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It is interesting that a bunch of finacial careeerists decided to jump on EVs without thinking - "Hey, we are going to need chargers as convenient as gas statio

It is interesting that a bunch of finacial careeerists decided to jump on EVs without thinking - "Hey, we are going to need chargers as convenient as gas stations, or else people wont use them!". In an alternative world, Hertz could have become _the_ EV rental company if they turned every rental office they have in the US to a fast charging center, and told customers "Look, just drive this thing and dont worry about returning it at a certain charge level". Such an action could have actually had a positive impact. Instead they focussed on "technology that will automatically open the doors for the users, adjust their seats, adds their favorite playlist"... I mean... Darwinism and all.

mcculley 3y ago
They also should have made deals with hotels. When I travel for business, I’m not going to allow for delays for finding and waiting for charging stations. They should have made a deal with Hampton Inn. Hertz kept trying to push EVs on me and I kept asking where I would charge them and the clerks had no idea.
cogman10 3y ago
They didn't even install chargers at their own parking lots. The end result is getting an EV from them would easily mean getting a flat battery if the previous driver didn't charge it or the car was in the lot for a while. The cheese brains thought just having an EV on the lot was all that was needed and that they could charge ice prices for things like half filled batteries. I drive an EV and would not rent one from Hertz.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  I got a plug-in hybrid from Hertz a month ago. Delivered with a full tank of gas an a 100% empty battery... Good thing I noticed it and charged it with my own charger before going for a trip.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    I'm a bit confused, isn't the point of a PHEV that the battery charge is optional?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - SR2Z 3y ago
      Optional, but a full charge saves around $10 of gas depending on the PHEV.
      - alt227 3y ago
        How much does a full charge of electricity cost in order to save $10 of gas?
        gambiting 3y ago
        My Volvo XC60 costs about £1.50 to fully charge(at home) and easily saves ~£6 in fuel cost for the amount of miles you can cover. I drive daily and fill up every 2-3k miles on average, it's a massive saving over a regular car(for me anyway). But even if it didn't save us any money, it's still worth charging as driving in EV mode is just such a luxurious experience, it's completely quiet inside and that's what elevates the whole experience. If you don't care about it, why buy/rent an PHEV in the first place lol.
        saalweachter 3y ago
        PHEVs tend to have 10-20 kWh batteries.
        eclarkso 3y ago
        That is impossible to say in a general way but generally speaking: significantly less. On our PHEV minivan, the electric range is ~30mi, and costs ~$1.50 in electricity (12 kWh usable, ~13c/kWh). On gas, it's ~$3. (30 mi/g, $3/g). Some places you'll save substantially more (cheaper electricity, more expensive gas) or less (vice versa).
- RadixDLT 3y ago
  pure greed
- IlliOnato 3y ago
  Comparing to the following, chargers might not be the biggest issue... > Sometimes the kludgy system erroneously showed cars as missing, resulting in hundreds of innocent Hertz customers getting arrested on charges of stealing rentals they’d actually returned.
- r00fus 3y ago
  I got a "free upgrade" from Enterprise to an EV with 20% remaining battery. I took it because I knew I had L2 spots at my hotel and wasn't driving much anyway. So it's not just Hertz.
thegrim000 3y ago
I wonder how much they paid Tom Brady to be their spokesperson. They decided to market their EVs by just having a celebrity act cool/funny. Not by, you know, telling the customer why it's a good value, or why to choose their vehicles/service, or any positive aspects of their business. No, their strategy was to just push out commercials where Tom Brady would do something stupid/funny like have a power cable plugged into him, to promote EVs. It's so baffling to me that that is the strategy of a multi-billion dollar corporation. It's also depressing to think that it probably does work on at least some portion of the population. But apparently not nearly enough.
- b112 3y ago
  I don't necessarily see a link to the advertising and the borkedness of this rollout. After all, commercials are very often just like this. Sadly, a vast majority of people have no interest in real information, and to be fair, the main purpose of a commercial is to stick the brand in mind. And as memory is amplified by emotion, humour helps. The real problem is range anxiety I think. PHEV is what we need now, as a transition path. With one, people can plug in for almost all uses, and still be OK if surprise usage means they won't have charge. Other comments in this thread highlight this. Primary, because when traveling you have no idea about the local infra. Where can you charge? What companies are cost effective? What hotels support charging, and for real, not just saying so on their website.. but only having one or two of them? When you travel, all the knowledge which makes EV usage at home easier, are gone. And so Hertz should have done PHEV.
