The article posits charging as the problem but that's not actually true.
The issue was twofold:
1. Repair cost and parts availability. Fleet damage was more expensive to repair and took longer. That means more of the fleet is offline at any given time and cost to operate is a bit higher.
2. Tesla lowered prices forcing them to recognize the depreciation. The cars resale value dropped faster than they anticipated.
Car and RV rental companies have this problem. People don't want to rent ragged out vehicles. In the case of RVs units for rental are built extra cheap so they don't last anyway. The model is get more in rent then you lose in depreciation then dump the vehicle. In the case of RVs they often turnover the entire fleet yearly.
The real killer was no doubt depreciation. That breaks the whole rental car model.
Not sure why you think charging is not the problem.
I am a very heavy user of rentals (300+ rentals last year, 200+ the year before - max status on National / Enterprise, Hertz and Avis) and I've rented an EV (Tesla Model 3) exactly once.
Most users don't have the time to think about places to charge and even more so, to bring it back at 80%
Not to mention, outside of major metropolitan areas (US and Canada), charging infrastructure is spotty at best (esp. if you don't plan for it).
This makes charging an added hurdle that takes away from the experience.
If you're a business user - you don't do it because you don't have the time and if you're a leisure user - you don't do it because your vacation time is valuable and spending time at charging stations that are usually out of the way is not ideal time spent for an expensive vacation)
I own an EV, I wouldn't rent one except: single day, and don't make me recharge it. The infrastructure sucks. I don't install charger apps on my phone; the number of chargers that just take a credit card and don't require an account -- even my local power utility requires a special card to access their network!
With my own car, in my home town, it isn't a problem. My garage has a lvl1 charger for grocery getting; I know a few account-free fast chargers around town, and that's all I need. A multi-day trip, or a rental company putting the onus on me to return it full, just isn't worthwhile.
A thousand times this. Hertz dumped a Polestar on me on a 6 week trip in Britain and it was absolutely ridiculous. No cash option anywhere. Most charging stations didn't even accept a credit card, and those that did required installing a badly written app that only works 20% of the time. Most apps/chargers only link your bank account, and I'm a fucking tourist, I don't have a bank account. And to top it all off, absolutely no charger anywhere gives out receipts, so I couldn't present the receipts/invoices for tax purposes.
That's just not true of the UK market. Most fast chargers accept credit cards using a contactless reader - indeed, by law, they will soon all have to. Of the main charging networks app based payments:
Shell - charges to your credit card,
BP Pulse - credit account topped by by credit card,
PodPoint - credit account topped up by credit card,
VendElectric - credit account topped up by credit card,
Fuuse/evpoint - charges to your credit card,
Mer - charges to your credit card,
ChargePoint - credit account topped up by credit card
You probably know better than me, but in those 6 weeks I drove in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and I charged a lot, in many different stations. Many did not accept a credit card:
In Scotland, many chargers only accepted some specialty charging card that foreigners can't buy.
Many stations claimed they do accept credit cards, but when I got there, card payments were conveniently "disabled at this time".
Apps that did take credit card _all_ refused to work with non-British billing addresses. The only app I got to work was ChargePoint, and I only succeeded in that after many trails and errors, looking for ways to trick it into thinking I was British and getting it to successfully charge my card (which eventually I did). And they do not charge your card per session, they randomly bill your card based on usage predictions. They still haven't returned me the 75 pounds they stole from me on the last day of my rental, because they figured I was surely going to need them soon.
And again, no receipts anywhere.
All in all, it was an awful experience.
EDIT: I only now notice that I wrote _most_ stations only link with your credit card. That's most probably an exaggeration, I suppose that was just the impression I ended with. All in all, I wasted exorbitant amounts of time on that trip purely on charging. Quite a few stations also failed on me, now that I'm ranting. In Northern Ireland, chargers often could not be used because there was no cell reception so I couldn't use the app, and cards were not accepted. One charger abruptly terminated my session mid-charge and made a scary noise and refused to work again. Turns out the charger stopped because _it itself_ lost Internet connection.
Ah, Scotland is a whole different country... :) Charging networks in the UK evolved from a set of regional schemes commissioned by the Government under the Plugged-In-Places programme. At that time, it couldn't be assumed that drivers had smartphones and contactless payment was still fairly new, so RFID cards were the exclusive route for accessing chargers. Many of these networks then folded into commercial providers in time, such as Source East being taken over by BP Pulse. During the programme you'd pay £10 for the card for the year, then all charging was free.
Charge Place Scotland continued to be run by the Scottish Government.
> non-British billing addresses
I can feel your pain there.
>And they do not charge your card per session, they randomly bill your card based on usage predictions.
ChargePoint has an auto-topup mechanism when your balance drops below a defined amount. The trick is to set the top up amount to be small.
> And again, no receipts anywhere.
In the app go to "Account" then "Monthly Statement". Select the month you care about, then share it using your email client. A PDF will be attached.
> All in all, it was an awful experience.
The big issue we've had has been with broken chargers and, at least in the past, a proliferation of charge networks. There's more roaming coming now, partly mandated by law, but the reliability issue still remains.
And yes, renting an EV in a market you're not familiar with is a pain. I've had that landed on me when visiting the USA, too.
> I only now notice that I wrote _most_ stations only link with your credit card.
I take it you don't have a tesla? I've had a non-tesla EV and the infrastructure did suck.
The infrastructure for a tesla is significantly better, and you don't have to install an app - everything is right there built into the car. It will add charging stops as part of navigation if you want. The superchargers are plentiful, have lots of stalls (rarely full) and are very fast. There is no fumbling with apps, credit cards or payment authorization, you just plug in.
With a Tesla you don't install apps or use a credit card. You just plug into their Superchargers (which are automatically added to your route if the car needs to charge to get to your destination). In the US, the largest gap between superchargers is Coeur d'Alene, Idaho to St. Regis, Montana (94 miles). I've gone on road trips all over the western US and never worried about charging.
1. You're talking about Tesla ownership, not rental.
2. You still need a very specific payment source, even if it's not physically on you at the time of purchase. If you're a foreigner, this may be literally impossible for you. Many places only work by linking with your local bank account. Tourists do not have local bank accounts.
I see, as far as I know that is not possible with Tesla rental in the UK (where my experience was). This is nice, but does it work with non-Superchargers? I wouldn't want to be tied down to one provider on vacation. Superchargers are rare in some countries.
The article is about Hertz renting out Teslas in the US. That's what I was talking about, and that's what I thought you were talking about because you didn't mention that your experience was based on renting a different brand of EV in a different country.
Teslas work fine with 3rd party chargers. It's just that (as you noticed with your Polestar rental) 3rd party chargers are inconvenient and tend to be poorly maintained.
That's cool, but I'm not a tesla owner and I don't live in your country. When speaking of an international rental firm, I hope you understand that I'm going to base my expectations on past experiences, and not the best-case story of a tesla owner in a country I actively avoid traveling to.
The experience of renting a Tesla from Hertz is the same across countries. You can use Superchargers just like if you owned the vehicle. Hertz adds the charging costs to your bill. And looking at Tesla's charging map, the density of chargers in Europe is greater than in the western US. When I drove to Salt Lake City (800 miles), there were 14 Superchargers along the route. A similar trip in the EU or UK would have twice as many.
Basing your expectations on past experiences makes sense, but it also makes sense to update those expectations based on the reports of people who have been there and done that, so to speak.
Between the site guidelines and Tesla's (in)famous lack of PR, I am compelled to assume that you are not a shill.
But it always astounds me how reliably Tesla owners attempt to convince me that water isn't wet. It really feels like you're trying to sell me on renting a Tesla from Hertz. But Hertz has written down their Teslas and they're replacing them with ICE vehicles. So why are you trying to convince me that renting a Tesla from Hertz is a good experience, when I can't even do that today? If it's such a good experience, what is this article about? What do you know that the finance wonks at Hertz don't know?
Sell to me. Why do I want to rent a car that's renowned for its big-screen touch interface, drunk&stoned UX decisions like the yoke, hitting parked emergency vehicles, and uploading livefeeds from the cabin for Tesla employees' amusement? What's the actual valprop over a Yaris, which has never tried to steer me into oncoming traffic? (message between the lines: attempt to entice me with FSD, or autopilot, and you will only undermine your case)
Because right now you're trying to move me from "charging a rental in a foreign country isn't stress I need in my life" to "this guy on the internet thinks that charging a Tesla is almost as easy as gassing up a Yaris." And that's still a million miles from sold.
First, you said that EVs don’t have enough charging infrastructure for road trips, and you complained about charging apps, so I explained how that wasn’t a problem with Teslas (which is what this article is about). Then you said that it was different for rented Teslas in other countries, so I explained how that wasn't the case. Now you claim I’m trying to get you to use a Tesla. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I’ve never driven a Jeep. I don’t particularly care for Jeeps. But if someone says to me that they own a Jeep and it can do X, I’ll give that some credence. Sure they may be a Jeep fan, but they also have lots of experience with Jeeps. I definitely wouldn’t say, “That's cool, but I'm not a Jeep owner and I don't live in your country. I hope you understand that I'm going to base my expectations on past experiences, and not the best-case story of a Jeep owner in a country I actively avoid traveling to.” That would be rude and unproductive.
If the Jeep owner ignored the insult and said, “Actually Jeeps in other countries are quite similar and can also do X.”, I definitely would not reply by talking about how Jeep fans always try to convince me that Jeeps are great, yet they refuse to acknowledge Jeep’s poor reliability, lack of curtain airbags, rollover propensity, etcetera. To a neutral reader, that might come off like someone who is incapable of changing their mind.
This depends a lot on where you are. I rented >10 times from Hertz in the UK last year, got an EV every time (mostly Polestar), and drove thousands of miles. Chargers are, now days, pretty much everywhere that you need them to be. Absolutely no issues charging, aside from the extortionate cost of a few of them, perhaps!
UK law requires that all new chargers support "ad-hoc" payment with a credit/debit card, which makes everything very easy and convenient (although often you can get a discounted rate by using membership-based apps).
I'm trying to imagine having to have an account or install an app to gas up my Pontiac and I'm like ... gulp I better take really good care of this car.
On top of this, most times when I am renting, is via an airport. Airports are everywhere, but not everywhere. They're 1-6 hours from whereever you're going. And if your destination is say 4 hours from the airport, necessarily one is going to be worrying about charging as such. That alone slaughters the business model.
