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Hertz is scaling back its EV ambitions because its Teslas keep getting damaged
- Waterluvian 3y agoI’ve never fully understood how rental companies manage the risk caused by drivers not having an incentive to treat the vehicles well. There’s a thousand ways you can incrementally damage a car that cannot be detected until some time in the future. I guess with rentals some maintenance tasks can at least be handled. I know someone who leased for three years and never got the oil changed until the day before returning it.
- tiahura 3y agoIn olden times, people were more conscientious and more ethical.
- ThrowAway1922A 3y agoGenerally they were, there's a lot more feral "people" these days.
- HomeDeLaPot 3y agoWhat makes you think that?
- seabrookmx 3y agoWhat about all the public executions, slavery and genocide?
- vivekd 3y agoI don't want to touch on what I see as a futile debate about whether people are generally better or worse now. However I do feel the need to point out that there are currently more slaves in the world than at any other time in history. I don't mean in the idomatic sense of wage slavery or anything. I'm talking about literal slavery - forced labor and ownership of people. Much of the stuff you buy today probably had a slave involved in its production at some point. Corporations say they can't ban slave labour from their supply chain because it's impossible for them to tell what resources had slaves involved in its production. The slave produced supply and legitimate supply of goods is too mixed to adequately track Some reading to get started https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century Also genocide was very prevalent in the 20th century probably more than at any other time
- tiahura 3y agoThe discussion is about the behavior of car renters so really only since the 1950s is relevant.
- alemanek 3y agoFairly certain horse rentals were a thing. Might be a bit of a stretch but post houses would fit the bill [0]. So, this lets us go back to the 2nd century BC. Just need to find some data on renter behavior now. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_house_(historical_building) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_house_(historical_build...
- mensetmanusman 3y agoCities have public executions weekly or daily without any law involved now…
- a2tech 3y agoMy wife leased a car for 2 years and never put enough miles on it to require the oil to be changed. Does that qualify are damaging the vehicle? Hertz works by flipping cars every few years (2-3, depending on mileage) and post rental inspections for obvious damage. It's not too complicated.
- throwaway5959 3y agoYour wife didn’t change the oil on her (leased) car for two years?
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoShe only drove 3000 miles per year?
- hef19898 3y agoOil changes are what, every 30k km for new cars? Totally possible to not have a single service or oil change in two years.
- ghaff 3y agoYou should probably get it changed once a year--although it also probably isn't some grave error to let it go a couple years if you haven't been putting a lot of miles on.
- hef19898 3y agoOEM maintenance manuals for wvery newish car I had, across miltiple brands, since MY 2008 an initial service interval of 3 years, and then 30,000 km or two years. Yearly oil changes stopped being a thing in the 90s, unless we talk about heavy use and / or harsh environments.
- Tempest1981 3y agoAlthough check the definition of "heavy use" -- it may include commuting during rush hour.
- HWR_14 3y agoHow far in the future? High turnover is priced into rental cars. They normally only last 2-4 years or 25k-40k miles. Meanwhile, all preventative maintenance (oil, etc.) is trivial to ensure happens on time and problems can be solved earlier because no one has an incentive to ignore the warnings (because a repair would be inconvenient or expensive). And they must get a great deal on replacement parts and mechanic services are no where near retail.
- dawnerd 3y agoIt was my understanding that’s why most rental car companies also run used car sales so they can flip the cars before they get too bad.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIf you're only keeping the car 2-3 years you can get away with pushing the oil change intervals out or skipping some of them and other maintenance. I would not believe that rental companies are strictly following the manufacturers maintenance schedules, when they can save money and not suffer the consequences of deferring maintenance.
- HWR_14 3y agoThey sell the cars when they are done with them, and regular maintenance is monitored by the onboard computer. It would be stupid to save a few dollars to obviously ding the resale value.
- Tempest1981 3y ago> maintenance is monitored by the onboard computer So is there a way for the prospective buyer to query this log? And can't it be marked as done without doing the work?
- HWR_14 3y agoApparently, this is still mostly done via paper records. I believe either electronic or paper records are easy to forge. However, that gets into "technically possible, but unlikely". After all, what you are suggesting is that the Hertz (or other large rental) company, to save a marginal amount of money, will commit widespread fraud and risk the massive lawsuit from faking records and then using those records to convince people to buy cars? Meanwhile, they risk damage to a car keeping them from renting it out while it's repaired. And the cost of standard maintenance is probably less than they make in the day or two it's out of service.
- deaddodo 3y ago> I know someone who leased for three years and never got the oil changed until the day before returning it. This is pretty easily detectable with modern ECUs.