  - sbrother 3y ago
    Do you know why there aren't any PHEVs with a more reasonable electric range? Something like a 100 mile range with backup gas tank would let my family do most of our driving on the electric battery while still being a usable car for roadtrips. But nothing like that seems to exist.
    - b112 3y ago
      They ae improving, as battery tech improves. Some now boast almost 70 miles, whereas 35 miles was common a decade ago.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
I disagree. The problem with Hertz is I primarily interact when them after flying. They’re always at some terribly inconvenient lot near the airport that takes a long time to get too.
- mrgoldenbrown 3y ago
  That is normal with most companies at most airports in my experience, (in major cities in the US). Phoenix was nice because it had a train from the terminal to the rental lots, but usually IME it's a shuttle bus .
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I'm not sure the last time I flew into a US city of any size that you didn't have to take a bus or other transport to the rental car center.
nunez 3y ago
The article says they tried to do exactly this but many of their largest locations (like Newark-Liberty International Airport) didn't have the infrastructure to accommodate that. That said, many Hertz locations do have way more chargers than they did before starting this gambit.
mr_coffee 3y ago
This is such a terrible take. In any market with Chicken or Egg problem, someone needs to move first. Sure, they could have been more conservative in their approach (easy to see in hindsight), but to say they jumped in "without thinking" is pure nonsense.
JALTU 3y ago
No, because the first lesson in bankruptcy clearly didn't Darwinize any of them manage by numbers, 1-2-3 peeps...(easy as a,b,c - thank you Sting) ;-)
sandworm101 3y ago
Doings this would deny the reality of the car rental customer. People don't rent cars to commute between their house and work, or to run errands around town. They are travelers. Either they are renting the vehicle to get from A to B during a vacation or such, or they are from out of town and need the vehicle to travel between the airport to the hotel/relative's house where they are staying. Neither of those groups will have ready access to chargers, nor do they want to drive all the way back to Hertz to charge the car. Rental cars are just not a good match for EVs. The best are use cases involving repeated short trips to known locations such as mail/Amazon delivery, school busses and commuters. Suburbia is where EVs thrive, the land of owned private charging stations and routine short commutes. EVs are not suited for hurried tourists.
- Retric 3y ago
  I think you’re overestimating what most car rentals are used for. Often it someone that just got into an accident and needs a car while the body shop fixes the issue or they shop for a new car. As such it is driving to work or doing errands is common and an EV owner may simply prefer an EV. Even for vacations you don’t really need level 2 chargers at most locations. A normal outlet can take a model 3 from near zero to full over a long weekend let alone a fast charger. Many camping stops even have RV hookups which are much faster.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    Maybe I just have a warped view of the market. I use rental cars about a dozen times a year. Inevitably, I am picking up the car at the airport, at midnight, and then driving 100 miles to the place I need to be. In a few weeks I am going with a team to the UK. They have us landing at Heathrow, picking up five rental cars, and then driving three hours north. (That was deemed cheaper than a more direct flight.) There is absolutely no way I would accept EVs for this trip as I have zero confidence that we would have access to chargers. We normally end up fighting just to get our cellphones working properly. Paying for parking with an out-of-country credit card is bad enough. I don't want to attempt getting a charging station working after midnight, in the rain, after already spending a dozen hours on planes.
macspoofing 3y ago
>In an alternative world, Hertz could have become _the_ EV rental company if they turned every rental office they have in the US to a fast charging center, and told customers "Look, just drive this thing and dont worry about returning it at a certain charge level". Such an action could have actually had a positive impact. I think you just demonstrated exactly the thinking that got them into trouble. EV rental business, turns out, has superficial benefits, but major underlying issues. They failed because of the basic economics of EV rentals: maintenance costs and depreciation. Also, there are massive challenges with building out a charging network as well. And yes, they pretty much have to give the option to customers to not return car fully charged, especially business customers. For business, taking 15 minutes to tank up is reason enough to overpay for the option to not do that, and that's 15 minutes - for EVs, charging up is a 3 hour exercise. Who would sit at a charging station for 3 hours (so now you need to be 5-6 hours before your flight at the airport?)? >Instead they focussed on "technology that will automatically open the doors for the users, adjust their seats, adds their favorite playlist"... I mean They didn't fail because of that.
