181–190 of 516 posts
I say this having never driven a Tesla, but are they really suitable rental cars? My understanding is that Tesla vehicles differ quite a bit from regular ICE vehicles, to the point that there's a bit of a learning curve to operating the car. I'd be interested to hear from a Tesla owner on this. Maybe it's a non-issue.
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Tesla used to have "Standard" and "Low" settings for how strong the regenerative braking is, but just found an article that says they removed the low option, which would be a bummer in my opinion.
It's way more energy efficient if you can learn to drive with regenerative braking. Otherwise you're just wasting energy as heat with your brake pads.
Electric cars are actually a very good fit for many rentals. Thinking through my last 5 rentals. A wedding that was 1 hour from an airport, ~100 miles RT. A ski trip where I wanted to drive from Denver to my AirBnB near Winter Park Colorado, ~200 miles RT. A hiking trip where I needed a second car for a point-to-point car shuttle (New Hampshire!), ~120 miles RT. A bachelor party where I needed to drive from the airpo…
I was very pessimistic about Tesla and confused by their stock price. But I now believe that they indeed are doing it and that we’re finally at the EV revolution. I’m not an early adopter type and the Teslas don’t excite me at all, but I’m really delighted that the market is evolving. I’m delighted that I was wrong.
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Just checked. At least Booking has a "ev charging station" filter when searching for places to stay.
There is one problem coming: people fighting over chargers. I was in a Target parking lot with two people fighting over who got to the charger first. Fortunately the mall 5 miles away has a Tesla outlet and a dozen underground charging slots.
Electric cars are actually a very good fit for many rentals. Thinking through my last 5 rentals. A wedding that was 1 hour from an airport, ~100 miles RT. A ski trip where I wanted to drive from Denver to my AirBnB near Winter Park Colorado, ~200 miles RT. A hiking trip where I needed a second car for a point-to-point car shuttle (New Hampshire!), ~120 miles RT. A bachelor party where I needed to drive from the airpo…
Wonder how the pricing and will be affected by the juice left in when you return it. And how their scheduling manages it.
Also, will “FSD” be enabled or disabled? There’s an interesting liability chain.
This is the best thing that could happen to EVs. If Hertz is throwing down, it's likely that National and Avis will follow suit. (National is partially owned by Ford, which might complicate things.) This was also my primary use case for Turo, so I'm excited to rent my favorite car from a conventional rental car company
It’s interesting that Hertz’s CEO is the former Ford CEO
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The cost of electricity is probably less than $5, plus the time they spend cleaning the car for the next person they can get to 80% charge
Wow! You are very optimistic about this. I assume you’ll eventually see a $50 “recharge” plus electrical costs marked up 100%. Or of course, you could just pre-pay and sign up for the $50 program and return it “empty”.
When you return a ICE car partially empty someone has to either bring gas to the vehicle or drive the vehicle to a pump.
Even though this is probably on-site it is very labor intensive and most rental places are pretty low staff. I could see future EV ones being entirely self service.
Anyway an EV can just be charged where you park assuming they wire each spot with an EV charger which I think makes sense since doing an n+1 charger is probably not much more.
I think the you will just pay whatever the normal charger electricity price would be.
How wonder how Hertz intends to handle turnaround delays. If I turn in an ICE car at noon, they can clean and gas it and (as a guess) a new customer can drive away in it at 12:15. With an electric, filling it with energy could take quite a long time. I'm sure Hertz considered that, but I wonder how that works into their calculations.