- BonoboIO 3y agoTo me it seems that nobody cares, not the driver or the lease company. All priced in. „Don’t be gentle it’s a rental“ Everybody drives their car as if they stole them.
- hef19898 3y agoIn terms of off-road capability it goes: 4x4, rental, rental 4x4.
- olyjohn 3y agoOil changes? How does the ECU know? Only if someone resets the oil change indicator. All you have to do is reset the indicator and not change the oil.
- megaman821 3y agoThis article is basically stating the opposite of your intuition. Rideshare drivers are causing much more damage the car renters, so they are taking unexpected losses by using half the EV fleet for rideshare.
- darkwater 3y agoHow can one fuck a rental car in a way it can be detected only days or weeks later? Personally I tend to be 10X cautious with a rented car because I never pay for full assurance coverage, because I feel it like being robbed (the same way renting a child's seat makes you feel, I paid more for the seat that for the car itself)
- latchkey 3y agoI went to Mexico once, damaged the side of a brand new rental car (big huge dent in the side of the door from a close corner in an alley). Shockingly to me, the repairs (which they estimated and billed me for when I returned the car), were less than the insurance (that I didn't purchase).
- rightbyte 3y agoSometimes you can just suck dents out with a, you know, the thing a plumber use in the sink or toilette. Then you repaint the edges of the dent if they are visible.
- latchkey 3y agopaint scratched + dent... there was a low cement staircase as I was going around a right hand corner of a small alley... didn't see it... whoops.
- seabrookmx 3y agoUnderbody damage? On an ice vehicle smashing up the oil pan for instance. Anecdotally, the folks checking over the vehicle before taking it back also do quite a poor job and miss things. A friend of mine I was helping move put a solid dent in the box of a u-haul and they didn't even notice.
- ghaff 3y agoYeah, it's usually a pretty cursory check. I've definitely had a number of scrapes over the years that weren't major but weren't totally trivial either and they've never been flagged. Right now I'm driving a rental that has some gouges in the paint up front that I had to make sure got added to my rental contract; presumably these were not identified after a prior rental.
- ahoka 3y agoMandatory service every year? Not that hard.
- hef19898 3y agoYearly services are still thing? All newish cars I know are on a 2 years and/or 30,000 km schedule.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Yearly services are still thing? Usually yes. Certain sports cars with turbos or superchargers mandate 6 month service periods for their engines. And you need to abide to that if you don't wanna void your warranty. This is a scam by the auto industry.
- hef19898 3y agoMaintenance intervalls are not a scam... And high performance engines and cars are obviously different from normal cars...
- 3c6bYDXLMj 3y agoCome on. Given the context, “certain sports cars” obviously wasn’t what GP was talking about.
- crazygringo 3y agoThey do manage the risk. It's all priced in. That's precisely one of the reasons why renting a car is so expensive. If they hadn't set prices to account for that risk, the rental companies would have all gone bankrupt decades ago.
- cavisne 3y agoHertz presumably use the fleet telemetry data Tesla provides [1] which probably give some interesting insights into how a car gets damaged. https://github.com/teslamotors/fleet-telemetry/blob/main/protos/vehicle_data.proto https://github.com/teslamotors/fleet-telemetry/blob/main/pro...
- alexose 3y agoThe headline doesn't really match the point of the article, which is that they're using half the vehicles for rideshare, thus causing more wear and tear than a typical rental. Apparently they didn't factor this into their math and had to fess up during their earnings call. The bigger problem is that their Teslas are so expensive to fix. I suspect a lack of replacement parts and/or qualified techs is to blame. Too bad, because if they had better repairability then Tesla would have a real claim to lowest cost-per-mile.
- peterder 3y agoThere's a lot of sensor-integrated parts that are difficult or impossible to repair and very expensive to replace.
- wredue 3y agoSaturn was also notorious for sensor integrated parts. That didn’t last very long. Tesla has a first mover advantage, but the “sensor integrated parts” has been tested and failed already.
- m463 3y agoInteresting - I remember saturn tried very hard to have plastic panels that would be easy to replace, and was ahead of its time with employee relations. I guess it disappeared.
- MDWolinski 3y agoYep, we rented a Tesla from Hertz during a recent vacation. Took a small pebble in the window causing a 1-inch spider crack on the lower part of it. Over $1200 repair bill sent to us for it, luckily we had insurance through our credit card.