- jandrese 3y ago
  A 3 hour charge is pretty far out of the norm in the modern world. Most EVs will go from 20-80% in 20 minutes or so if you're at a reasonably modern fast charger. I think a big part of the problem is that Hertz did a terrible job of instructing people new to EVs about the quirks of the platform. Charging to 100% is almost never necessary or even a good idea. It takes so much time that you're better off just making one more charging stop instead. The built-in computer in the cars is excellent at figuring out where to charge and even does stuff like pre-warm the batteries right before you arrive to make the charging go as smoothly as possible. But of course if Hertz doesn't tell you this you instead have a panic attack as you suddenly realize you have no idea how to find a charger in your area. It doesn't help that there are two competing standards currently so you have to know which kind of plug your car has and where the available chargers are. Of course the on-board computer has all of that information, assuming you know to ask. Given how many stories there are of people wandering around looking for chargers, it is clear that Hertz did a terrible job of informing customers of how their cars worked.
ypzhang2 3y ago
They did think about it and that was their plan? It would be helpful not to strawman arguments that can be directly refute by reading the article. It didn't work out because of real world execution is harder than just saying that they are going to do it.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
In the real world, commercial fleets (lease cars, uber drivers, delivery vans, buses, and increasingly trucks, etc.) are electrifying very rapidly. Reason: the economics have proven to be better. That debate was over years ago and it was very brief. Most car leasing companies are pretty much done switching to EVs at this point. TCO is way better for them. The market is bottle-necked on production volume. There is no demand problem for EVs at the right price point. Of course there are some manufacturers unable to meet those price points. And there are lots of attractively priced products in the market now. What went wrong with Tesla and Hertz relates to poor financial planning, poor execution combined with a Tesla specific problem of poor repairability. All of that is fixable. But maybe Teslas aren't the ideal vehicle for this. Having driven rentals, people using their bumpers for bumping into things is something that is a given. When those bumpers are really expensive to repair/replace, you have a problem. Charging infrastructure is actually a minor issue. The real issue is drivers having to figure things out for the first time in a rental car. That pain is easily offset by the low cost of charging. But of course you have to make that matter for the user and really deliver on that. Hertz made a mistake there by not just including that in the rental price. Just plug it in and don't worry about it. Electricity is cheap and Hertz is charging a premium so what are we talking about here? They should have just done a deal with Tesla on this. Tesla actually used to do include free charging and it helped them grow their customer base enormously. Don't worry about returning the car with a charge either. Herz can plug it in while they clean the vehicle. And so what if it isn't at 100% charge? Probably better for the battery if it isn't. This is both simple to do and it totally removes charging as a friction point because it is cheap, easy, hassle free and there's no pressure to top it up.
silverlyra 3y ago
> Hertz could have become the EV rental company if they turned every rental office they have in the US to a fast charging center They did build out fast charging – but at some locations, the local electric utility couldn't support it: > While the company had installed its own charging network as part of the electrification push that started in 2021, some older airports, such as New Jersey’s Newark, don’t get enough power from the electricity grid or lack the infrastructure to support the number of so-called Superchargers that Hertz needed to get EVs back on the road in a half-hour or less. Once a Tesla was returned to those locations, Hertz employees often had to drive them for miles to find a Supercharger[…] The image of Hertz staff driving around Jersey, searching for an open supercharger any time a Tesla needed a fast turnaround … tragicomedy. I would think that only a gradual pilot rollout of Tesla rentals could have saved this from getting out of hand. Instead they ordered 100,000 full-price Teslas, and congratulated themselves on getting a lock on a market … a market which proved to be much smaller and more expensive to serve than they'd imagined.