Easy solution for Hertz: don’t require it to be changed upon return. Where I live a full 100% charge from zero at residential prices is $8. It’d also improve the customer experience I bet, especially over gas cars where you either need to refuel or get nickel and dimed on yet another thing
From Hertz perspective, that car is now out of commission for half a day. Car rental companies rely on getting cars back on the road as quickly as possible once a rental period ends. A fleet that is parked, charging or waiting to be charged, is actively costing them money.
I’m pretty sure that if they’re using even remotely fast chargers, cleaning and inspection (and associated queuing) would take most of that time. I also suspect that most rental places aren’t so close to capacity that someone returning a car a few hours late would block a customer from pickup. There’s a certain amount of slack in the inventory.
I rented from an airport car rental once and the lot was _full_ of unused cars, and this was RDU which is a fairly high-volume airport. I can imagine you’d maybe have issues if you wanted a very specific kind of car, but even then I doubt you couldn’t find something comparable for around the same price
It's going to get charged to 80% only. That takes half an hour if they install DC fast chargers. That's how long a walk around inspection for damage and cleaning of the car inside/out takes.
That costs money of course. Let's pretend we're NOT on hackernews where we all love to talk technicalities.
This isn't about tech or practicalities. This is a decision about money. It's not worth installing all the infrastructure, it's not worth getting repairs slowly done out-of-house, it's not worth taking on depreciation of epic proportions, it's not worth having to educate customers and employees on how to use new cars and new processes.
2 hours is still a lot longer than 5 minutes. Rapid turnover is important for these folks. I've seen rental companies run out of cars numerous times. Two hours is tough. Plus, how about when dozens of cars have been turned in and are waiting on a charge? If anything, they are most likely to levy a higher fee for returning uncharged because of their lost time.
It would seem ideal to have the line-up area where cars are turned in, inspected and cleaned set up with a bunch of retractable charger leads in the ceiling, ala shop air. As soon as you pull up, the attendant pulls down a lead and plugs the car in. Bam.
It seems like the same economics of tweaking the size of the fee for returning a rental Tesla uncharged, which is a flat $35 fee ($25 for Hertz Gold Club members) [0] vs the much higher rental cost ~$60-200/day [1], then most customers will skip recharging and pay the fee; just like returning an ICE car without refuelling (or comparable to returning it 1-2hrs later than the agreed time). Then it's Hertz's business model's challenge to figure out how to incentivize/penalize their customers. (If you return it at 79% do you still pay the same fee as if 10%? This is harsher than the unfuelled ICE penalty).
If Hertz has a "morning/evening rush hour gap" between when uncharged EVs are returned vs when they're charged and cleaned and available again, then (just like surge pricing, or same-day standby offers that airlines make when oversold) maybe send individual customers $$ incentives the evening before to charge it or return it earlier.
And as for improving first-time customer experience of renting EVs, Hertz has an incentive to do better with steering them towards reserving a hotel/motel with L1/L2 chargers (give them a coupon for the price premium), or at least nearby ones. At least on their last night before returning. Or help them plan out which nights it'll need recharge, based on their itinerary, then factor that advice into suggested hotel booking.
And another idea: the Hertz app could set reminders the day before for "If you want to return your car at 8am charged, and you estimate the return trip will take 45min and 8% of battery, then you need to charge overnight, or else start charging by (say) 5am, to 88%".
I don't see any of this as a limitation of EVs, just figuring out how to incentivize behavior modification in rental customers, improve the app, teach customers how to plan for it, give coupons, do hotel partnerships etc. If the Hertz app won't, then a calendaring or driving-directions app could.
> "Not sure why you think charging is not the problem... Most users don't have the time to think about places to charge and even more so, to bring it back at 80%"
Nobody is forcing you to bring it back with 80%. Hertz's charging fees are not extortionate or unreasonable. If you don't have the time or inclination, just return it as-is and pay the per-kWh charging fee. It isn't all that much more than what it would cost you to supercharge it anyway!
(I don't disagree that charging is a problem when it comes to car rentals, but for the most part it's a psychological problem, not a real one.)
I'm curious, what's the point of renting 300 cars in a year? Why not just buy a car? That's close to renting a car daily, no? Unless you're flying to different places and renting cars there every day?
it was mostly for work (I was home for less than 1 month including weekends) & some vacations (~15-20 rentals for vacations). My car was also stolen and wreaked and due to the auto shortage, it took insurance 3 months to get me a new car (meaning, 3 months of rentals - each for 1 week term).
Never rented a Tesla through Hertz, but I did rent one through Turo once. The owner did stipulate that I return the car fully charged. However, he pointed out hotels in the area that offered charging. So, I just charged the night before I returned the car; couldn't have been easier. Not sure if Hertz has/had coordination with hotels that offer EV charging, but that would help in a lot of cases.
Yes, I think this was the primary reason actually. It only takes 1-2 times renting it before you realize that returning at 80% is a major hassle.
It's also a ridiculous stipulation since Hertz could easily charge the cars themselves. Instead they invested heavily in the EVs while keeping their archaic rule about returning at 80%. I wonder how much they could have made without this.
If they allowed returning at 20% it becomes less hassle than a gas car because many trips wouldn't require any charging at all and a much better user experience.
Filling up and then expensing gas while running late for a flight is super stressful, trying to charge an EV in that same scenario is like 10x worse.
I rented a model 3 twice. One time I brought it back charged. The other time I dropped it off uncharged. I think it was $25? I didn't think it was that big a deal, doing the same with a gas car would have been 3-4x the price.
>Not to mention, outside of major metropolitan areas (US and Canada), charging infrastructure is spotty at best (esp. if you don't plan for it).
EV owner here. It’s VERY state and location dependent.
Generally speaking, if you’re following an interstate, charging won’t be a problem even “in the middle of nowhere”. If you aren’t following an interstate, in general, “red” states that haven’t had any programs to build out infrastructure are a nightmare compared to “blue” states that have. Tesla in general is far better about charging in the boonies than CCS.
I used to essentially be a consultant (left that life behind this year). My title was Junior Partner / Assoc Director.
I'd on one hand advice executives (public, private & gov) on strategy (usually focused on tech but also growth, finance etc.) and work with on-the-ground staff to figure out what was going on & implement changes (meaning tons of travel between my home base - Toronto, to on-site - all over US / CA, to engagement HQs - usually NYC / Washington / Chicago / Seattle / Nashville etc.)
I also took tons of (very-short) vacations in-between because I used to get super burnt-out (eg. my last day was Dec 31, and I ended up working at a client from Dec 5th to Jan 1st and flew back on the 1st to start my new job on the 2nd) and I love driving so I'd rent cars and drive all over (eg. Toronto to NYC to DC or Seattle to Vancouver to Whistler to Kamloops to Edmonton to Calgary, Toronto to Halifax etc.)
I used to joke that in general, any car I rented would come back with at least 1k km if I had it for more than 2 - 3 days)
Fun life (I'm just turning 29), enjoyed my job (tons of perks like I earned points for a lifetime on Air Canada and Marriott - my family used to joke that I'd treat my home as a hotel as I spent more time in hotels than at home), but I was grossly underpaid (I gave up a role that paid me 2x what I would have made for this) and I ended up on the wrong side of the politics at the consultancy (big 4) so I left on my terms (for a much better role) before I'd have been forced to.
The other issue is people rent cars where they do not live and are unfamiliar.
No one wants to hunt for a charging station when they need to get to a business meeting on time or enjoy their vacation.
It is also a change in consumer behavior. EV owners just aren’t that big a percentage of the total market, and ICE users aren’t going to learn EV on a business trip to unfamiliar territory.
It's interesting Tesla did not take the opportunity to install chargers at the rental dealerships at no cost or reduced cost, and have the rental company offer "no need to charge before you return it" deal.
I'm not sure why you think charging anxiety couldn't have been one of the factors. TFA calls it out as one. Charging is one of the main concerns with ownership and that would be even more of a challenge with a rental car in an unfamiliar area.
Absolutely. My local paper's environmental columnist recently rented an EV and chronicled the experience. [1] There were so many compromises involved, largely related to charging/range. For example, she had to walk in the cold (Maine) from her hotel to her car, which she was charging overnight elsewhere. She also had to skip part of her trip due to lack of range.
The columnist concludes the sacrifices were worth it, given her dedication to environmentalism. The vast, vast majority of people would not choose her experience to be a little greener.
It's all about charger coverage. As a large group we rented 2 Volkswagen ID.4's in Norway over the Christmas holidays (think -4 degrees F so we were getting about half the advertised range) and it was never a limiting factor. Anywhere we went we could top up, from the grocery store down to the cabin that was quite out in the boonies, never had to fight for a charger spot either.
It is not about charger coverage. When I have a 7:00 flight after an all day meeting I don't want to or can't budget the time required to fully charge an EV on my way to the airport. It's all about time.
At cold temps you lose range a few different ways:
First heat in an EV isn't free, this is usually where it gets you. People get in go "oh man its cold" and crank up the heat and there goes range. When you see one of the "this person ran out of power waiting in line at the Tesla charger in winter time" pictures this is how they did it.
Second battery efficiency goes down.
Finally, the battery usually is constantly doing the regen breaking thing but in cold weather it doesn't to save pack wear until you get the pack warm again
At least last time I checked, Teslas had rather anemic battery heaters. IIRC they’re around 6kW.
6kW is not enough to make a big dent in required mechanical braking, and it’s also not enough to quickly heat the battery pack, especially when operated intermittently.
I thought GP was referring to generating heat for HVAC, which is an interesting idea. I assume one challenge would be getting the warmth from the brakes to the cabin.
The problem is that cold batteries can't charge or discharge quickly. From the battery's point of view, regenerative braking is the same as fast charging (just for a very short period of time). When the battery is very cold (or almost full), Teslas regen as much as they can, then use the friction brakes to keep a consistent feel for one pedal driving. The battery does have fluid pumped through it for heating/cooling, but it can take some time before the pack is warm enough to charge/discharge at its rated capacity. The longest I've had a cold battery notice is 20 minutes, and that was after my car sat at 0ºF overnight.
My thought was to use the regen braking electricity for (more) resistive heating when it has nowhere else to go. It's an extra thing that only gets some use (depending on climate), but not a very expensive extra thing and takes some load off your pad/rotor brakes.
