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

This stuff tends to be very complex. Writing off losses early doesn’t always help you. This is why depreciation rules are flexible and losses can be carried forwards.

For a public company with steady growth I imagine you generally want to amortize losses over a fairly long window. Also if you already had losses this year, and think you’ll grow more in future years, you really don’t want to book more losses now! Hertz has been getting hammered recently. Especially problematic if these are lumpy losses which will make profits less predictable. You’d rather smooth those out and hit your earnings forecast. (At least, that’s the CFO’s mandate.)

It gets even more complex when you consider the interplay with windfalls and rapid growth, but you can probably assume here that they are optimizing for short-to-medium term stock price (1-5 yr). Most CEOs don’t invest in 10yr bets. You might get fired for lackluster growth before that pays off!

More generally, “fiduciary duties” is generally construed pretty loosely. Delaware corporate law defers quite strongly to the corporation; if they can make a coherent argument for why they are benefitting shareholders they tend to get the benefit of the doubt.

I wholeheartedly disagree that rental companies are a bad place for EVs.

When I'm traveling and I know that I'm going to have to do a week of heavy driving, I prefer an EV to save on gas. I've rented a Tesla Model 3 from Hertz a couple of times for this purpose: when I did the calculations, the cheaper per-mile cost of using superchargers more than made up for the difference in rental price vs. an economy rental (the addition of free destination chargers when i found them was a bonus). The general driving experience was obviously better than an economy rental, as well.

I know it's not the case everywhere, but along my routes, I was able to find convenient superchargers in parking lots of stores that I wanted to visit (bubble tea, Target, etc), and the car was usually finished charging before i was finished in the store. The couple of times that i stopped at superchargers that didn't have a useful establishment nearby, i was able to appease the kids with the built-in video games.

When it was time to return the car, there was no run-around trying to find a gas station to fill up near the rental center: you can return the car with a quarter charge, and it's no problem, Hertz doesn't charge any additional charging fee.

It would have been nice if i didn't have to use key cards, and if i could use the app to, say, precondition the car. It also would have been nice if the videos saved by "sentry mode" were easier to batch clear. But these are quibbles; the rentals were absolutely worth it for me.

H2O is a pretty robust storage solution for H2.

The bigger issue is scaling down cracking stations so you can use stranded electricity from solar and wind to generate the H2.

Gasoline is not much of a fire hazard. (Compared to other things like a 32 ampere spark right next to a lithium battery, at least.)

I don't think the US is ready for a compressed gas powered car. Natural gas vehicles are basically gone except for some fleets, and there was already extensive distribution of natural gas. The fuel tanks on compressed gas cars expire, and chances are it won't be economical to replace them; it certainly wasn't economical to replace natural gas tanks when I was looking circa 2016. When cars are lasting longer and longer, having a 15 or 20 year ceiling on the life of a vehicle that's not connected to the amount of use is a problem. EV batteries might wear out over time, but that's more connected to number of charge cycles than how much time has passed.

Maybe it took too long, but we've got a single standard for high powered charging going forward, and I think J1772 is universal for PHEVs and slow charging of EVs. Eventually, people running charging networks will figure out how to keep their machines working and add card readers. My favorite broken charger is the wireless ones --- someone has run off with the cable, but hey the advertising display still works.