mcculley 3y ago

They also should have made deals with hotels. When I travel for business, I’m not going to allow for delays for finding and waiting for charging stations. They should have made a deal with Hampton Inn. Hertz kept trying to push EVs on me and I kept asking where I would charge them and the clerks had no idea.

cogman10 3y ago

They didn't even install chargers at their own parking lots. The end result is getting an EV from them would easily mean getting a flat battery if the previous driver didn't charge it or the car was in the lot for a while. The cheese brains thought just having an EV on the lot was all that was needed and that they could charge ice prices for things like half filled batteries. I drive an EV and would not rent one from Hertz.

theshrike79 3y ago
I got a plug-in hybrid from Hertz a month ago. Delivered with a full tank of gas an a 100% empty battery... Good thing I noticed it and charged it with my own charger before going for a trip.
- rwmj 3y ago
  I'm a bit confused, isn't the point of a PHEV that the battery charge is optional?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - SR2Z 3y ago
    Optional, but a full charge saves around $10 of gas depending on the PHEV.
    - alt227 3y ago
      How much does a full charge of electricity cost in order to save $10 of gas?
      - gambiting 3y ago
        My Volvo XC60 costs about £1.50 to fully charge(at home) and easily saves ~£6 in fuel cost for the amount of miles you can cover. I drive daily and fill up every 2-3k miles on average, it's a massive saving over a regular car(for me anyway). But even if it didn't save us any money, it's still worth charging as driving in EV mode is just such a luxurious experience, it's completely quiet inside and that's what elevates the whole experience. If you don't care about it, why buy/rent an PHEV in the first place lol.
      - saalweachter 3y ago
        PHEVs tend to have 10-20 kWh batteries.
      - eclarkso 3y ago
        That is impossible to say in a general way but generally speaking: significantly less. On our PHEV minivan, the electric range is ~30mi, and costs ~$1.50 in electricity (12 kWh usable, ~13c/kWh). On gas, it's ~$3. (30 mi/g, $3/g). Some places you'll save substantially more (cheaper electricity, more expensive gas) or less (vice versa).
RadixDLT 3y ago
pure greed
IlliOnato 3y ago
Comparing to the following, chargers might not be the biggest issue... > Sometimes the kludgy system erroneously showed cars as missing, resulting in hundreds of innocent Hertz customers getting arrested on charges of stealing rentals they’d actually returned.
r00fus 3y ago
I got a "free upgrade" from Enterprise to an EV with 20% remaining battery. I took it because I knew I had L2 spots at my hotel and wasn't driving much anyway. So it's not just Hertz.

thegrim000 3y ago

I wonder how much they paid Tom Brady to be their spokesperson. They decided to market their EVs by just having a celebrity act cool/funny. Not by, you know, telling the customer why it's a good value, or why to choose their vehicles/service, or any positive aspects of their business. No, their strategy was to just push out commercials where Tom Brady would do something stupid/funny like have a power cable plugged into him, to promote EVs. It's so baffling to me that that is the strategy of a multi-billion dollar corporation. It's also depressing to think that it probably does work on at least some portion of the population. But apparently not nearly enough.

b112 3y ago
I don't necessarily see a link to the advertising and the borkedness of this rollout. After all, commercials are very often just like this. Sadly, a vast majority of people have no interest in real information, and to be fair, the main purpose of a commercial is to stick the brand in mind. And as memory is amplified by emotion, humour helps. The real problem is range anxiety I think. PHEV is what we need now, as a transition path. With one, people can plug in for almost all uses, and still be OK if surprise usage means they won't have charge. Other comments in this thread highlight this. Primary, because when traveling you have no idea about the local infra. Where can you charge? What companies are cost effective? What hotels support charging, and for real, not just saying so on their website.. but only having one or two of them? When you travel, all the knowledge which makes EV usage at home easier, are gone. And so Hertz should have done PHEV.
- sbrother 3y ago
  Do you know why there aren't any PHEVs with a more reasonable electric range? Something like a 100 mile range with backup gas tank would let my family do most of our driving on the electric battery while still being a usable car for roadtrips. But nothing like that seems to exist.
  - b112 3y ago
    They ae improving, as battery tech improves. Some now boast almost 70 miles, whereas 35 miles was common a decade ago.

