It's quite simple to figure out, once you understand no electric charging and consumption can happen without the knowledge of the car computer, which is programmed by Tesla, which just received a $5 bilion dolar order from Hertz. Surely they can fit a bit of Hertz-specific "charge monitoring" code in this price tag.
In fact, electrics open up a whole world of pricing and customer ripoff models.
Instead of charging you $5 a gallon, they can even charge $.50 per kWh (or translate it to miles) and that's something like a 3x markup. Even more if they use a renewable energy source.
In my rough calculations, it costs something like $5-$7 to charge from empty to full on my Model-3 mid-range.
My ICE car is $50-$70 to fill the tank (26gal/100l) from empty to full. And gets me 450-500 miles. So I'm a tad bit jealous, just not enough to take on a car payment.
Our second car is an older Beetle and we've kept it around for exactly that reason, it's paid off, and even the occasional repairs needed on it annually are way cheaper than a monthly auto loan payment. When I used to commute (pre-COVID, I'm never, ever going back to that), we still used it.
Exactly. When you are running late to get to the airport, stopping to charge your Tesla is a bigger delay than stopping to gas up a car, so this will likely give them even more people they can gouge.
And having a charger at the hotel you stay out won't be enough considering how many times I have filled up the tank the night before, but they could still tell that I used gas just driving from the hotel to the airport.
"San Francisco area households paid an average of 26.3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity in September 2021." [1].
The standard Model 3 has a 50kWh battery, so the cost is roughly $13.
If you charge between 23:00-07:00 the cost is reduced to $7 [2], though presumably that incurs the cost of installing an extra meter. It would be $9.50 sticking with a single meter for house + car.
(For what it's worth, in Denmark the lowest I'm charged is currently double the night rate for PG&E, although the peak day rate is similar. It varies depending on demand and how windy it is forecast to be [3]. But petrol is $2.10/L, so the other commenter's 100L car would be $210 to fill — though at 12.5L/100km, it's pretty inefficient. New vehicles in the US use 9L/100km, in the EU new vehicles average under 5L/100km.)
[1] is not a good measure, because of low income subsidies not everyone qualifies for. I live in the Bay area, and I pay 35-41 cents/kwh in summer. Now if I charge during the nights with the EV plan, I get preferential price of 14 cents/kwh but that makes my day time use (for other things) that much more expensive. Sorry, I didn't mention I drive a long range model 3, and quoted the price for it, not the parent's mid range.
So if they're doing it the way EHI's been doing it: there won't be a need to recharge. I've received half-full EVs from EHI and returned them almost entirely discharged without any surcharges.
I deeply hope they don't charge you for electricity, that would be a huge bummer and really counterproductive to their goal of having these luxury cars actually feel luxurious.
LFP batteries can be fully charged and Tesla is switching their standard range vehicles to LFP. It's possible that Hertz is ordering standard range / LFP Teslas.
Car rental companies aren't in it for the long term. iirc they hang on to a vehicle for an average of something like 8 or 9 months (Was told this many, many years ago, so probably a bit out of date, but probably not off by much.)
