Hertz Is Selling 20,000 Used EVs Due To High Repair Costs::undefined
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I initially read the headline as referring to maintenance costs, but it’s actually because people who rent EVs were using them under the rent to gig economy business they had. As in, people would rent cars to go do Uber Eats deliveries and such, as the EVs weren’t being rented as often as expected from regular rental business. The people who rented these EVs were more likely to damage the vehicle than people who rented gas cars, and the repairs for that damage were more costly to fix.
There wasn’t a great explanation as to why the EV rentals were more likely to get into accidents, but it’s possible that the EVs were more confusing to operate, or more likely to be driven more aggressively due to the acceleration and performance. It’s also possible that the EV models they had were more prone to other issues, like blind spots, worse breaking, or insufficient self-driving, but they didn’t seem to distinguish between different makes and models as being more prone to damage.
Reuters noted that they had to put torque and speed limiters on the fleet EVs. These are cars that have performance stats that you would have found on a Viper or Corvette in the previous decade.
I imagine that the following combo is a recipe for disaster: flagship sports car speed + touchscreen centric car controls + eyeballs on mobile delivery apps
Don’t forget people not caring about the car because it’s a rental.
Correct, but that’s true for all rentals. ICE and EV.
My guess is that the disproportionate damage costs are due to something that’s more common with EVs.
My guess is that repair costs are higher because they have to be sent out for expensive repairs because the car software is locked down so they cannot repair them in-house.
That’s what the future is coming to with cars. No more fixing with your own parts at home.
Note that Tesla, specifically, does not allow any third-party repairs. They simply don’t make the parts available to independent shops. They are very much like Apple in this regard.
From my understanding, EVs from Chevy and Ford follow the same model as their ICE models. You may have difficulty finding independent mechanics that can work on their EVs, but it’s not because the manufacturer is freezing them out.
I drive a Tesla. The same one they bought a whole fleet of. Can confirm: is unnecessarily fast and fun. And it’s the slowest one they make.
Anecdotally, people in my area definitely haul ass with their EVs in my part of down. They accelerate quickly, and people very much enjoy punching it.
I paid for the whole speedometer and I’m gonna use it.
For real though people should absolutely maximize the capability of EVs to get up to speed with the intention of reducing traffic and keeping flow. That’s the best part about them!
I find the acceleration quite dangerous. I was trying to pass a truck the other day and move to get in the left lane. As I’m doing so, a Tesla that I couldn’t see pops out from the car behind me and starts trying to pass the truck too. I swerved back into the right lane to avoid being rear ended. With the fast acceleration, Tesla drivers are prone to doing erratic things faster than other cars on the road can predict and react to.
people would rent cars to go do Uber Eats deliveries and such
Uber Eats incentivizes driving recklessly. The faster you can complete a delivery, the more deliveries you can make in a night. Also you’ll be out during bad ice storms and other weather that reasonable people wouldn’t drive in unless necessary. Renting an EV might make the math add up better for doing deliveries, but were it economical to have a fleet of ICE cars doing gig deliveries I suspect they’d have similar issues with damage, although the acceleration and top speed of their EVs might be making the problem worse.
I’ve only driven EVs a few times for benchmarking but every time I have a hard time adjusting to the single pedal driving. I’m sure you get used to it soon, but if you are just renting short term or may be not enough time to adjust
Wait which cars have single pedal? On forklifts and such it’s my most hated configuration.
From what I have seen on YouTube they all have both pedals, but some have the option for regenerative breaking (single pedal operation).
They have two pedals, but with EVs you basically brake when you remove your for from the “gas” pedal
This is always a user-enabled option. On the Chevy Bolt, it’s a button on the center console that you have to activate every time you turn it on.
The presence of the setting is appreciated, but not saving config or even just being a physical toggle switch is cursed.
I imagine it’s a safety thing. This way, every time you get into a Bolt (and possibly other EVs; I don’t know how their switches are configured) it’s in a known state. You will not be surprised (the hard way) when you pick it up from the mechanic, or your SO drove it previously, etc, and discover that it’s in 2-pedal mode.
Except Tesla, where regen power is always at the maximum level.
Oh so regen on release. Not my favourite config. I was experimenting with regen on a front motor ebike before and the best way for my comfort that I found was a slider that controls regen amount so you can either coast/bomb hills, or have a similar feeling to gearing down on a stick shift car when the slider is turned up.
Apparently it’s related to “expenses related to collision and damage” and they’ve had to put speed and torque limitations on the fleet cars.
Telsas and Polestars are not slow cars, and it sounds like renters are driving them aggressively. I wouldn’t be surprised if torque and speed are also the reason why Tesla is #1 with recent car accidents stats.
Telsas and Polestars are not slow cars, and it sounds like renters are driving them aggressively.
Driving a rental car - any rental car - more aggressively than your own car has been pretty typical behaviour since the beginning of rental cars.
Exactly. Only now they’re twice as fast and require you to play a video game to turn the air vents.