- Johnny555 3y agoThat sounds like a typical price for a dealer-replaced window including sensor calibration. If you're willing to skip calibration, cost is about half that - some people say calibration is not strictly necessary, but it's a safety system, I wanted to make sure it's working. This is based on getting my 2020 non-EV car's windshield replaced, the local glass shop said they can do calibrations for many cars, but didn't have the right procedures/equipment for my model.
- latchkey 3y agoOne thing I've noticed about Tesla's driving around southern california... a significant number of them look damaged. I can't tell if this is because they aren't easily repaired or if people who drive them are worse at driving.
- LightBug1 3y agoAren't easily repairable, means much more expensive to repair, means drivers will be slow to repair them, if at all. Probably don't want to shoot their premiums considering how expensive the insurance for them already is.
- rnk 3y agoThey seen to have highly optimized manufacturing over repair. Since tesla sells auto insurance for their cars, I wonder how that compares and handles repairability. I've had a few problems with my tesla that were fortunately not hard to repair. Someone clipped the front of mine in a parking lot and partly ripped off the right edge. I had to wait a month before the repair place got the parts but it was driveable. I had a few other minor things that were just typical drop offs. On the glass repair someone complains about $1200, glass is just expensive for front windshield. I have a non-tesla that got hit by multiple rocks and cost $2400. $2400! It was an electric pickup truck. Insurance paid for almost all. Then on my tesla, last year a huge rock hit the windshield, that cost about $1200 too.
- arcanemachiner 3y agoI paid $300 to get my last windshield replaced. But I have an older car and no bullshit sensors that justify jacking up the price. I _hate_ newer vehicles. So much fluff and I can't disable 3/4 of it. I drove a newer Ford Escape that had a broken sensor somewhere. It has a feature called "adaptive cruise control" where it detects the distance between the driver and the car in front of them, and adjusts the spacing accordingly. It uses a sensor of some sort to accomplish this feat. A related sensor stopped working so, naturally it reverted to the regular kind of cruise control right? Wrong! Because the feature for the adaptive cruise control stopped working, it disabled ALL cruise control functionality. And don't even get me started on the fucking spyware built into that vehicle (and other newer ones).
- 1shooner 3y agoI thought Tesla's strategy was getting autopilot to the point that their cars would be utilized more hours in the day, essentially like these Hertz Teslas have been used. But apparently they can't stand up to that amount of use?
- robbywashere_ 3y agoSurprised they aren’t just printing warrants for arrest like the usual.
- p1mrx 3y ago> Uber drivers also tend to drive their vehicles into the ground. This higher rate of utilization can lead to a lot of damage It's not just the "utilization rate", Ubers have to go everywhere. Imagine what your own car would look like if you spent a month driving to random addresses. The Uber heatmap of a city probably covers its worst-maintained roads, on days with the worst weather.
- brookst 3y agoA very good point, and it’s probably even worse than random distribution: people are more likely to call Uber in bad weather.
- IshKebab 3y agoUnless you pick your route based on the quality of road surface* I don't see how that would make any difference? *yes I'm sure there are some HN types who will claim they do.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoI do drive lower pot hole routes to reduce my chance of a flat tire. :)
- spandextwins 3y agoSounds like hertz doesn't know what the F is going on. Next time do more research before you try to grab a headline.
- crazygringo 3y ago> But Uber drivers also tend to drive their vehicles into the ground. This higher rate of utilization can lead to a lot of damage — certainly more than Hertz was anticipating. I'm mainly curious how Hertz got this so wrong. They must have gathered some kinds of stats on Tesla repair rates per mile driven -- why did the math turn out to be wrong? Does driving an EV 10,000 miles over the course of a month damage it far more than driving 10,000 miles over the course of a year? Or if they knew there were big unknowns, I'm surprised Hertz didn't or wasn't able to offset a lot of the risk of higher damage rates to Tesla as part of a fixed-fee maintenance contract or something. There's always the possibility that a low-level analyst just messed up their spreadsheet, but it's hard to believe that passed executive review. When a team pitches their proposal to the execs, it's precisely the execs' job to look at the slides and challenge each and every number and say "hey wait a minute, these numbers for wear-and-tear seem in line with historical, but two slides ago you said 50% of the fleet will be for rideshare." If they missed it, that would be a gigantic failure of management.
- dragontamer 3y agoHertz is the original meme stock, meming its way out of bankruptcy. Its not about being wrong, its about doing things that get investors to pump money into your company. Tesla is meme-adjacent and Hertz knew that making headlines with Tesla would attract investors. Now that Hertz lost money, its not their problem. Its their investor's problem. Or perhaps more accurately: its not the Board of Directors or CEO's problem that Hertz lost money per se, they did what they set out to do (ie: sell Hertz stock during a difficult time and raise money). All the Hertz shareholders who have lost real value are... well... that's the shareholder's problem now.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>All the Hertz shareholders who have lost real value are... well... that's the shareholder's problem now Let's see them meme their way out of that one now.