The battery is warmed by the heat pump (or if you have an older model, the resistive heating coils). That component can only take so much power. A more powerful heat pump would cost more, take up more space, and weigh more. My guess is that Tesla designed their heat pump based on these tradeoffs.
The density of air at 20ºC (293ºK) is 1.204kg/m^3. At -10ºC (263ºK) its density is 1.341kg/m^3, or 11% denser. For a Model 3 moving at 100kph, about half of its power is used to overcome air drag and half is used to overcome rolling resistance. Air drag is 1/2 * density * velocity^2 * coefficient of drag * area, so an 11% increase in density means an 11% increase in drag, so a ≈5.5% decrease in range. That's significantly less than typical cold weather range loss.
Most of the range loss comes from climate control. In a combustion car, the majority of the energy in the gasoline is turned into heat. In cold weather, you just dump some of this heat into the cabin to keep it warm. An EV's efficiency is a disadvantage in this case, as it needs to use energy from the battery to heat up the cabin.
I don't have the exact numbers there but the HVAC system should draw ~2kW at full throttle. Giving an average of, let say, 160Wh/km (speaking of a recent Tesla M3 for example) at highway speed. Over an hour of full throttle heating you would have consumed in heating an extra ~10% of what you spent to move the car. So OK, maybe air drag increase is not the worst offender here but it's not just the HVAC system.
...
While writing this I searched a bit and according to this [1] when there is really cold temperature and the battery still haven't got warm, it can draw 5-6kW at the beginning. Anyway when driving motors heat up, the heat is used to warm the battery, the battery heats up as well and all that heat is used by the heat pump to warm the inside of the vehicle.
I have a PHEV and when I turn on the heat as I'm pulling out of my garage, the range is cut by 30%. This has nothing to do with drag since I'm backing out at 2 MPH. It's just about the HVAC system, which uses a lot of power. I typically just use the seat warmer, but when my kids are in the backseat I have to run the heat as well.
I very much doubt this. I've never seen this having a notably measurable effect on ICE vehicles in Massachusetts winters (which can be cold but aren't notably arctic).
Yes. You use twice as much electricity to go the same distance.
Gas cars lose efficiency in the cold too, but it’s less drastic. Only stats I can find are 15% loss at 20F (which is a lot warmer than -4F).
Also, charging tends to be much slower in the cold as batteries need to be warm to accept full charge rate. If you’re cruising on the highway it’s usually not too bad, but if you start from an overnight stop and then try to immediately charge the car you could be waiting for the battery to warm up.
> Does this mean the electricity you paid for went half as long?
No, the battery simply isn't able to hold as much energy because the chemical process that makes it work "slows" down (my basic understanding of electrons, someone feel free to correct me).
My brother lives in Maine and has two electric cars. I have one and travel in Maine a few times a year. It's a particularly bad state for charging. I'm not sure why that is.
I imagine the temperature doesn't help. Compared to CA (where the columnist is from), the average temp is probably 20° colder, which could cut 15% off the range.
This is unlikely to be the central factor, given that Norway, one of the few inhabited places which is colder than Maine, has the highest rate of electric car ownership in the world.
That's in spite of the range issue, and is due to the Norwegian government carrot-and-sticking heavily towards electric. Maine has no such incentives, and is sparsely populated, which doesn't play to the strengths of electric cars.
Norway has huge financial incentives for buying EVs, including exemption from VAT and registration fees. This has added up to billions of USD in subsidies, [1] and is why there are so many EVs in Norway. I'd be very surprised if their neighbors, who have similar climate but fewer incentives, see the same rate of adoption.
Norway shows that you can have EVs in a place that is very cold if you shovel cash at buyers. It doesn't prove that weather wouldn't be a central factor in a place like Maine.
Also worth noting that in Norway, they will often have cars with engine block heaters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater), with associated plug points in parking spaces/places.
Makes it much easier if there's already infrastructure.
Maine is sparsely populated, but most of its population is concentrated in a narrow strip along the coast. Actually, this is probably true of Norway as well.
Yeah, the cold hurts the range, but not all that much. The central (I was going to say "main") thing is that Maine is a charging desert.
Bar Harbor, the destination of most of the out-of-state Teslas, has almost nowhere to charge. I went to a hotel once which promised to have 4 level-2 Tesla chargers. All of the spots were occupied by ICE trucks. I went in to point out this problem to the clerk. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "they're probably our customers." Apparently the chargers were just there to lure in suckers. "Yes, we have chargers, but good luck using one. They tend to be parked in by ICE pickup trucks. We're helpless to do anything about this." I failed to check to see whether the trucks had Maine plates. They didn't look like typical customers of this hotel.
Around Portland things are a bit better. And new stations are being put it. It's just behind neighboring states.
- It's a cold state in winter and there's at least the perception that you don't want an EV in places with cold winters. (I see few enough Teslas in the wild in exurban Boston.)
- It's a relatively poor state.
- I imagine pickups and the like are disproportionately represented.
- It's big and sparsely populated as you say.
A friend of mine who lives in Boston but owns a house on a bunch of land in northern Vermont finally got a Tesla when he convinced himself there was sufficient buffer for weekly trips between the two places.
Articles like that make it all sound so complicated and hard!
TBH, the experience of most Tesla owners is just put the dest in the map and charge when needed on the way.
The one clear problem that is highlighted in that article is that hotel, or more generally destination, charging makes a huge difference. People think it is all about getting there, but it really is the being there that can be tricky.
Rental cars magnify this problem, which is why it was so strange that Hertz expanded the fleet so rapidly. Scaling the same move over 3 years would have had very different results(*).
(*) Maybe other than maintenance costs. There were odd rental effects in that from the stories that I've heard.
> of most Tesla owners is just put the dest in the map and charge when needed
Do you think that's because it's far easier to charge your car at home while you are sleeping? And that renters who lack this convenience or face difficulty achieving it might be put out by the experience during a possibly expensive and rare vacation?
It's because Tesla's navigation automatically adds charging stops to the route. Also you add billing info when you set up your Tesla account (which the car is tied to) so you don't do anything besides plug in. While you're driving you can see on your car's screen how busy nearby chargers are, whether any stalls are out of commission (an extremely rare occurrence), and what the maximum charging rate is.
I've tried 3rd party chargers a few times and gave up on them. They're often broken or extremely slow. They usually require installing some app, and you don't know whether they're occupied or not until you get there. In contrast, Tesla's chargers are a consistently good experience. Without them, I'd simply never use my EV for road trips.
The Tesla supercharger team rarely gets enough credit. They do an amazing job behind the scenes to make all of that a reality.
I still use other charging networks from time to time. The best that I can say is that they are usable, but they are often frustrating in various weird ways.
I'm sure it happens. We get EV 'reviews' from time to time in some of the ev forums and reddits. I've noticed a common tendency to get this experience, then extrapolate it to the rest of the experiences as well. It isn't always a representative sample, though I understand why it happens.
But that's not why I mentioned Tesla. I mentioned them because there's so much weird industry caused complexity that they avoid. Need to charge the car you've just rented? Just find a supercharger and plug in. Not ideal necessarily, but at least it isn't hard.
Got a non-Tesla and need to use EVGo or EA? If you're lucky the card reader isn't broken. Then there's a decent chance it times out while communicating, because the order of events isn't intuitive for first timers. Cancelling the session at this point sometimes gets tricky too. Oh, and all of this is assuming the unit itself wasn't broken. If the card reader was broken, now you are downloading an app, tapping in card details, trying to figure out which stall to active, etc. And finally, you find out that the Bolt might require you to hold the cord just right for it to activate. EA used to have a whole video just on this detail. :facepalm
one of the primary complaints I've seen is the Tesla apps being inaccurate about charger availability - like 4 out of 5 chargers available here! And you show up and they're actually all taken with a huge line of people waiting.
So weird (and I'm not a Tesla apologist at all) but I have never in 5 years seen this happen - and I've driven across America 4 times in a Model 3.
In fact, mid drive Tesla will auto-reroute you to a supercharger station with more open slots if the one you're going to gets busy while on the drive. The UI is extremely accurate (like I can see open station numbers increment when a car pulls out).
Are you sure you're not hearing complaints about non-Tesla chargers?
> For example, she had to walk in the cold (Maine) from her hotel to her car...
Equivalently, she chose a hotel without chargers, or without enough chargers. How much extra time and money would it have taken to find a hotel with/near chargers?
Which travel search engines/ OTAs/ directories allow you to find hotels with L1/L2 chargers? (Do they list number and ratio of chargers/rooms?) Just like how most of these allow you to search on free parking, breakfast, wifi, disabled access etc., I see this as a feature that will become common then standard.
EDIT: to the down-voter, this is on-topic and substantive comment. Per my other comment here, the onus is on the rental company to actively incentivize behavior modification in first-time-EV-renting customers, help them plan their trip, not just to merrily slam them for fees. Assuming Hertz want loyalty and repeat business (if not, then this is a wider issue with them, not with EVs).
I believe charging anxiety was. The base case for car rentals is generally "time bound, busy itinerary" of some sort.... think business trips, holidays, etc.
Few want to spend that precious time becoming familiar with that cities charging network if charging is new to them.
I recently rented a Mach-E over Christmas in a large Metro, and stayed in a populous suburb. Charging & the states of chargers was no fun and really added a cognitive load.
However, I did realize I enjoyed EV's for some point in the future - somewhat curing range anxiety of my normal life routine.
How many hotels have sufficient charging capacity to charge EVs while people sleep?
A lot of hotels around here have 110v outlets in their parking lots for fishermen to charge their bass boats but I haven't heard that a similar ethic applies to EVs. :-)
Here's something purely anecdotal: recently stayed in a motel in very rural Arkansas. In the morning, I noticed a Chevy Bolt (or similar) plugged in with an extension cord. Asked the clerk about it. She said it was a relatively rare situation but they didn't have a problem with someone using their outside outlet.
I suppose I can't extrapolate this situation to everyone, but I have a feeling if you provide your own cord, most motels won't have a problem with you charging. Especially since it'll be uncommon. If everyone had EVs, then they might start putting a fee on it.
Bass fishing is a major part of tourism in NE Alabama, so most hotels have many 110v outlets near the parking lots to support the boats' trolling motor batteries, and I don't believe they charge (ahem) for access. But introducing a lot of new infrastructure would cost.
