Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars

I tried renting one in Hawaii last month. Figured it would be a great idea on an island where I could drive all day and easily charge overnight. Wrong.

- Our hotel (and many others) did not offer EV charging. In most places, there was no assurance that the chargers would be functional.

- Oahu has very limited level 3 charging. Finding a supercharger meant driving out of the way.

- Hertz wanted me to top-it-off before returning. I was mindblown when I realized that they had a fleet of EVs but no in-house charging equipment.

Had Hertz offered to charge it themselves upon return, I would have still taken it, but asking me to sit around for a few extra hours at an L2 charger just before returning the vehicle was definitely a deal-breaker.

But hey, they hired Tom Brady (who also got paid to shill for FTX) to do their EV-focused commercials. Surely it's a good business when their commercials don't, you know, extol the benefits of their company and products, but instead hire a celebrity in a pretty low-brow disgusting way to try to sell a product: by pandering to the people with "hey, this famous person is in our commercial and for money he says our product is cool, so that means you should like it too, if you want to be cool like Tom Brady". Surely their fundamentals are rock solid.

i think you just described most marketing. its irrelevant

I feel like there's a big market opportunity to create an EV-only rental car agency that will eventually get rolled up by an Avis or Hertz.

Besides the body damage repair cost mentioned in the article, one other reason for Hertz' decision has to be customer complaints. Car rental agencies frequently have to give people a different car than the one they reserved and for whatever reason, a lot of Americans have a bone to pick with electric vehicles. Having traveled extensively for work over the years, I've seen some pretty stunning meltdowns from the people ahead of me in the Hertz line when they got, e.g., a Traverse instead of a Tahoe (i.e., a marginally smaller SUV than the one they reserved).

Imagine the theatrics that ensue at the Honolulu airport when an entitled boomer out of central casting (sorry to stereotype) gets a Bolt instead of the Malibu they reserved. I could totally see how such incidents, at scale, would bubble up to Hertz leadership and drive decisions.

It doesn't seem like there are any electric-only agencies out there except for the Tesla plan to let owners monetize their vehicles during owner downtime. Feels like a good market opportunity and the US Gov would probably subsidize the shit out of it.

I have been almost exclusively renting electric cars since late 2022. This makes total sense.

Tesla is very strict about their parts distribution. They will only send parts to authorized Tesla service centers, of which there aren't that many.

This is extremely unfortunate for rental cars, as they get beat to absolute shit and are in a near constant state of repair.

I've rented several Teslas from Hertz and Avis. Almost all of them have had at least one visible non-OEM replacement part on them, and half of them had that part installed incorrectly. Examples:

- A replacement backup camera that was pointed way too far downwards. Because this car didn't have ultrasonic sensors, it couldn't do distance estimates reliably. Parking that thing was like going straight back to 2006 every time.

- A passenger-side window that didn't align with the top of the window frame, causing air to leak into the cabin and kW/h averages to skyrocket.

- Heaps of el cheapo tires. This isn't a problem specific to Tesla, but it's a worse problem with Teslas since their cabins are already loud as they are and non-EV-rated tires throw off energy consumption.

It's not _as bad_ with Hertz since they are a Tesla partner, but it's the wild west with other rental car companies. Teslas offered by Avis are almost entirely bought individually from who knows where and I think every single Tesla I've rented from Avis has had something up with it.

I can also believe their claim regarding low customer adoption. Most of Hertz and Avis's customers are business travelers on corporate expense accounts. When they want to rent a car, they need a car _now_ and do not want to worry about things like fueling and parking the car.

Teslas are a completely different experience from a "normal" car. Their interior is also very polarizing, especially now that Tesla is experimenting with a stalk-less steering wheel cluster. This makes it not only more difficult for rental car companies to put those cars to work, but it also adds toil in the backend from dealing with car returns and clogging the (almost always understaffed) reservation desk with exchanges.

Non-Tesla EVs are also impacted by this. Many business travelers just _won't_ with charging apps, especially when they only fuel the cars either just after getting them or just before returning them.