- koolba 3y ago> Or if they knew there were big unknowns … It’s possible the driving habits in a rental Tesla are unique as well. There’s already the general principle, “Don’t be gentle on a rental”, but perhaps the novelty of an electric car with a unique pedal system (compared to a gas vehicle) leads to more aggressive driving?
- Ekaros 3y agoSeems obvious that taxis are used heavily through the day. As rentals probably have more down time either by not being rented out or just sitting in parking lots when people renting them are doing something else. And long distance travel is less wear.
- ghaff 3y agoIt probably varies a lot. As others are noting, there's a meme that people are rough on rentals. On the other hand, as you say, it's also pretty common to get a rental because distances are far/you need enough local transport that an Uber isn't really practical but in practice the car sits at the resort/conference hotel most of the week. That's been my situation this week.
- Gibbon1 3y agoI have a lot of friends, particularly women and men with lower incomes that rent cars for any longer distance travel. I think because the true cost and risk factor is much lower. If your beater breaks down 200 miles from home you're in a real pickle if you can't just throw money around to make the problem go away. And women in particular don't want to be stuck on the side of the road somewhere strange. I bring it up because I see complaints from people with money that EV's don't fill their use cases 100%. No offense it's a privileged position. Where you spend an extra $10-20k for a car that does everything you might want just to ditch the inconvenience of renting something for that last 5% use case.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoI have also been curious about the renting strategy you mentioned. But then I realized that if everyone has EV’s and they all use this rental strategy, burst rental prices will be insane.
- ghaff 3y agoI don't know how common it is but I got rid of a (second) car a few years back that I wouldn't have trusted for a several hundred mile road trip into the mountains--and I could, if push came to shove, have paid for a long transport from the side of the road. But it could have been a real pain. As it was I just drove it locally but I wasn't doing that enough to justify the cost given lack of commute even before pandemic.
- vinni2 3y agoI don’t understand why they had to go with Tesla and Polestar. It’s not really the issue with EV ambition but because Teslas are expensive to fix. Plenty of other EVs out there.
- potatochup 3y agoI rented an EV at hertz in Nashville recently. I ended up with a Model Y, but they had hyundai, Kias, Polestars, some Chevy Bolts all available for renting.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThere were no other EVs with a competitive charging network.
- brianstorms 3y agoRecently was at Baltimore Washington Airport and rented a Tesla Model Y from Hertz. The ordeals began long before we arrived at BWI. I forget the reason now, but I didn't trust Hertz with the reservation for the Y. Even though the site said yes we have them and your Y reservation is GUARANTEED! It was weird because the Y was cheaper than renting a 3. And something just didn't seem right. So I was determined to call. I didn't know their number so I went to their website. Hertz's website was full of problems, like, no way to find out the phone number for customer service. If you clicked on the Contact Us page, it led to some customer-avoidance links like most companies nowadays have, where, here, talk to our useless bot, or here, peruse our Knowledge Base, or here, read our FAQ, but no phone number. And when you finally found a link to a phone number and clicked it, you wound up at a 404 Not Found page. (I finally got the number from Google.) When I talked to a human at Hertz I asked to double-check on the Y reservation. They said oh yes, all is good, you're all set, yadda yadda. Day we arrive, big long line at the Hertz counter. One employee behind the counter (this counter is like a football field's width wide, with workstations every few feet, so they could easily fit 25 employees each taking a customer. But no. One.) We eventually get to the employee. I give my name, tell them I'm here to pick up the Y. Sorry sir, there's no reservation here for a Y. Let me check something. She then walks away. A minute goes by. Two minutes. Five. Ten. Suddenly some dude in a Hertz uniform comes out. Obviously the bearer of bad news. Sorry sir, we have no Model Ys. Well we have 25 of them but none of them are available, they're all at the Tesla shop and we don't know when they will be available. But, you guys said yesterday on the phone that yes my Y was guaranteed, reservation is all set, all is good, etc. Sorry sir, no Ys. We have plenty of 3s though. Crap, I didn't want a 3, but we decided to take the 3. That took the employee 15 more minutes to process at the computer. HUGE LINE now backed up behind us, while this guy takes his sweet old time finishing what should have been a 30-second task. Finally we're told where to go in the epically vast parking garage for the car. It's in spot number 325 or something. We look on the ground . . . we're at like spot number 1, 2, 3 . . . we keep walking, we cannot find the car. I ask a Hertz employee, where would spot 325 be? He looks at me like I'm an idiot, and responds in a tone he reserves for people he thinks are idiots: it's next to 324, right over there, and I'm looking and I only see spots in the 200s. Employee mutters "what an idiot" or something and walks away. We eventually find the 3, among many 3s, at the extreme far end of this garage that is easily the size of an airport hangar that could fit a dozen 747s. We get in, and it's the first time I've driven a 3... even though I'd driven an S for ten years. Tiny car in comparison, everything on this little toy screen (compared to the mighty S's) and in a different place. We thought, we've had a Tesla for ten years, and we're not quite sure where all the settings are. What about brand-new customers who've never driven a Tesla or even an EV before? The entire customer experience at Hertz was F-A-I-L. Just terrible. It's like the workers hate the cars. And I can imagine Tesla's service is a total nightmare for Hertz as a fleet owner. Tesla doesn't get customer experience either. Hertz has become so awful (at least the BWI Hertz) we can't imagine renting from them again. I think there's blame all around. Do better Enterprise, Budget, Avis, etc. Somebody, do better.