I was surprised during a ride in a friends' Tesla. We needed a few more miles. They let their phone guide them to a convenient pile of superchargers. Plugged in. We checked messages and chatted for a few minutes. Then continued. Remarkably painless.
This future is probably not yet evenly distributed around the world. Sure. But fast charging might eventually come to something. Eventually.
I have never seen a hotel with more than two EV chargers and that was a very high end spot near Seattle. Most hotels, if they have an EV charger at all, will only have one. If there are 100 guests you'd better hope they are all petrol-heads.
TBH, I've experienced it where it can go either way. I've rented gas cars and ended up at a hotel with nice L2 stations. The EV would have been easier! :)
But I've also rented EVs in metros with decent fast charging, but none at the hotel. It was fun, but charging was a notable downside.
My partner just travelled to middle of nowhere Illinois. At the airport car rental they were trying to offer EVs instead of an ICE. That was not in any way a viable option since the destination town not only wouldn't have charging stations there's no guarantee the car could be charged anywhere.
If you buy an EV you hopefully do so knowing full well the vehicle's constraints. You've figured out those constraints aren't a deal breaker for your known use cases. When being offered as a rental most people have no idea what the constraints of the vehicle are nor can they make informed decisions about them. So having anxiety about any of those, including charging, makes complete sense. A rental car should be as flexible as possible, not have a care and feeding schedule like you're buying a Mogwai.
We had someone plug their rental EV into a 15 amp outside circuit on our house on a friday night. We thought it said that it would be charged by 10 am the next day so we just drove them to their rental. Next morning when they showed up at 11 am we discovered that the charger hadn't said 10 am Saturday. No, it said 10 am Monday.
The key takeaway for me, they being wall street people - customer empathy was missing.
101 of salesmanship - understanding of customers needs, desires and then selling solutions for those. Here their customers were out of town weary travelers wanting to have a hassle free quick ride to a hotel or a meeting; have not used EVs before (perhaps never intend to), now have to focus on a new problem - how to learn a new skill of handling EV, how to plan for charging during their multi day trips.. etc.
Stealing a recent comment from reddit on someone's Hertz EV experience. It's a Solterra (Subaru's first EV in collaboration with Toyota) which made it even worse than the Teslas, but I think a good illustration of this idea that you can just roll out EVs to rental customers and act like it's the same as a gas car:
> Hertz gave me a Subaru Solterra for a one way trip from Temecula to Vegas because it was their last car. Couldn't tell me how to start it or anything because they just got it the day before... and they didn't bother plugging it in so it had 20 miles of range. Couldn't tell me where to charge it so I wasted much of it driving around the mall looking for the charger.
> Four hours later I had enough charge to get to Barstow. Or so I thought. Had to charge in Victorville. Then get a hotel room because it was midnight. Put it on a fast charger in the morning and a full charge should have gotten me all the way back. Hit Baker and I knew it wouldn't.
My god, not having enough on site fast chargers for both charging the fleet and reassuring renters that if nothing else they can come back to the airport and top up is really stupid
>> My god, not having enough on site fast chargers for both charging the fleet and reassuring renters
Take a look at a major airport. They could average a hundred rental cars arriving, with peaks into the hundreds. Even assuming every can arrives at a half-charge, the power requirements would be immense. At 50kwH per car, charging up 100 cars every hour would require, at an absolute minimum, a 5000kw/5mW connection.
This is a problem for a car rental company that wants to provide electric cars to solve, sure.
The rental co really needs to provide reasonable charged cars, and so long as charging infrastructure is dicey (especially with hotels in the mix) they could provide peace of mind to their customers by providing a known charging spot.
Put it wherever, I'm not Hertz, the airport is not Hertz's customer, but I would have a pretty strong bet that Hertz's customers would expect this sort of thing.
Airports are massive pre-planned industrial facilities with utility connections to match. Getting chargers there should be easy mode compared to most businesses.
The power requirements were not drawn up with the car rental agency in mind. Maybe you can get the airport to cooperate and ask the utility to expand capacity - how many years of planning do you think that takes?
Sounds like something a car rental agency that wants to have a bunch of electric rentals should probably think through before yeeting a fleet into existence....
Yes, definitely a project, especially with the shortages of transformers lately. But even if it delayed their (attempted) EV shift, it’s something Hertz needed to have done before buying a bunch of EVs. Handing out discharged EVs to customers who haven’t driven an EV before was a totally braindead move.
They have the added challenge of people dropping off cars at a different place from where they started, so they can’t necessarily say “we’re going to start with EVs at our new facilities where we can design that capacity from the start.” They needed fast charging everywhere for this to go smoothly.
They also don’t offer automotive refueling services at the airport. This is the same reason they charge a premium to fill the tank. The constraints are the same for ICE and EV in this case.
What's your source for this? I'm just realizing I might be way off-base, but I thought airport car rental places all had their own fueling stations, and just overcharged you because they can and there's nothing you can do about it, and I'd thought of it as one of those "everybody knows" kinds of things. So now I'm very surprised to hear otherwise.
I don’t have a source. It just seems obvious to me they wouldn’t bother with the cost of maintaining that infrastructure.
Do you have any reason to believe car rental companies maintain onsite fuel stations? Have you ever seen one? Why don’t they let customers use it?
There are already gas stations near airports. If a car needs gas they pay someone to drive it there and fill it up. That’s the source of your inflated prices.
I haven't at an airport, but I have at freestanding ones. Having fuel delivered to a tank with a pump isn't really that involved as infrastructure goes. You're just buying the fuel wholesale instead of retail. You don't need the same size underground tank as a gas station, but you can hold more than enough to fill up whatever you need to from a fleet of cars. As for why they don't let customers use it? This is obvious. They'd rather overcharge you. And they know nobody's going to do something dumb at the pump if it's only their own team doing it.
Plus, often when I rent a car, it isn't full. I'm sure they still charge the person "to fill the tank," but they don't actually fill it, so the total they'd have to store on-site is even less than if they were actually filling the cars.
I also assumed they had somewhere to store siphoned fuel, because every car I've ever driven has at least a gallon before the needle moves off of "F," but rental cars drop below F immediately. I've always assumed they were siphoning out a gallon or more any time someone did return the car all the way full.
Yes, but many are also very old and don't necessarily have large power lines leading to the car park as it's never been necessary in the past. Newark was mentioned as a case in point, where power is simply not available at the scale they'd need it. Of course, Hertz should have thought of that...
50kwH is a huge charger. You wouldn't need many of such feeds even with hundreds of cars.
How long do cars sit in the lot? Do you need to send cars out at 100% full? Is it good enough to make sure the cars leave the lot with 50-80% full?
They're returned, inspected, cleaned, put in the "outgoing" queue. I suspect having DCFC for just the cleaning area and then 16 or 20 or 24a /240v posts for L2 charging the cars as they sit waiting to be rented would more than suffice.
Other big issues would be around having to have dedicated parking for EVs and also having charging posts sticking out of the ground all over.
50kWh is not the charger, half the battery capacity for the cars (as decided by GP).
And 50kW would not be a huge charger, or even a large one, it's the bottom end of DC charging.
> I suspect having DCFC for just the cleaning area and then 16 or 20 or 24a /240v posts for L2 charging the cars as they sit waiting to be rented would more than suffice.
Aside from not being very efficient, 24@240 is not really a thing that's used. 32@240 is relatively standard but it's 7.2kW and generally considered a residential AC charger, acceptable when 3-phase is not available (or too expensive). It needs 7 hours to half-charge a 100kWh battery.
I'd suggest that 50kw/h is way too small and way too large.
A car rental setup would benefit from having a couple big DCFC setups where cars are inspected / cleaned.
EVs charge fast if the battery is empty (and warm) -- so the car comes in, is inspected and cleaned and put on a fast charger, and in 20 minutes will get to ~50% charge (regardless of battery size).
As far as "not efficient" or "nobody uses" well, 240 (or 208 if you're in a commercial setup with 2 legs of a 3 phase) is "normal" and a 16a / 20a / 24a AC charger will put reasonable charge on the car while it's just sitting there waiting to be rented again. EV's don't need to be fully charged to be useful so you don't need to put the battery back to 100% before sending it out again.
"your car is at 60% charge and has 180 miles of range right now; your car's nav will tell you where to charge if you need more range to get to where you're going. We'll bill for the power if you bring it back to us at less that 60% full. Have a nice day!"
I'm not sure what the turnover is for a rental lot -- I suspect "it depends" but I suspect it's not unusual to have cars on the lot for 6-12 hours before they're sent out again.
IMO As long as the car has 60% or better charge (or, 150-180 miles of range) it's "good to go". At least for most "airport rental in a major metro area" situation.
As far as charging efficiency -- anything charging at 240/208v is "good enough" -- the differences between 16a or 20a or 24a or whatever are minor relative to the bump from 120v to 240v.
Furthermore, at a rental car center, you're not just swinging in and swinging back out. It could change of course but they're setup that once you drive in, you're returning the car. (Re: comments about rental car center being the charger of last resort.)
(I had a friend joining me on a trip a number of years back. We wanted to add them to the contract once they arrived. I had to patiently explain that we could do it with a company that also had an off-airport location but we couldn't drop by the car rental center at the airport. I've had other experiences with how car rental companies really don't have good mechanisms to change things once you've signed and initialed the contract.)
Still scratching my head at why they couldn't make EV batteries hot-swappable, at least with a technician and specialized equipment assumed. (You'd need to changing the finance model a bit, of course, so that the batter replacement service were sold separately from the car -- but this would be easiest for the case of a car rental fleet.)
It was tried and failed--admittedly a long time ago. However, today, I want to have a pretty good idea of the battery health of the battery in my car and avoid it randomly changing when I "fill up." Also most recharge locations are 24-hour with no one on staff so you'd drastically cut when and how an automated replacement could happen.
Yes, a user-swappable would be even better, but even limiting it to banker's hours allows you a five minute complete fill-up, which is still 100x than what it actually takes to fully charge via outlet, or even the 15 minutes you would take if you're lucky enough to find an available supercharger, which still only gives you 200 miles.
I thought I'd run the numbers on this for a Solterra in my area. Assume 35 MPG for reference since that's my car's EPA highway mileage, so 20 miles of gas is 0.571 gallons. At $2.85/gallon that costs $1.63.
EA's charging here is priced at $0.44 per minute, so with that budget you can charge for 3.70 minutes.
