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I think you are thinking about it wrong. A lender will happily lend $3B discounted slightly because the loan is secured by… $4B worth of Teslas thanks to that b
by ethagknight 5y ago
I think you are thinking about it wrong. A lender will happily lend $3B discounted slightly because the loan is secured by… $4B worth of Teslas thanks to that bulk purchase discount. Now, imagine if that lender is Tesla Financing Arm N.A.
It’s not a bet concerning whether or not Hertz has $3B cash on hand, it’s a bet if the lender thinks Hertz branding is good enough to pay the note. I would bet so.
Finally, there may well be a cross-collateralization with the Hertz family to make this deal pencil out.
- greatgib 5y agoThis is close to what I think could be a possibility. In financial reports of Tesla, there are more and more cars that are "leased" by Tesla, and maybe they are thinking of "outsourcing" that to Hertz. But still, Hertz is not so financially solid, and one has to remember that a car, as an asset, loose value very fast on the after market.
- ethagknight 5y agoIf you've tried to rent a car lately, prices are sky high. I'm renting a very rough Nissan Frontier with 50,000 miles from Enterprise at the moment, that was the only car they had available. At some point in the last year, the rental car market made a binary flip going from Can't make money because no one is renting cars to Can't make money because we have no cars to rent! Tesla's risk here, even if they are lender as well, is very modest because the rental market is in a massive supply pit that may take 5 years to get out of. Details will come forth but I would not be surprised if Tesla's terms were pretty harsh to Hertz, as in a profit sharing from Tesla rentals in exchange for ongoing tech support for making Teslas work on the rental market. So Tesla's upside could even far exceed the value of the car sold + financing terms.