- steveBK123 3y agoThe other problem is they stocked on on Teslas on near-peak pricing and now the cars are depreciating extra fast due to price drops and used market softening due to rates. I believe they've taken some paper losses marking their inventory to their resale value. Teslas are fairly low maintenance but still above average repair cost for sure. Related issue is parts & service backlog means above average time a Tesla rental may be out of service. There are notorious stories in Tesla forums of many many month waits for repairs after seemingly non catastrophic accidents.
- lgkk 3y agoOof since everyone is giving their Tesla experiences I'll share mine. I got my P3D in Oct 2018 and it got bumper damage a couple months later because of a distracted driver. My car was in the shop for almost 1.5 months and the total cost was around 5.7k USD. Thankfully insurance covered all of it and I didn't pay anything out of pocket. However, it just shows these cars are very tech-heavy and the cost of sensors and supply chain issues add up. For me as a individual it wasn't a big deal that my car was in the shop waiting for parts shipments - I had a second car. For a business that invested in these cars having fixed assets collecting dust waiting for parts sounds like a nightmare scenario! Sure they have other cars too, but it is different scenario for them. I still think the Tesla was a fine car especially with all the tech. Maybe not the nicest car interior and issues wise (panel gaps galore), but fun to just kick the accelerator in and SCREAM! In 2018/2019 it felt really special. Now, I feel like every 3rd car is a Tesla (I live in California) so it isn't as special anymore but that's a good thing! I sold mine a couple years ago, and looking forward to what new innovation we get in the EV space next.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd now imagine the service of, say, VW would be at the same level...
- nullc 3y ago> Thankfully insurance covered all of it and I didn't pay anything out of pocket. Tesla's fragility and high repair costs are presumably increasing insurance prices for everyone.
- dehrmann 3y agoThis brings up an interesting insurance debate. On one hand, you should have the right to drive around whatever expensive-to-fix car you want and be entitled to not getting hit, or at least reimbursed if you do. On the other, this doesn't set up good incentives. You have less skin in the game when it comes to repairs, so that's not a factor you look for when buying a car. The at-fault party's insurance should only be responsible for the repair cost of a median car with similar damage?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smrtinsert 3y agoI feel like history will not be kind to this government subsidized car.
- llamaInSouth 3y agoI got a Tesla at hertz and it cost me more in charging costs then it would have cost me in gas ... and they gave me a Tesla when I asked for the smallest gas car.... still happy they did because it has great acceleration, but thats the only reason I like Teslas... but fuck charging if you cant charge at home
- snapetom 3y agoI ordered the smallest ICE possible at Boston Logan a couple of weeks ago from Hertz. There wasn't anything but electrics (in this case, a Volt) so I took it because I was eager to go visit my uncle in CT. Huge mistake. Like my last electric rental, in Northern California, over half the chargers I tried to charge at were out of order for some reason. All the charging station apps suck, and there's like one super charging station on I-95 in between CT and Boston. The drive back took three hours because I was super careful to keep the charge in green. Just as I entered the Boston tunnel, the car went into "limited propulsion mode." Next time, I'm just going to uber everywhere and cancel long drive plans if I have to get an electric.
- llamaInSouth 3y agothe tesla chargers worked fine for me but it cost me $600 in electricity for three weeks... almost $1000 in total including the rental
- fswd 3y agoTesla should make a fleet version that's easy to repair, and jump into the market place or help Hertz get back on its feet.