Assume it spends that whole time at 80 kW. This is probably optimistic, it will take time to ramp up to that. But we'll forget about that, and assume the car starts from near empty because the Solterra's charging curve is trash and will begin throttling the speed down when it's about 35% charged.
3.7 minutes at 80 kW gives us 4.93 kW of charge. EPA rates the vehicle at 3.23 miles/kW, so for the equivalent price of 20 miles of gas we've added... drumroll
15.9 miles of charge.
With other vehicles or in an area with different gas/charging pricing, your mileage my vary. And if you look at a straight ICE competitor of the same size as the Solterra as the MPG reference it will be worse than 35 MPG (requiring more gas and giving you a higher charging budget), so basing this on my smaller car did limit that. But regardless, fuel price isn't necessarily a huge advantage for a rental EV.
If I were talking price for L2 charging at home in my garage then I'm sure the EV would be way cheaper, but that's now how anyone will be using a rental.
When I looked into this, renting an electric car from Hertz in the UK, the only chargers I would have had access to were public ones that wanted something like 85p/KWh. I would have spent an absolute fortune compared to petrol for the trip that I took.
Sorry - to be clear I meant if Hertz owned their own chargers and pumped in the same amount of electricity as they would've put in petrol. Not a 3rd party charging rate. Domestic rates today on moneysupermarket.com are 24p/kWh, and I imagine Hertz could get it cheaper.
I’m a big proponent of EVs but nothing about the current state of chargers can be described as “just put in money”. I have never had an EV charger work the first time.
I drive an EV and I’m still a bit unconvinced about renting one.
If my total expected mileage is practical without charging and I expect the car to start adequately charged, fine. It’s like a free tank of gas.
If not, I can’t charge at home. Charging at a hotel is a PITA. Charging first thing in the morning in cold weather without heated parking is slooooow even at a Supercharger.
And I really don’t want to deal with the utter mess of charger networks and their ridiculous membership cards.
And the usual rental model of strongly encouraging customers to return the car with a full tank of gas doesn’t really make sense for EVs.
My friend's friend got an electric vehicle they didn't ask for an it made their entire visit a giant pain because they brought negative energy everywhere with them.
I had been planning to get an electric but now I'm looking at PHEVs. And I still need to get the wiring for my house fixed. There's an outlet but it was meant for some early gen electric vehicle and literally nothing uses that plug anymore (and now the wiring is probably not adequate gauge)
Outlets are standardized and not specific to EVs. If you mean the charge plug, that's different.
Assuming you're in the US/Canada or other country with 100-120v service, a standard wall socket is sufficient for many full EV users and plenty enough for a PHEV which has a much smaller battery. Think about how much time your car spends sitting in your driveway/garage...and if you don't get a full charge, so what? The engine kicks in.
The wiring gauge is good for a certain current. That affects what sort of plug is installed in the wall, as they're keyed according to current limits. The EVSE can be programmed to not exceed the appropriate current, which is 80% of the breaker's rating.
If it was wired for an EV, it's almost certainly not 100-120v but 208 or higher, in which case even if it's a 15A circuit, that's definitely enough for a PHEV and sufficient for charging all but the largest EVs practically overnight.
A 208v, 15A circuit is good for 2.5kW. If you get home at 7PM and go to work at 7AM, you'll be able to charge 25kWhr each night, roughly. Average EV efficiency is about .35kWh/mile, so that's sufficient for 70 miles of driving.
You'll probably have 240V in North America in a residential detached/duplex/row home. It's low/high-rise apartment buildings/condominiums where you'll see 208V.
We use 110 to charge our PHEV (which admittedly has a very small battery). I would like to get a PHEV for our next vehicle, but the price premium makes it very unattractive for us. Some vehicles are $12k more for PHEV, and given how little we drive it would never be worth it. It's nice not tanking up often, but the extra cost (and extra car insurance) isn't worth it for us.
I'm not saying it was no factor whatsoever but if you listen to the Hertz investor call they describe the reason for backtracking and they certainly don't cite charging as the primary reason.
In theory if the people used the in-car travel planning features it shouldn't have been a problem, but if Hertz wasn't telling them about that then you could have a very stressful experience.
The "in-car" planning features are a going to get people stranded on the side of the road, including in a Tesla.
I had to make a trip from Tucson, AZ to Bisbee, a super common route you would make as it's a popular tourist destination. Bisbee is about 80 miles from the supercharger down Interstate 10. By default, the cars are configured to stop charging when they get to 80% or something like that. Your average consumer is not going to have a clue because that's not how gas pumps work.
There was 0 public charging infrastructure after the Supercharger, not so much as a public J1772 charge point (It might look like it using an app, but they are broken or nonfunctional). The Model 3 gets under 200 miles of range going the pace of traffic, which is 80-85 MPH. Then they take a wrong turn or drive around at the destination and burn up the last 30-40 miles.
The poor sucker that rented the Tesla was told it would get "270 miles of range". When he left the charger it said he had over 200 miles to go. But reality sinks in, and at some point in the journey, if they get even slightly distracted, they will find themselves 50 miles from the charger with 30 miles left.
> The poor sucker that rented the Tesla was told it would get "270 miles of range". When he left the charger it said he had over 200 miles to go. But reality sinks in, and at some point in the journey, if they get even slightly distracted, they will find themselves 50 miles from the charger with 30 miles left.
And the reason gasoline took off as a fuel was because it was frequently used as a degreaser before we decided to burn it instead, so you could buy it in tins from the blacksmith in whatever town you found yourself stranded in. There's nothing analogous to that for EVs.
The thing is -- electricity is widely available to people who have purchased an electrical service and have installed the requisite breaker panel. So while you might be very close to places where there are electricity, you can't just roll up and plug in to someone's house.
You could certainly offer to pay someone for electricity from their home or business, but then you're parked in their driveway for a period of time waiting. And the social aspects of this make it a lot more challenging than simply walking up to the local blacksmith and buying a gallon or two of solvent off the shelf so you can get to the next town.
You're at that point relying on the kindness of strangers.
The local blacksmith is still relying on the kindness of strangers thing. They have to make the business decision of what they need to run their business versus what margin of extra they have on hand. That's a transaction with a lot of complexity and I can't imagine the conversations were all as pleasant as you seem to expect.
On the other hand, I've had the "I noticed an external outlet near my parking spot, do you mind if I plug my car into it while I shop/stay at this hotel/eat at this restaurant?" conversation plenty of times and there's no "challenge" to it nor "transaction". The most common answer I've got has been "I don't see why not" because it's not really a transaction for most businesses, whatever extra they spend on electricity they easily make back in making a new customer or keeping an existing customer happy. In a few times I got back "there's a Level 2 charger hidden at the Library across the street and the fees support our local library" or "we have a deal with this parking garage a block away that has chargers and we can validate your parking for you when you get back", which just goes to show how normalized it already can often be as just another "parking consideration" of "where to park" when you ask businesses about it. Most businesses are used to answering "is there a good place to park?" questions. Parking is normal operations for a business, not "relying on the kindness of strangers". Electricity is "just" an amenity of parking, already in some businesses' minds. (Not enough businesses yet, sure, but more than you might think.)
To be fair, I've never been in a "life or death" situation where a "No" would have been some terrible catastrophe, but I've also never known anyone in my lifetime that had to buy gasoline from a small town Blacksmith or Pharmacist either.
A model 3 realistically gets 4~4.5 mi / kWh, US 16A@120V is rated for 1500W continuous, so that's about 6.5 miles per hour of charging. 20A@120V is close to 2000W continuous, so that's about 9 miles per hour.
If the comparison is to buying an emergency gallon from a "town blacksmith", then let's get those numbers too: a (Ford) Model T was said to get 13 to 21 miles per gallon. So if you managed to buy a full gallon from your hypothetical blacksmith in history, you'd need two to three hours on a boring wall plug to get the equivalent charge in your Model 3. That's quite a bit more time than you might want to spend in a small town, but that's "a lazy afternoon" amount of time (or a good four course meal with all the fixins depending on whereabouts in the country you find this stop and the hospitality of local restaurants) and still not "spend the night" amount of time.
I know this thread is entirely about comparing apples and oranges, but the historical examples weren't getting a full tank from a small local Blacksmith back then and so it doesn't make sense to worry about getting a full charge in this situation either.
> In theory if the people used the in-car travel planning features it shouldn't have been a problem,
This is just a different way of saying "If people put in more work this wouldn't be a problem", but you're ignoring the context - people who rent cars are often in a hurry, need transport now and need to get someone now. This all indicates that they are busy, and your suggestion is that they should work harder to get the same result?
The systems aren't hard to use, quite the opposite, but they can't help if you don't use them. I think if Hertz spent even 5 minutes explaining to people how the in-car navigation worked and emphasizing how important it is this experiment have been a success. The car will work out the charging stops for you, tell you how long you need to be there (hint: not long), and do all of the stressful planning steps automatically.
It's not just Tesla either. All major EVs come with route planning. If you have range anxiety you're using it wrong. This isn't even the driver's fault, how can they know about these features if nobody tells them? I don't even fully blame Hertz for this. Tesla should be marketing the route planning nationwide. Show people how life with EVs actually is instead of leaving them in the dark and letting them think that owning an EV means a roll of the dice every time you get behind the wheel where you might not find a friendly plug in time and be stranded on the side with no way to jerrycan more miles.
> The systems aren't hard to use, quite the opposite, but they can't help if you don't use them.
I'm not claiming that the systems are hard to use, I'm saying that it's an additional friction over ICE cars, in which you don't need to put in extra work to learn a piece of software, you don't need to wait for the rental assistant to explain how it works and you don't need to plan refuelling stops to coincide with rest times.
As a renter, I give them my booking number, my drivers license and my credit card, then jump in and head straight to my destination. All the other stuff that the Tesla's required may be easy, but we go from 2 steps (pay and drive) to 5 or more steps.
TBH, if Hertz had wanted this to be a success, the biggest thing they could have done was made sure that the cars were always fully charged before the customer drove off.
Route-planning is kinda irrelevant when you're doubling the friction required to rent a car.
Sorry but that is a hyper-obnoxious comment. I've never yet driven an EV, and range anxiety is undoubtedly something I will experience when I eventually get to. I don't want that in the context of being away from home on work or holiday.
5 marginal minutes is an eternity in customer service. Travelers are in a rush. The idea that Hertz will or even can train customers individually is a laughable fantasy.
