Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

681–690 of 834 posts

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

#681

Im bullish on EVs but I feel like rental cars are one of the worst places for the current generation of EVs. EVs are best for the types of driving we do on a day-to-day basis. Short commutes in areas we know well. Charge at home over night and 95% of the year you never worry about charging. Renting a car means I'm usually either driving long distances or im somewhere new and I don't know about the local charging infr…

> Charge at home over night If you have a private garage. I live in a (non-US) city where there's shared garages (those who do have a garage, a lot of them just park outside) which are old and not always have power sockets. And even if they do, I don't think you're entitled to use them to charge your car. And do EVs work with standard power sockets, or needs some special stuff? I've never driven an EV.

Most EVs seem to come with cables that work with regular power sockets, they're just more limited on output even compared to regular charging (not fast charging, which btw reduces battery life).

I don't know where outside the US you live but in some countries tenants have the right to install a charging station. Of course they're not exactly cheap, especially if the wiring isn't set up to handle that kind of load (from personal experience: charging your car while the washing machine is running on the same circuit in an old house is an easy way to trip the breaker).

Private charging stations can also be installed outdoors just fine and strangers stealing your power is not a problem either (the plug can't be removed if the car is locked and you can literally switch the charger off if you're not using it). Most public chargers don't have a roof so charging your car in the open isn't exactly odd.

Also in many countries even more rural areas now have charging stations. Often you can pay a flat fee per month to freely use charging stations on the same network or to do so at significantly reduced rates. In my case there's even a nearby charging station that charges approximately the same rate I pay for my home electricity provider - although the speed is also similar so it's not very useful if you don't plan to leave your car for a few hours.

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

#682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 12 Ionity chargers in Greater Manchester, plus 18 Tesla ones. I've used both sets. You seem to be confusing home/destination chargers and rapid chargers - which is a common mistake for non-EV drivers to make. Unlike petrol, electricity comes to you.

> You seem to be confusing home/destination chargers and rapid chargers Well, or they went to https://ionity.eu/en/network/network-status or https://www.zap-map.com/live/ looked at Manchester and it listed only one Ionity charger, "Manchester East".

This.

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

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swappable batteries are a huge fire hazard. They stopped doing that even for scooters. Too dangerous.

Who's they? There were thousands of shcooters with swappable batteries riding around Taiwan when I was there in November.

Correct.

Gogoro currently do more than 400,000 battery swaps / day, primarily in Taiwan, but are expanding into other Asian countries.

https://www.gogoro.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gogoro

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

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery swapping is also not very accessible, not evening can lift 50+ pounds

Oh battery swapping would be entirely automated, no way you'd do it at home (let alone on the reg). Nio Inc. has videos of the process, and that's what you'd expect (and I assume what tesla tried at one time), you drive to a booth, the car gets locked in and the battery is replaced automatically, then you drive out.

Who owns the battery?

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

#685
I rented a Tesla on a recent trip lasting a few days, and I feel there are other reasons for which is a bad rental car than charging.

I've rented a lot of cars, but when I got this one I spent ten minutes completely dumbfounded trying to get it going. They gave me a key card but I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Swipe it, I guess, but where? I tried the door, but the pillar? Would've never guessed until looking online. Pretty much all other cars have keyless entry with a push button on the handle. I couldn't figure out how to adjust the side mirrors, which I always need to do in any rental, until I gave up and looked online.

Oh and when I got to where I needed to go, I left the car unlocked because I couldn't figure out how to lock it out or even whether I had locked it. I might have even left it running so that someone could have driven it off, for all I know.

I am very used to Android Auto in rentals, which I love because of easy access to the places that I care about (vs the last place than some other rental customer went to), the music that I care about, and the voice assistant that I'm used to. Instead I found the Tesla screen beautiful but distracting and useless without Android Auto.

It felt like a design very focused on eliminating hardware controls that are commonplace on most cars - very unusual - and with a strong proprietary, "we know better" bent.

So I feel like if you're going to have EVs in your rental fleet, maybe a Hyundai or Kia or Chevy is a better choice than Tesla.

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

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh battery swapping would be entirely automated, no way you'd do it at home (let alone on the reg). Nio Inc. has videos of the process, and that's what you'd expect (and I assume what tesla tried at one time), you drive to a booth, the car gets locked in and the battery is replaced automatically, then you drive out.

Who owns the battery?

In the NIO case, NIO owns the battery and you pay a monthly leasing fee. One interesting feature this allows is that you can lease a cheaper low capacity battery for the 48-50 weeks of the year you drive less then 100 miles a day, and upgrade to a more expensive high capacity battery for the few times you're driving far.

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

#687
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn’t make any sense at all. The point of storing H2 is to use it as a way to store energy. If you store it as H2O, you’re not storing energy any more, it’s just water. It’s like saying, “It’s easy to ship fragile glass sculptures. You just smash them into little bits and put the bits in an envelope, I don’t see why people use all that styrofoam.”

>It’s like saying, “It’s easy to ship fragile glass sculptures. You just smash them into little bits and put the bits in an envelope, I don’t see why people use all that styrofoam

You’re obviously not a New Yorker

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

#688

Im bullish on EVs but I feel like rental cars are one of the worst places for the current generation of EVs. EVs are best for the types of driving we do on a day-to-day basis. Short commutes in areas we know well. Charge at home over night and 95% of the year you never worry about charging. Renting a car means I'm usually either driving long distances or im somewhere new and I don't know about the local charging infr…

Yes. Recently I rented a car and put nearly 3,500 miles on it in a week, most of that in very desolate places in the Western USA. In Nevada, we would drive for hundreds and hundreds of miles without seeing another car, much less a EV charging station. I’d hate to be out there in something with as limited a range as an EV.

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

#689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 12 Ionity chargers in Greater Manchester, plus 18 Tesla ones. I've used both sets. You seem to be confusing home/destination chargers and rapid chargers - which is a common mistake for non-EV drivers to make. Unlike petrol, electricity comes to you.

> You seem to be confusing home/destination chargers and rapid chargers Well, or they went to https://ionity.eu/en/network/network-status or https://www.zap-map.com/live/ looked at Manchester and it listed only one Ionity charger, "Manchester East".

Doesn't really matter, but that's one location that contains multiple chargers.

Of course, very few people that live in Greater Manchester would use a really fast charger like those there whilst in Greater Manchester. Maybe if you're a taxi driver, or caught short somehow? This is the confusion I was talking about.

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

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me battery swapping makes no sense for consumer cars unless it’s used to significantly increase prices (possibly by removing home charging as well): battery swapping requires a ton more maintenance, space, infrastructure, and logistics, constrains vehicles enormously, and requires a very small number of standard battery formats.

Battery swapping is also not very accessible, not evening can lift 50+ pounds

https://www.nio.cn/charger-map

This map has real time stats on battery swap. Unfortunately it's only available in Chinese. NIO has done 35 million battery swap to date and you can see where the swap stations are located. Not quite as accessible as your gas stations but not far off especially in the large cities.

Post reply on HN