> pre-planned

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?

Sounds like something a car rental agency that wants to have a bunch of electric rentals should probably think through before yeeting a fleet into existence....

Yes, definitely a project, especially with the shortages of transformers lately. But even if it delayed their (attempted) EV shift, it’s something Hertz needed to have done before buying a bunch of EVs. Handing out discharged EVs to customers who haven’t driven an EV before was a totally braindead move.

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.

They also don’t offer automotive refueling services at the airport. This is the same reason they charge a premium to fill the tank. The constraints are the same for ICE and EV in this case.

What's your source for this? I'm just realizing I might be way off-base, but I thought airport car rental places all had their own fueling stations, and just overcharged you because they can and there's nothing you can do about it, and I'd thought of it as one of those "everybody knows" kinds of things. So now I'm very surprised to hear otherwise.

I don’t have a source. It just seems obvious to me they wouldn’t bother with the cost of maintaining that infrastructure.

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.

I haven't at an airport, but I have at freestanding ones. Having fuel delivered to a tank with a pump isn't really that involved as infrastructure goes. You're just buying the fuel wholesale instead of retail. You don't need the same size underground tank as a gas station, but you can hold more than enough to fill up whatever you need to from a fleet of cars. As for why they don't let customers use it? This is obvious. They'd rather overcharge you. And they know nobody's going to do something dumb at the pump if it's only their own team doing it.

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.

Yes, but many are also very old and don't necessarily have large power lines leading to the car park as it's never been necessary in the past. Newark was mentioned as a case in point, where power is simply not available at the scale they'd need it. Of course, Hertz should have thought of that...