Hertz "Horror Show"

[IgorKl]

Rent Companies jumps on EV train without or refusing to understand that not everyone knows EVs, from my experience:
1. rented Tesla coming to EA or EVGo and started to look how to charge - no CCS/NACS adapter provided by rental company, as well as no instructions about charging
2. majority rental companies does not have own charging infra
3. many employees do not train on EV so customer who rents EV should have knowledge otherwise with #1 it's become disaster experience.
4. majority EVs were purchased when prices skyrocketed and right now used car prices are falling -it creates big gap to recover $$ for rent companies
5. EV more expensive to maintain than ICE - sorry, but this is bullsh$%t. it becomes expansive since no own ifra and no trained employees.

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[Tha_Ape]

Thought this was rather interesting.............

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/18/business/hertz-ceo-departure-ev/index.html

"Part of the problem for Hertz was that even people who might want to buy an EV wouldn’t necessarily want to rent one while on the road"

Right on the nose! I have 2 EVs right now, they're my only cars. Ive had one of them for 3yrs and before that a PHEV so I'm all about the tech. I love not going to the gas station and how effortless they are to own. That said, if I go on a trip where I'm going to rent a car, I want an ICE (or HEV/PHEV). I don't want the slightest inconvenience when I'm traveling. I don't want to plan around charging anywhere. In fact I generally pre-pay for fuel so I don't even have to fill the car up when I return it

Others may differ, but I'll bet I'm with a majority of the population on this one

 

[mkhuffman]

You have to understand this, that most of the automotive market wants this convenience as a daily occurrence, just not on vacation also.

In all fairness, the daily convenience of driving a car that you can refuel at your own home is huge. It is much better than owning an ICE. It is out of town travel that sucks.

People arriving at an airport and renting a car are probably out of town and not able to charge at home. Obviously.

 

[Mach1E]

"Part of the problem for Hertz was that even people who might want to buy an EV wouldn’t necessarily want to rent one while on the road"

Right on the nose! I have 2 EVs right now, they're my only cars. Ive had one of them for 3yrs and before that a PHEV so I'm all about the tech. I love not going to the gas station and how effortless they are to own. That said, if I go on a trip where I'm going to rent a car, I want an ICE (or HEV/PHEV). I don't want the slightest inconvenience when I'm traveling. I don't want to plan around charging anywhere. In fact I generally pre-pay for fuel so I don't even have to fill the car up when I return it

Others may differ, but I'll bet I'm with a majority of the population on this one

Yup.

Almost always when we get into a EV vs ICE road tripping debate, people here throw out the argument- “use your EV for around town, but the 1-2x per year you road trip, just rent an ICE.”

If EV owners won’t even rent an EV…….that tells you something.

 

[BudC]

We rented a Model 3 from Avis at LAX. All I can say is if I didn't already own an EV (my Mach E), it would have been a horrible experience.

It took several trips to figure out the idiosynchrasies of the car (settings, nav use, etc). Charging was OK, except we found that a couple of chargers we needed to use were inside parking garages that required us to pay for parking - what's up with that?? Having the Mach E experience made it a whole lot easier to deal with the strangeness.

It was fun, though, to have the opportunity to try out a Tesla in a real-world setting. I just can't imagine someone who doesn't have EV experience having a positive feeling about them afterwards.

 

[Thunderbuck]

Again... EV... wait until...

Same old story. Wait.

Hertz went all in. For some reason the CEO did understand his customer's use case.

And, again, he wasn't psychic, or he would have known that Elon was going to wipe out millions in his fleet's residual value.

 

[JellyBelly]

The Polestar is a really quite reliable EV; I would have rather been on a horse wagon than a base Altima ?

Yeah on any other trip I would have picked a Polestar… but was on tight schedule and really bad weather forecast so just wanted something that did not require any additional use of my brain cells

 

[kindofblue]

I looked into a one way rental in May from Portland OR to San Luis Obispo CA. Nothing available for that one way trip.

 

[Lemmy]

Thought this was rather interesting.............

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/18/business/hertz-ceo-departure-ev/index.html

I rented a Tesla and a polestar from hertz for a couple of simple business trips. Delta switched to hertz as a partner so thought I’d try them. I didn’t have to return them fully charged and I wasn’t driving very far so it was simple since I didn’t have to refuel at the airport like I usually do. I didn’t like either of them as much as my MME. I’m back at Avis now for rentals since I have better luck with ease of pickup anyway.

 

[azerik]

So can we buy these damn 'Hertz GT's' now or not? I'd happily give eh $15k maybe $20k.

 

[Mach1E]

Has nothing to do with Musk. All to do with not understanding people don't want the hassle of using an EV as a rental car.

Musk dropping the price of all Teslas $20-50k last year killed the resale market on BEVs.

That wiped millions out in the fleet value.

 

[DennisD]

Musk dropping the price of all Teslas $20-50k last year killed the resale market on BEVs.

That wiped millions out in the fleet value.

And Elon's value as well. ?

He, in many ways is his own worst enemy.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-stock-price-today-32d7cac3

 

[Thunderbuck]

Has nothing to do with Musk. All to do with not understanding people don't want the hassle of using an EV as a rental car.

SOMEBODY hasn't been paying attention.

The Tesla price cuts did massive damage across the industry, not just rentals, but that's a great place to start. European rental fleets also dropped Tesla in the wake of the price drop. Ford and GM had to drastically scale back their EV development plans. And, just another example, the software company SAP was supplying Teslas as company cars for their employees. The price cuts hurt the residual value of their fleet so badly that they had to discontinue the policy.

Those price cuts were a stupid temper-tantrum response to the market. It may have stimulated sales for a few months but it wound up doing a lot of damage in the long term. I'm not even saying Tesla shouldn't have cut prices, or didn't have the right to, I'm saying cutting so deeply so quickly had a deeply disruptive effect on the whole industry.

Maybe the worst part, past the companies that were hurt by those cuts, EV owners suddenly saw their cars lose a ton of value and that's been poison for community goodwill. I think that erosion of good will has given EV critics/opponents a great opportunity to stick a wedge in peoples' overall willingness to adopt EVs.

 

[ChuckA]

We all know that operating an EV is different than ICE. You can’t just jump into an EV and intuitively know the controls or charging nuances. I test drove a Tesla Y and spent time trying to turn on the wipers instead of carefully driving the car. I had to pull over and call the salesman. Rental EV’s should only be rented to people familiar with EV’s.
.

 

[voxel]

Musk dropping the price of all Teslas $20-50k last year killed the resale market on BEVs.

That wiped millions out in the fleet value.

Resale was terrible for Polestar 2 back in summer of 22 way before the Tesla price cuts. Approximately 30-35% depreciation in less than a year. Tesla just looked at live MMR data and realized their new cars were $15K more than dealers were wanting to pay.

Hert'sz CEO mistake was Polestar 2 IMO. They probably lost more with those vehicles than Teslas.

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