I rented an electric car from Hertz out of necessity. They gave me NO information about this functionality, and in a new car UI my priorities were covering the basics for safe travel. This is not a realistic perspective, that EV-specific in-car features would provide help for an unfamiliar and weary traveler. That will change over time but it'll continue to be painful for now.
> Tesla lowered prices forcing them to recognize the depreciation
I'm surprised Tesla and Hertz couldn't work out a deal, e.g. reimbursement or a large discount on additional purchases that would wipe out the accounting charge. Rental vehicles are a sales channel for new vehicles. And every Hertz Tesla being dumped on the secondary market is new-vehicle profit Tesla could have booked.
PR more than anything. Tesla growth story is pretty much over, many people turned off the brand for a multitude of reasons (Musk, terrible service, price, lack of innovation, more EV competition). So if anything a good opportunity for Tesla to win some PR, potentially expand partnership, sell more cars.
Now they get more bad news "rental company dumps Tesla because of XYZ", the used market took a big hit as well pissing off existing owners, and I feel like this pushes newer buyers even more away.
>the used market took a big hit as well pissing off existing owners
Oh no, poor wealthy Tesla owners loosing value on their car. /s Since when are ordinary cars appreciable investments?
It's been well known cars tank in value, especially when you're an early adopter of new tech in a market that's in constant disruption. Your 1999 GeForce 256 also lost most of it's value in a year compared to other later GPUs, it's the nature of tech in a rapidly changing market.
People who expect cars to hold/go up in value need to buy limite edition exotics, not mass produced commodities.
EVs tanking in value on the used market is good for EV adoption as non wealthy people can afford them.
>> good for EV adoption as non wealthy people can afford them.
The sticker price isn't the issue. The issue is ironically fuel costs. Anyone who doesn't own their own house will rely on commercial chargers. In many circumstances a commercial charger can cost more per-mile than gasoline, and certainly they take much more time. So the non-rich, people who rent apartments and don't generally have spare time, cannot afford a used EV despite the sticker price.
Not-rich people also generally own only one car. They cannot "afford" a vehicle that is expensive to fix, both in time and cash. A couple days waiting for a part is a couple days missed work. A few weeks without a car (ie most any Tesla repair) could mean a lost job.
It's a matter of degrees. A car losing 25% of its value is much better than losing 75% over the same time period. How well a vehicle will hold its value is a factor that many people factor into their purchasing decisions.
>How well a vehicle will hold its value is a factor that many people factor into their purchasing decisions.
Cars are commodities, like microwave ovens or washing machines, not houses. You won't get any sympathy because your risky economic bet didn't pan out the way you expected it to.
> You won't get any sympathy because your risky economic bet didn't pan out the way you expected it to.
No one is offering sympathy, we're just saying that when buyers are considering a car, depreciation is a consideration.
Because, you see, no one simply burns down a 3 year old car when they want a new one - they use whatever equity in their existing car as part of the payment of the new car.
Not only that, but these were rented cheaply to Uber drivers. They'd come back with worn brakes from Ubers who'd drive hard and brake hard instead of using regen. They'd have batteries that had more cycles than most from charging to 100% whenever there was a break between rides.
They depreciated like a rented Uber, which seems entirely predictable.
>If a value of a vehicle can drop $40k over a period of a month, it is too volatile and I will never purchase such brand.
And why is this bad? Who said a brand/company is entitled to a certain amount of sales just because they exist? Aren't we in capitalisms where it's sink or swim and the market/customer is right? If a product is volatile maybe it's not good and people should orient to other brands, no?
If Tesla bins it, other better manufacturers will pick up the slack if the EV demand is there according to market forces. If the EV demand isn't there, maybe the EV hype was a bubble that was gonna pop sooner or later?
Why are you interpreting bad as some kind of moral position? You seem to be purposely misinterpreting these comments to start an argument about economic systems.
It's not bad that it happens, it's bad for Tesla if they are marketing their product as high-end/luxury while their product very obviously lacks the attributes, such as a stable/predictable value over time, that competitors' luxury products have. Someone deciding not to buy a product, for whatever reason, is the system working as intended. If Tesla can't produce a product people want to buy, Tesla will suffer the consequences, as they should. If they don't change their marketing or improve their product in the light of low sales, that's on them.
There's a huge difference between a car depreciating normally (which all of them do at varying rates) and what happened to the Model 3 depreciation curve over the last 12 months.
Nobody is asking you to cry for Tesla owners or feel bad for them. If anything, this is more of a Tesla problem to solve as it reduces the likelihood of those wealthy buyers buying another Tesla in the future as it's another negative data point to consider.
People want to know what they can expect when making a huge purchase. When the pros outweigh the cons, and I would say worse than average depreciation is a pretty big con, then buyers will look elsewhere.
Your entire comment is hostile and outside the guidelines for this site. We’re in this for honest discussion, not “let me play you the world's smallest violin for them” or “Are Tesla owners gonna starve or become homeless”.
The discussion was started on the basis that there's only an acceptable depreciation a car should have, whereas there's no such thing and I made that statement as clear and as direct as I could even if others don't like it.
"Buying a car today is an investment into the future. I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset, not a depreciating asset."
-Elon Musk, 2019.
Whether you believed him or not is a different matter but that's what he said at the time.
You are arguing with a straw man. Managing depreciation on a vehicle has nothing to do with anyone expecting appreciation. Many people simply want to maintain a reasonable residual value for their next trade in, and/or maintain an above-water loan.
LOL. Tesla believes heavily in PR, Musk just doesn't believe in PR departments.
That's why if you're involved in a Tesla accident, even a fatal one, Tesla will have no hesitation holding a press conference, pulling vehicle telemetry, to make sure that (rightly or wrongly) blame goes to you as the driver and not Tesla.
They'll make statements like "Autopilot wasn't to blame here. The vehicle had warned the driver of his inattentiveness", and the Tesla fans will nod their heads, reassured.
What will later come out will be that Autopilot was active, and that while a driver attention (steering wheel) warning had occurred on the fateful trip, it had happened ONCE, and that that one time was EIGHTEEN MINUTES prior to the collision.
But there won't be a press conference to correct those details.
You know, it's hard to know what sources other people consider to be "reputable" these days, so perhaps you could put on your big boy britches and google the subject to find a source you like rather than expecting us to know what you trust and don't trust? I mean, shit, if you bothered to look at the Verge article you'd have seen the link to the NTSB report. Here ya go...
So, Google's results only seem interested on showing the articles about the NTSB's ultimate findings, not the ones that were originally reported immediately after the crash. I then assumed that some of the articles I had linked in that post would probably link back to their own previous articles about it, and figured I'd just start by going through that list from the top down.
Sure enough, the second one I linked, from CBS News, linked to their older article on it, entitled, "No one was driving Tesla before fiery crash that killed 2 passengers in Texas, authorities say".
>The assertion had two parts and these stories only reflect the latter.
They don't, actually. Take this line from the Ars piece (though Ars isn't the only one that says something like this - most of them do! :D), for instance:
>The possible involvement of Autopilot was suggested in the wake of initial reports that one of the two occupants—specifically the driver—was found in the back seat of the car.
If you click the Ars link, you'll notice that the phrase "initial reports" also links to their own article written immediately after the event, titled, "Cops 'almost 99.9% sure' Tesla had no one at the wheel before deadly crash".
Musk might claim to not believe in PR but his twitter activities (both the purchase and his actual tweets) strongly imply he does care about public opinion and his ability to shape it.
What Musk does on Twitter is wholly separate from Tesla not having a PR department to handle some of the things that OP suggested. In fact, I'd wager that the lack of a PR department hampers Tesla's ability to control the negative reactions towards the company that have been caused by Musk's attempts to shape public discourse on Twitter.
The parent comment said "Tesla doesn't believe in PR". It's clear that Tesla does in fact believe in PR judging by all of Elon's related activities, they just do it differently than other companies.
Elon believes in doing his own PR, but Tesla does not, simple as that. If I'm to believe that Tesla does believe in PR then, as I mentioned in response to another user, I'd wager they'd be doing a lot more to improve their image given how much of a negative impact Elon's poor attempts at shaping public discourse via Twitter has had on Tesla lately, where their stock is at, etc.
An "about" page is bog standard stuff and a pretty paltry effort in the grand scheme of the things a PR department at a company the size of Tesla would otherwise traditionally be doing. It's like, yes, technically that's a form of PR, sure, but it ain't much.
Sounds like they would have been able to sell more cars to Hertz.
Depending on when they negotiated the relevant stuff, Tesla might have thought they needed to contribute more to the deal to sell even the cars they ended up selling already.
Last year Hertz gave me a Chevy Bolt. This was my first EV ever. I thought it’s pretty crazy to let people rent EVs without any training. It took me a long time to figure out how to charge the thing and how to find chargers. And the charger I found was super slow and would have taken hours to fully recharge.
I assume things are better with a Tesla but if somebody reasonably tech savvy like me has problems, I can’t even imagine how difficult it will be for many less tech savvy and less tech interested people I know to deal with an EV.
A few weeks ago I rented a Model 3 from Hertz in San Diego, and the car didn't come with an SAE J1772 Charging Adapter (this covers most level 2 stations). That's crazy. I was staying primarily at UCSD for cancer treatment, and there are a million level 2 chargers that I couldn't access without the SAE J1772 dongle. The Tesla my wife and I have always has a SAE J1772 dongle in the center console. I complained about the lack of this essential part.
I ran into this. Desk staff said they had initially provided travel chargers but that so many got stolen that they stopped.
Seems to me that this could have been fixed by making them optional and requiring a deposit, but when you read in the article that Hertz had major IT issues it seems safe to assume that they didn’t have the capacity to make such process changes quickly.
Hertz also had absurd policies like bring the EV back 100% charged. Which is basically impossible unless there is a DC fast charger adjacent to the rental car center.
Yes. This was the policy I saw when I considered renting an EV in Phoenix. We were only going to be there for 27 hours and our hotel did not have its Level 2 charger operational yet, so we opted for a gas car instead.
I rented a Bolt from Hertz last December and their policy at the time was:
“Return your EV at the same charge level as pick-up and pay $0. Or return your EV at any level for a $25 Recharge Fee.”
They were pretty lenient about the return charge — it was close to 100% to start and 80% when I returned it, but they didn’t charge me the $25. Even if they had, the EV rental rate was cheap enough that I would’ve still come out ahead vs. renting a gas car.
