Hertz is absolutely decreasing their investment in EVs. However, they’re not dumping their EV inventory to do so: they’re just not replacing EV cars they would have been selling anyway even if they hadn’t gotten cold feet about renting EVs.
Rumor has it that the first gen Rivians are a pain in the tuckas (and STUPID expensive to boot) for body work. If Ford uses the same ~$5,000 lighting clusters on the F150 Lightning as they do for the ICE versions, that can add up to some serious money as well…
There’s still a ‘bumper’ on there, but it’s under the bumper cover, and that’s were all the sensors are attached to. AND they tend to take up a large portion of what the front and rear of the cars look like, which adds up pretty quickly when one has to replace it because some chucklehead decided to give your car a love tap in the parking lot and leave a note saying “People think I’m leaving my insurance info. Signed, THE PHANTOM”. /slight sarcasm and silliness
Considering that this is Hertz, which has been known to sell inventory, then claw it back after filing police reports claiming it was stolen, I am not surprised either.
2 Likes
OP’s friend didn’t plan ahead. We just rented one over xmas and they let you pre-pay $15 or something to not have to worry about the charge level. Seems like a no-brainer when you think about it.
2 Likes
That’s really too bad. I’ve only rented one once, but it was a great experience. The Tesla charging network is good and the charging speed is incredible. Hertz billed me for exactly what the charger cost, with no markup, which was surprising. I prepaid $15 so I could just drop the car off without charging it. Also it went like stink and was a lot better than a comparably priced ICE car. It had quirks and I’m not going to buy one, but as a rental it was awesome.
“let” being the word for adding a hidden fee.
paying an employee to go fill a tank, or having some sort of gas station on site seems like a justifiable expense. purchasing a charging station for your ev fleet seems like it should be a cost of business
1 Like
For those that are looking to rent Teslas (or a variety of other vehicles) there are a ton of them available on Turo for less than $50/day. (It’s like Airbnb but for cars)
1 Like
I am of the firm belief that it is perfectly ok to gently and non-destructively nudge bumpers when parallel parking in a tight spot (and have taken some glares from passers-by who clearly felt otherwise). But I am not sure this still holds true nowadays, maybe it’s just the cities I’ve been in lately but I don’t see it as much as I used to. I think backup cameras have been partly responsible for making this technique obsolete, it’s so much easier now to get right up to another car without having to tap.
I spent a bunch of time comparing Turo to the Hertz Teslas, and the cost on Turo was higher and had a bunch of fees - it was a week long rental and I saved a couple hundred dollars renting from Hertz. I was surprised, but at least at the time (11 months ago) the Hertz Tesla rentals were a great deal.
So no electric cars at Hertz, and nobody has made a pun about that yet?
4 Likes
I rented a Chebby Bolt in SeaTac in November for light local cruising. Hotel had a couple of chargers so I was good to go there. Not great, not awful, but the ‘return it full’ thing was awkward and had me thinking long and hard about driving over to the Harley dealership that had a charger out front while we were getting dim sum before returning the car.
In/around a metro area for a weekend was generally fine.
The pun threads seem to go in cycles 
7 Likes
My favourite is the rntal car return in Helsinki. You have to drive through the gas station to get to the rental car dropoff.
3 Likes
Isn’t it it’s its own pun? Hertz rejects Tesla.
But you want to rent them by the hour, not Faraday.
Sadly that’s not a choice - they haven’t got the capacitance for anything else.
Trouble is, the cars are static for too long.
ETA (much later) I realise I could have written, instead: ‘Hertz discharges Tesla’
10 Likes
So around 2004 or so I had an 86 Caprice and was rear ended by a newer Toyota on the highway once when there was stoppage. I am not sure how fast the guy was going, probably 15mph or maybe a little more as I was going maybe 5mph.
Anyway, it bent my bumper in some, but his had the bumper smashed in and the top of the hood pushed back. Significantly more damage.
I know they make things to crumple more and redistribute energy, but bumpers seem to be just brittle plastic shells that crack and shatter even from, like you said, a 5mph bump in a parking lot.
Doesn’t the battery make up something like 30-40% of the cost of the (new) car? Seems like that would make it a pretty big “exception,” when you actually have to replace it?
Yeah… I’ve owned a Bolt since Halloween 2017, have got 65k miles on it, and the only maintenance this car has required was new brake pads and rotors (they rusted and warped from no use - I was doing electric braking) and last summer I needed a new 12V battery. This is all aside from the totally new main power battery I got as part of the recall in the summer of '22. This car is over six years old now, and it requires nothing from me other than putting new windshield wiper fluid in it. My $/mi equivalent has been $1.20 for 30 miles (we get a kWh for $0.12, and conservatively the car does 3 miles on a kWh… though I have done closer to 4 during the summer with slower driving, that would be like $0.90 a gallon gas for a 30 mpg car).
3 Likes
Depends on the car type (Telsas have bigger batteries, the Bolt I’ve got is about 60kWh) but I’ve heard ~$12k retail (that jibes with a cost per kWh in the BESS market for LFP at ~$180/kWh). For a fleet manager it’s probably more like $8k. In the near future that would probably drop another 20%.
2 Likes
I have a Kia Niro EV so can’t really speak to the quality of Tesla. We have a 10 year warranty on everything, including the battery.
We replaced an 8 year old Impala that was quite literally falling apart, aside from also being a gas guzzling beast. Maintenance on that piece of rolling garbage came out to about $2k/year for the 3 years I was saddled with it. Before it was monkey pawed to us the transmission had already been replaced once (and was failing again, hence the scrapyard).
By comparison maintenance on the EV has been $315/yr for the annual servicing - and I’m not entirely sure they do much aside from rotating the tires.
If I get a decade of hassle free driving with minimal maintenance costs, I am not going to worry too much about the battery. Firstly, it will be 7 years from now and quite possibly cheaper. Second, it might not be a problem. Third, the cost of replacing an ICE motor isn’t small either. Any difference would be more than made up by the NOT spending tons of cash in all the intervening years.
1 Like
So bean counters at Hertz decided to sell their cars earlier than planned, bc the price of used cars went down bc the price of new cars went down, and this is being presented as a problem caused by Tesla???
Another big downside to Turo is that in most cases you need to pay for insurance that you might not need to pay for with a regular car rental agency.
Many credit cards, for example, will automatically cover damage to a car rented from a car rental agency as long as you pay with the card (some–mostly Chase cards with annual fees–will even provide primary coverage that kicks in BEFORE your personal auto insurance gets touched). But they don’t consider Turo a rental agency–it’s a platform where you’re actually renting from the car’s owner (which in most cases is an individual, not a rental agency).
1 Like