I mean, technically you’re not supposed to be fiddling with neither radio, AC or other crap on any car, touch or not, when you’re driving. All of that should be set before you start driving anywhere. If you follow the law to the letter, the only thing you should operate while driving, is what can be done from the steering wheel controls and voice control.
Of course that’s now how most people actually drive their cars…
I have never in my life heard this before. What if the window fogs up and you have to turn the defrost on?
You should have anticipated this and directed airflow to the windshield before you start driving.
I have also never experienced spontaneous fogging of the windshield while I’m driving, and I live in Scandinavian weather which is both humid and cold. It’s always there when I enter the car. The AC dehumidifies the cabin air while driving so it really shouldn’t be fogging the windshield out of the blue while you’re driving.
But besides that, steering wheel control or voice control cab enable/disable this in many cars these days.
Yeah, last time I’ve rented a car I wanted an electric but my insurance would not cover me for a Tesla.
They are in the sport car category.
Hertz is also famous for renting Mustang GTs which are much faster and much more likely to be driven aggressively.
I’m guessing it has more to do with the misconceptions around “self-driving” that these cars don’t even include.
I wouldn’t say a mustang GT is any faster. Most EV’s have a sub 5 second 0-60, which is what a Musang GT has. EVs are just incredibly fast, especially Teslas.
I wouldn’t say a mustang GT is any faster.
Well if you said anything different you’d simply be wrong.
Most EV’s have a sub 5 second 0-60
This isn’t “most EVs”, this is a Tesla Model 3 standard range (AKA RWD).
Yeah, but they usually don’t have a lot of those things on the lot to rent. They have a butt load of Model 3s. My guess is that it’s a numbers game.
They also have a ton of data and footage to tell them what people are doing when they’re getting into accidents, and after looking at that stuff, they’re choosing to basically put these cars into a form of valet mode to limit acceleration.
Pretty sure they are #1 due to their touchscreen focus. Its incredibly hard to operate a Tesla safely.
I appreciate that this article isn’t going for the “electric cars are bad see even hertz can’t make them work” angle, and instead has more of a “someone left a chair on the curb if you have any interest” vibe
It hertz just reading this.
It’s a National tragedy.
They really should have the repair costs in their Budget.
That would make a more fiscally agile Enterprise anyway
Vis-AVIS these puns… I think yall took the good puns already.
Yeah, that’s the best I got.
Amazingly, this is the Sixt pun!
If I had a Dollar…
It’s all Tesla and I do not want to be associated in any way with that whiny little bitchbaby Musk. Hard pass.
Some of the used EVs are rather affordable—the cheapest Model 3 is just $20,125. A long-range Model Y will cost a fair bit more than that, although even here, the most expensive one for sale by Hertz is just $38,116. As a reminder, there is now a tax credit of up to $4,000 available when buying a used EV that costs less than $25,000, assuming one meets the income caps.
But they are all ex-rental cars, and that means most of these cars have had relatively hard lives and now have plenty of miles on them—the cheaper Model 3s are all closing in on 100,000 miles. Not all of them, though—in New Orleans, there’s a Kia EV6 up for sale with just under 5,000 miles.
Who is going to pay upwards of $20,000 for a car with nearly 100,000 miles on it?
Sadly, the used car market is high all the way across. Finding deceng vehicles under 20k with less than 100k miles would be tough.
This does not entirely surprise me. When Tesla became well-known a significant fraction of taxi services in my country switched to Tesla. Why: a) it was cheaper to buy since subsidies for EVs, b) electricity being cheaper than fuel, and c) Tesla being perceived as luxury.
Within a couple years most taxi services had gone back to ICE cars. The Teslas had inferior build quality, and repair turnaround time was awful compared to regular ICE cars. This meant a large fraction of the Tesla fleet was idle as they were waiting to be repaired.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Hertz encountered the same. It’s not that EVs are bad. It’s that the largest supplier of EVs in the West, Tesla, is bad and slow to repair cars.
Ya think they would get some sort of a deal (federal or business) when it comes to repairing a fleet of EVs.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After announcing big plans to purchase tens of thousands of EVs from Tesla and then Polestar, it’s now liquidating a third of that fleet, the company told investors.
After Hertz went bankrupt during the early days of the pandemic, its big EV ambitions began in 2021, when the company revealed it wanted more than 20 percent of its rental fleet to be electric by 2022.
By early 2023, it was still far short of the ambitious goal, in large part due to Tesla’s inability to actually fill that order in time, and EVs still represent just 11 percent of the total Hertz rental fleet.
But it may not actually be that upset at falling short—it turns out that the electric rental cars haven’t been the panacea it needed.
At the end of Q3 2023, Hertz told investors that significant price cutting during the year had “resulted in lower EV residual values, increasing vehicle depreciation expense and negatively impacting salvage cost.”
As a reminder, there is now a tax credit of up to $4,000 available when buying a used EV that costs less than $25,000, assuming one meets the income caps.
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