Wow. I used to drive CNG airport shuttles in Seattle, where there were two pumping stations in the entire county (one just off the airport, fortunately).
>> Newbie Tesla drivers who weren’t used to the car’s instantaneous acceleration and immediate braking were running into obstacles or getting rear-ended, sometimes even before they left the rental lot. Hertz’s Teslas got into accidents four times more often than the company’s other vehicles.
> I thought it’s pretty crazy to let people rent EVs without any training.
They send you a bunch of "Explore your upcoming rental" emails when you rent a tesla, with video tutorials [1]. I've rented plug-in hybrids before and had pretty much the same experience as you, but for a tesla rental I watched the videos and all worked well.
My mother is the least tech-savvy person I know and she found it incredibly easy to intuitively use an EV (Volt). She also borrowed a friend's Tesla and had zero issues with it. Perhaps you are not as tech-savvy as you might think?
The ChargePoint app was the main killer. It told me several times that I am ready to charge but the charger wouldn’t unlock. Thankfully after a while a guy came by and told you need to do something in your wallet before it will work. Don’t remember the details.
I know this is anecdata, but of a couple of friends that had Tesla rentals from Hertz, the number one issue was charging availability, or lack thereof. The fleet maintenance issues may have also been a factor, but from what I observed I would not take an EV as a rental car myself, solely because of the charging issue.
Charging issue being that they couldn't find any available superchargers using the in-car navigation? Or was the in-car navigation not working because it was a rental? That would be a serious problem on a Tesla where the software stack is critical to running the vehicle properly.
The in-car navigation to the nearest supercharger worked, but:
- some markets don't have an abundance of fast superchargers. It can take > 1 hour to charge.
- vehicles would often get returned mostly discharged, which forces the next customer to deal with it.
- I rented a few that appeared to have been driven really hard, leading the remaining charge calibration to become mis calibrated, which caused me to have to stop for some unscheduled charges.
- the vehicles lose a few percent of charge per day even when not driven (worse in hot weather)
- Hertz locations are typically not equipped with any kind of charging infrastructure -- if they were, EVs would be far more convenient to rent.
I wish the program would continue, and I would still prefer to rent a Tesla over the other options, but I think the aforementioned things factored into the failure.
>the vehicles lose a few percent of charge per day even when not driven (worse in hot weather)
Is that a Tesla thing? Or does Hertz have some sort of battery draining telematics? I have a non-Tesla EV and even in warm weather (100°F+) that hasn't been the case for me. If the weather changes drastically the SOC might change ±2%, but when I've left my car sitting for weeks it seems to average out
It could have been the aforementioned mis-calibration as well, not sure. I consulted some help/documentation at the time and it said it was normal.
With respect to telematics, I think the only change to the vehicle was that a few menu options were unavailable. I updated the software on one of the vehicles, renamed a few, added some to the app, etc.
In my opinion, a Hertz office with sufficient charging capacity could be great with EVs. (I also don't understand why traditional gas stations aren't already featuring a few high capacity charging stalls)
From the accounts I saw it was mostly that the available charging locations were too far out of the way, and too slow. When someone is renting a car for business meetings you don't want to spend a bunch of time on a charger scavenger hunt and then be forced to sit there killing time.
I dunno about the back end business parts of it, but I've rented a few cars recently, and Hertz was not only 20-30% more expensive than Enterprise, but getting a Model 3 from them was over double the price of a comparable gas car. There's no way I was going to get enough miles in to make the fuel cost worth that differential.
Pricing is going to depend a lot on the dynamics of the local market and the number of cars each company has available. (Article mentions that rental companies will truck cars between markets and that anticipating demand is key to being profitable.)
For a while last summer, EVs from Hertz were the cheapest cars you could rent in the Seattle area because they had many and customers didn’t want them. Sounds like they’ve been selling them off.
The thing that gets me is that the guys who lead this effort are go-getting ex-finance, ex-trading people who work their butts off and have attention to detail of a microscope. And the article mentions that they did in fact do detailed studies and make financial models of the venture and things looked good enough to push forward. So... clearly even their experience, hard work, and attention to detail was not enough to predict what would happen.
I'm not sure what that means in the end :-). Maybe predicting the future is just hard? Maybe it was a 30-60 bet and they just got unlucky? In that case what they did was not unreasonable and had it worked the same journalists that cackle at them with schadenfreude would be singing their praises.
My experience with Finance/PE people is that they don't really care about any details. They want all decks to be like three slides. If you can't represent something on a spreadsheet it doesn't count. And they're extremely good at working backwards from a conclusion.
I'm sure they never asked "how fast can they be repaired?" "What will the customer experience be when a car has to be paired with your phone and you need a Tesla account?" "Are the maintenance claims put out by the manufacturer reasonable?" etc. etc.
Or maybe a background in finance is not actually enough to know how to launch a totally new product within your company. Maybe you need some people with engineering expertise to ask a different set of questions beyond "will the costs add up?"
The scenario of Elon aggressively cutting prices was likely not something they modeled as it is pretty unprecedented.
Elon should have kept prices high while giving deep discounts and priority on parts to fleet purchases. That is what a sane car manufacturer does. To keep cars moving for retail you can have limited sales for holidays and seasons with "cash back" (not officially changing base price) and buying the loan APR to a lower rate.
Instead Elon crashed the price of Tesla's entire lineup.
It seems to me that the finance guys were completely out of their element and when their models didn’t fit the reality on the ground they couldn’t adapt at all.
when I rented a Tesla, by mistake, because they didn't have any other cars available, charging was definitely the problem. They charged me the same price as their cheapest cars, but it still ended up being more expensive because of charging (I paid about $900 for 3 weeks of charging at Tesla's stations, and it would probably would have cost me $300 with a small gasoline car)
In other words, you gotta be stupid to rent a Tesla unless you do it just for fun.
> I paid about $900 for 3 weeks of charging at Tesla's stations
Huh. Did you rent a Tesla and then have to pay separately for the privilege of using Tesla's charging network?
I've had a Tesla for years and what you paid for 3 weeks is comparable for what I've paid at superchargers the entire time I've owned the car (I mostly charge at home). It seems you did get ripped off, it just seems like it would be difficult to pay that much in three weeks at superchargers alone. There must have been some special surcharge (as it were).
Not OP but you do have to pay separately. Although as you say, that's a crazy amount for just 3 weeks. In my experience I was charged about $100 for two weeks of regular use + one roadtrip from Miami to Orlando and back.
Maybe it was just idle fees, that seems like it could go up by a lot if you leave the vehicle on the station:
>For every additional minute a vehicle remains connected to the Supercharger, it will incur an idle fee.
I always charged at Tesla's stations because I never was home, and the charges was a surprise at the end of the rental because they charged me only once when I returned the car... no clue if they ripped me off because it was the first time I used electric car chargers and didn't pay close attention to the receipt.
I know it would have been a whole lot cheaper if I had my own charger though.
Assuming $0.48 per kilowatt, that's 1875kW.
At 7 km per kW that is 13 thousand kilometers or 8 thousand miles.
That is about 400 miles per day every day in 3 weeks. Wow.
A hypothetical Toyota Camry, btw, would have consumed more than $900 worth of fuel.
I was saddled with an EV from Hertz unexpectedly (they said it was the only car left), and had to drive from NYC to MD and back.
Charging was absolutely the worst part. And most of the charging stations were full at any given time.
Range was extra bad due to the cold as well.
I understand the EV model for home use, but it makes 0 sense for rentals today. It's vastly less convenient, even ignoring the other factors like depreciation
the primitive state of charging in the US was a very large factor in the decision. i own an EV (egolf), so i'm already used to how terrible charging can be.
last year i went on a trip to LA and got a polestar for 4 days! car was fine, but finding a working and available charger was a nightmare. after spending 10m on one charger that would take my CC but not connect to the car, i moved to another spot and tried again. that charger would actually connect to my car, but it wouldn't take my CC. a few minutes after that, i called chargepoint tech support but neither of us could understand as i was in a parking garage.
after 15m on the phone before giving up and about to punch something, someone left and a new charger spot opened up. that one worked, but it wasn't chargepoint so i had to download a new app.
so, it took over 45m for me to get the car plugged in and a ton of stress for the ONE charge i needed to perform. i can guarantee that my experience is far from out of the ordinary, and i will never rent an EV again.
> The real killer was no doubt depreciation. That breaks the whole rental car model.
Yep. It's not just about rental income - it's about acquiring fleet at bulk/discounted prices and then reselling quickly before they lose too much money. Tesla's drastic price cuts have been annoying to consumers who just bought cars whose resale value plummeted overnight, but a complete deal breaker for a company like Hertz, only exacerbated by unexpectedly high repair costs.
I'd imagine charging must have been a demand factor too - people might like to experiment with an EV rental if they don't own one, but on business or vacation the last thing you want to be worried about is finding a charger or range-anxiety. If you have an EV at home, then part of the convenience, and a mitigation for slow charging, is overnight charging. Many hotels (often used by rental customers) are starting to have chargers too, but it's not something you can depend on.
I for one would love a company that rents out “ragged out” vehicles for bottom dollar. A well maintained toyota etc. lasts 20 years. Rent me the fully depreciated vehicle and reap pure profit. Not to mention not worrying about every little dent or scratch. Sounds like a dream rental to me.
Side note: when renting in other countries, I always ask for the worst looking beat up car that they have. Really is less stressful to drive around.
Agreed! In the US there is a company that does this but they don’t have a nationwide presence: https://www.rentawreck.com/. Also in Iceland there is “Sad Car” which was great for kicking around.
In the 90s, RentAWreck at least used to be part of an operation called FixAWreck who did low cost auto repairs. I used them shortly after I'd moved and had an excellent time with the two sub-compacts they gave me while my car was in their shop.
When did you rent with SADCars? I did once in 2014, and cheaply got some small old manual beater, which was just perfect.
But I think they've "pivoted" to just another rental company since then. Looking at their website and Google maps reviews the cars now look new, and indistinguishable from what you'd get from Eurocar, Hertz etc.
I had to turn down the first car due to non-functioning wipers and a broken door handle.
Ended up with a Subaru Forester that had definitely seen a lot of miles and had its share of minor issues, but was a beast in the surprise blizzard.
Shame if they pivoted but their office was a pain to deal with and last thing you want after a red-eye is to be worried about the car maybe not actually working properly. Decided next time we'd just rent from a more established brand.
