.
Charging was absolutely the worst part. And most of the charging stations were full at any given time.
Range was extra bad due to the cold as well.
I understand the EV model for home use, but it makes 0 sense for rentals today. It's vastly less convenient, even ignoring the other factors like depreciation
For a while last summer, EVs from Hertz were the cheapest cars you could rent in the Seattle area because they had many and customers didn’t want them. Sounds like they’ve been selling them off.
I'm not sure what that means in the end :-). Maybe predicting the future is just hard? Maybe it was a 30-60 bet and they just got unlucky? In that case what they did was not unreasonable and had it worked the same journalists that cackle at them with schadenfreude would be singing their praises.
I'm sure they never asked "how fast can they be repaired?" "What will the customer experience be when a car has to be paired with your phone and you need a Tesla account?" "Are the maintenance claims put out by the manufacturer reasonable?" etc. etc.
Elon should have kept prices high while giving deep discounts and priority on parts to fleet purchases. That is what a sane car manufacturer does. To keep cars moving for retail you can have limited sales for holidays and seasons with "cash back" (not officially changing base price) and buying the loan APR to a lower rate.
Instead Elon crashed the price of Tesla's entire lineup.
I assume things are better with a Tesla but if somebody reasonably tech savvy like me has problems, I can’t even imagine how difficult it will be for many less tech savvy and less tech interested people I know to deal with an EV.
Seems to me that this could have been fixed by making them optional and requiring a deposit, but when you read in the article that Hertz had major IT issues it seems safe to assume that they didn’t have the capacity to make such process changes quickly.
“Return your EV at the same charge level as pick-up and pay $0. Or return your EV at any level for a $25 Recharge Fee.”
They were pretty lenient about the return charge — it was close to 100% to start and 80% when I returned it, but they didn’t charge me the $25. Even if they had, the EV rental rate was cheap enough that I would’ve still come out ahead vs. renting a gas car.
They have a gas policy section, which says "Si vous avez loué un véhicule électrique, veuillez vous reporter à la section Véhicules électriques".
In other words, find and check the electric vehicle section. But they don't have a Véhicules électriques section...
They send you a bunch of "Explore your upcoming rental" emails when you rent a tesla, with video tutorials [1]. I've rented plug-in hybrids before and had pretty much the same experience as you, but for a tesla rental I watched the videos and all worked well.
Often others require messing around with smartphone apps, often with very bad UI.
That statistic from the article shocked me.
Four times?!
1) I'm likely driving more than I do at home
2) I don't know if my hotel/s will have chargers
3) I am cognizant of my time and don't want to drive out of my way to sit in parking lots while my car charges
4) I might be travelling to rural areas where chargers are infrequent
Not saying that the issues you brought up are invalid, but I do think there's a demand 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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 with chargers (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'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.
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.
Why wouldn't the rental car company charge it?
Worst case, it's going to lose 2 hours on a 1+ day rental, right?
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.)
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.
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.
How isn't it?
It's literally the first reason why people avoided renting electric cars according to pretty much every poll out there. Not even the polls, it's literally what Hertz that commissioned studies on their low rental rate found out.
And you can count me as one, I would never rent an electric car in a place I don't know, especially when on vacation/work, where I don't know where and when I will be able to charge and I'm busy already.
I'm more prone to owning, but renting will be a no for quite some time.
The purchase discount (maybe fleet rate) is usually wrapped in a contract - the car must NOT be sold within a certain time or under a certain mileage - and in this way does not compete with the manufacturer's car dealers.
Hertz and Tesla did not have any sort of contract like this. This means that Hertz did not have any concessions from Tesla. Instead of Tesla having a special relationship with Hertz - a car discount, guaranteed quick repairs, possibly special rental-car software helping renters onboard with the car - Hertz got NOTHING.
It should have gotten something, at minimum some sort of fleet rate. It was a VERY good customer. Instead Tesla gave nothing and got a lot of bad PR in the end.
last year i went on a trip to LA and got a polestar for 4 days! car was fine, but finding a working and available charger was a nightmare. after spending 10m on one charger that would take my CC but not connect to the car, i moved to another spot and tried again. that charger would actually connect to my car, but it wouldn't take my CC. a few minutes after that, i called chargepoint tech support but neither of us could understand as i was in a parking garage.
after 15m on the phone before giving up and about to punch something, someone left and a new charger spot opened up. that one worked, but it wasn't chargepoint so i had to download a new app.
so, it took over 45m for me to get the car plugged in and a ton of stress for the ONE charge i needed to perform. i can guarantee that my experience is far from out of the ordinary, and i will never rent an EV again.
Charging and long drives, both tough conditions somewhere that isn't my home city both would be major issues. They sold off the cars at a low cost so not sure how they amended depreciation doing that.
The issue was twofold: 1. Repair cost and parts availability. Fleet damage was more expensive to repair and took longer. That means more of the fleet is offline at any given time and cost to operate is a bit higher. 2. Tesla lowered prices forcing them to recognize the depreciation. The cars resale value dropped faster than they anticipated.
Car and RV rental companies have this problem. People don't want to rent ragged out vehicles. In the case of RVs units for rental are built extra cheap so they don't last anyway. The model is get more in rent then you lose in depreciation then dump the vehicle. In the case of RVs they often turnover the entire fleet yearly.
The real killer was no doubt depreciation. That breaks the whole rental car model.