From their FAQ:
> However, we decided to use the name to make it more memorable as our cars used to be older in the beginning but it's been many years since we stopped using old cars and now all our cars are new, or one or two years old
With a clean, damage-free car, you know there isn't anything on the car you can be blamed for that you didn't put there yourself.
I used to do zipcar and I would always do a full walk-around and email zipcar support a set of photos of any and all damage I'd find before I'd even unlocked the vehicle so there was proof the damage wasn't caused by me.
I did this after Zipcar claimed a dent that was already on the car was put there by me, because a prior renter didn't disclose it, or zipcar was double-dipping.
Finding a clean, undamaged car was a relief because I knew I could take photos afterward
It got particularly annoying because after the first 4-5 years zipcar clearly cut back on maintenance and repairs. Cars kept getting dirtier, more damaged, more "weird noises from the suspension", etc. Cars would be overdue for oil changes, have check engine lights on, etc.
There was a business in the UK doing this but didn't work out any cheaper than a regular rental from Enterprise. Economy of scale at such a level is hard to beat.
It's not economy of scale - they get to write off depreciation at a much higher rate than the cars actually depreciate.
This is true of all businesses and all capital. It's a great big tax cheat, centered around companies getting to claim that their capital is worthless after just a few years.
How would that actually help long term though? Imagine they write off their entire entire fleet in 1 year. Yes they pay less tax that year, but in future years when they sell their old cars that are worth nothing for lots of money they'll have a load of extra tax to pay.
I can see how it lets you move tax around in time a bit but that's it (and it's often allowed explicitly anyway).
Am I missing something or is this the common "tax write-off = magical money" misunderstanding?
Budget/Avis is getting there. I had an absolutely horrible rental at O'Hare about five years ago. Rattles and squeaks and probably 50,000 miles overdue for an alignment.
Last fall, I got an almost new Mazda SUV from Avis. I was 3 miles down the road when a Service Engine Soon message took over the entire center of the dashboard. I hope they got it serviced after I returned it the next day.
There used to be "rent a dent" discount car rentals that did exactly this. You could save a bunch by renting a clearly used (and usually scuffed/dented) car.
I agree about driving a brand-new rental being stressful. I don't to worry about little scratches and dings, especially when you're driving an unfamiliar car in a foreign place.
It's been a little while, but I've used Turo for this a few times. Got older, rattier cars for $20-$25/day, and way less hassle than trying to deal with Hertz/Budget/etc. It was perfect for my needs.
I think you're right. The actual rental car model is to garner large discounts from the auto manufacturer, rent the car for a time, then sell it via the rental car used-car lot.
The purchase discount (maybe fleet rate) is usually wrapped in a contract - the car must NOT be sold within a certain time or under a certain mileage - and in this way does not compete with the manufacturer's car dealers.
Hertz and Tesla did not have any sort of contract like this. This means that Hertz did not have any concessions from Tesla. Instead of Tesla having a special relationship with Hertz - a car discount, guaranteed quick repairs, possibly special rental-car software helping renters onboard with the car - Hertz got NOTHING.
It should have gotten something, at minimum some sort of fleet rate. It was a VERY good customer. Instead Tesla gave nothing and got a lot of bad PR in the end.
> The article posits charging as the problem but that's not actually true.
How isn't it?
It's literally the first reason why people avoided renting electric cars according to pretty much every poll out there. Not even the polls, it's literally what Hertz that commissioned studies on their low rental rate found out.
And you can count me as one, I would never rent an electric car in a place I don't know, especially when on vacation/work, where I don't know where and when I will be able to charge and I'm busy already.
I'm more prone to owning, but renting will be a no for quite some time.
Fixing collision damaged vehicles is a profit center. They'll bill your insurance for every tangentially related maintenance item they'd been putting off (the belt is _obviously_ squeeky because the collision loosened the tensioner, the brakes are worn down because the emergency stop was too aggressive, the windshield fluid won't come out because the shock knocked a wire loose in the electric pump, ...). The car comes out in better shape than it went in.
That pales in comparison to the charges for lost income they claim they would have received from the car while it was out of service.
90% of their fleet at that location might sit unused for a week or more, and most of their rentals are steeply discounted from the standard rate - but that car you backed into a pole? Why, that one would have been earning them the standard rate, every day.
Counter-point: I rent cars fairly frequently and over the past 30 years I've had three damaged. Case 1 windshield hit by rock and cracked. Case 2 creased driver door via grey pillar in gray colored underground parking lot. Case 3 semi truck with those pointy front wheel nuts max-maxed my passenger door with them. In all three cases the outcome was positive. No excess charges or shenanigans.
otoh Hertz have twice billed me for damage I definitely did not cause. In one case for a scratch on the front air dam that you had to lie down under the vehicle to see (which their agent in fact did when I returned the car). So now I use Avis.
In the US, you (and transitively your insurance) are liable as a driver if you cause damage. You can separately have a contract assigning that liability (e.g., the $20/day or so a rental company will often offer to waive basically all physical damage to the car at a $0 deductible). I assume it's that latter sort of thing you're referring to?
I'm not sure how they handle cars damaged under those sorts of policies. I do know those policies are also wildly profitable (I've never come close to approaching eqv. $7300/yr for insurance, despite a horrible driving record when I was younger). Rental cars don't even crash 1.5x as often per mile, so a 5-20x multiple on your premium is noteworthy.
Most regular cars can still be driven after a (minor) collision, they might need some work to fix them up but usually they are fine. If you're ok with mostly cosmetic damage or replacing a body panel, then it's a great buy.
A Tesla after a minor collision might disable itself entirely until inspected by a Tesla technician, and it might need a whole new (and very expensive) battery pack - no one would(or should) take a bet on such a car.
So it's a lot less attractive thing to buy over regular cars.
Teslas do not "disable themselves"; it's done by Tesla HQ, using criteria they do not disclose, but it seems to be just a matter of whether the crash happens to come to their attention.
Rich Rebuilds has covered this extensively. Sometimes he comes across a heavily damaged Tesla, still on their network that hasn't been disabled. Other times he comes across one with minor damage that has been disabled. I believe one of his rebuilds, he took some of the guts from a heavily damaged car that wasn't deactivated to transplant into the guts of a car that had easily repaired damage that had been.
Interesting - it was my understanding that most collisions(and definitely collisions that activate airbags) cause the car to disable itself until inspected. Good to know that this isn't always the case.
I've never heard this being the case, and I sure hope it isn't for most cars.
Imagine being in a remote area.. you hit a deer after slowing down.. and now you're trapped at night? You're in death valley offroading a little too enthusiastically, airbags deploy and now you're stuck? A small fender bender in Baja Mexico and you're disabled?
I once rolled a vehicle in Nevada being stupid with friends. Airbags deployed. The radiator was crushed and leaking. We strapped the radiator support to another vehicle and bent it back out. Took the other vehicle into town and bought a radiator at AutoZone. Installed it and drove it an hour home. The steering wheel was only slightly off center.
Hire cars in the UK often have a long list of already-known dents and scrapes. You have to be super careful and check the car over to spot any others so you don’t end up paying for prior damage. But all those dents have been paid for by previous renters; the hire company charges the renter but doesn’t actually fix the damage…
How do you say so confidently without stating your sources?
Charging and long drives, both tough conditions somewhere that isn't my home city both would be major issues. They sold off the cars at a low cost so not sure how they amended depreciation doing that.
I suggest you read up EV charging in New York city. At any one time at least a third is faulty. Charging is HUGE problem. When you have it at home, with your home charging, it doesnt seem so much of a problem for you. But when you have masses running EVs, a handful of Tesla super chargers CANNOT compete agains a handful of gas stations which is way way way more efficient servicing their ICE cars than the same for EVs by supercharger. You literally have to have gas triple in price and solar/fusion supplying electricity to get masses to wait extra 30mins for their cheap charging. And now, USA is in conundrum, if they support EVs, Chinese will wipe clean all American manufacturers worst than peak Japan auto. Of they dont, Americans will stuck in their stone age ICE. Look forward for Joe and Trump to declare Chinese EVs and batteries are national security threat. You can only buy expensive Model 8000 from Elon.
Eh... The charging is an issue. I have been in a position to rent EVs before but opted not to. If I own a Tesla, then I likely have a charger at home (and possibly at work), so dealing with charging is only an issue on my rare long haul trips (and if I frequently make long-haul trips, I probably own a gas car), which I'd be willing to put up with. If i'm renting in a city i'm visiting though:
1) I'm likely driving more than I do at home
2) I don't know if my hotel/s will have chargers
3) I am cognizant of my time and don't want to drive out of my way to sit in parking lots while my car charges
4) I might be travelling to rural areas where chargers are infrequent
Not saying that the issues you brought up are invalid, but I do think there's a demand problem.
... if you find a buyer for them which is the real problem. Not many people want to drive a car that has been used as a short-term rental, because they're a guarantee for needing a replacement clutch and engine at least. People drive rental cars like shit, and it shows up everywhere.
From what I've seen the most desirable vehicles on used car lots are former rentals. Maybe slightly behind cars that fell off of a lease. There's always the stories about people who rent cars so they can thrash them in street races or whatnot, but really most rentals are for businesspeople who need to get around a city for a bit. The companies usually try to keep up on the basic maintenance items as well, which is not always the case for used cars. You get a fairly new car with higher than average but not crazy miles for a decent price.
These Teslas should also qualify for the $4000 used EV tax credit as well, which could make them quite an affordable option.
Not many people want to drive a car that has been used as a short-term rental, because they're a guarantee for needing a replacement clutch and engine at least
Well, obviously not in this case. Battery health would be the only real concern, I suppose, and that hasn't proven to be an issue so far.
The issue was twofold: 1. Repair cost and parts availability. Fleet damage was more expensive to repair and took longer. That means more of the fleet is offline at any given time and cost to operate is a bit higher. 2. Tesla lowered prices forcing them to recognize the depreciation. The cars resale value dropped faster than they anticipated.
Car and RV rental companies have this problem. People don't want to rent ragged out vehicles. In the case of RVs units for rental are built extra cheap so they don't last anyway. The model is get more in rent then you lose in depreciation then dump the vehicle. In the case of RVs they often turnover the entire fleet yearly.
The real killer was no doubt depreciation. That breaks the whole rental car model.