SkyPuncher 3y ago

I disagree. The problem with Hertz is I primarily interact when them after flying. They’re always at some terribly inconvenient lot near the airport that takes a long time to get too.

mrgoldenbrown 3y ago
That is normal with most companies at most airports in my experience, (in major cities in the US). Phoenix was nice because it had a train from the terminal to the rental lots, but usually IME it's a shuttle bus .
- ghaff 3y ago
  I'm not sure the last time I flew into a US city of any size that you didn't have to take a bus or other transport to the rental car center.

nunez 3y ago

The article says they tried to do exactly this but many of their largest locations (like Newark-Liberty International Airport) didn't have the infrastructure to accommodate that. That said, many Hertz locations do have way more chargers than they did before starting this gambit.

mr_coffee 3y ago

This is such a terrible take. In any market with Chicken or Egg problem, someone needs to move first. Sure, they could have been more conservative in their approach (easy to see in hindsight), but to say they jumped in "without thinking" is pure nonsense.

JALTU 3y ago

No, because the first lesson in bankruptcy clearly didn't Darwinize any of them manage by numbers, 1-2-3 peeps...(easy as a,b,c - thank you Sting) ;-)

sandworm101 3y ago

Doings this would deny the reality of the car rental customer. People don't rent cars to commute between their house and work, or to run errands around town. They are travelers. Either they are renting the vehicle to get from A to B during a vacation or such, or they are from out of town and need the vehicle to travel between the airport to the hotel/relative's house where they are staying. Neither of those groups will have ready access to chargers, nor do they want to drive all the way back to Hertz to charge the car. Rental cars are just not a good match for EVs. The best are use cases involving repeated short trips to known locations such as mail/Amazon delivery, school busses and commuters. Suburbia is where EVs thrive, the land of owned private charging stations and routine short commutes. EVs are not suited for hurried tourists.

Retric 3y ago
I think you’re overestimating what most car rentals are used for. Often it someone that just got into an accident and needs a car while the body shop fixes the issue or they shop for a new car. As such it is driving to work or doing errands is common and an EV owner may simply prefer an EV. Even for vacations you don’t really need level 2 chargers at most locations. A normal outlet can take a model 3 from near zero to full over a long weekend let alone a fast charger. Many camping stops even have RV hookups which are much faster.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Maybe I just have a warped view of the market. I use rental cars about a dozen times a year. Inevitably, I am picking up the car at the airport, at midnight, and then driving 100 miles to the place I need to be. In a few weeks I am going with a team to the UK. They have us landing at Heathrow, picking up five rental cars, and then driving three hours north. (That was deemed cheaper than a more direct flight.) There is absolutely no way I would accept EVs for this trip as I have zero confidence that we would have access to chargers. We normally end up fighting just to get our cellphones working properly. Paying for parking with an out-of-country credit card is bad enough. I don't want to attempt getting a charging station working after midnight, in the rain, after already spending a dozen hours on planes.

macspoofing 3y ago

>In an alternative world, Hertz could have become _the_ EV rental company if they turned every rental office they have in the US to a fast charging center, and told customers "Look, just drive this thing and dont worry about returning it at a certain charge level". Such an action could have actually had a positive impact. I think you just demonstrated exactly the thinking that got them into trouble. EV rental business, turns out, has superficial benefits, but major underlying issues. They failed because of the basic economics of EV rentals: maintenance costs and depreciation. Also, there are massive challenges with building out a charging network as well. And yes, they pretty much have to give the option to customers to not return car fully charged, especially business customers. For business, taking 15 minutes to tank up is reason enough to overpay for the option to not do that, and that's 15 minutes - for EVs, charging up is a 3 hour exercise. Who would sit at a charging station for 3 hours (so now you need to be 5-6 hours before your flight at the airport?)? >Instead they focussed on "technology that will automatically open the doors for the users, adjust their seats, adds their favorite playlist"... I mean They didn't fail because of that.

jandrese 3y ago
A 3 hour charge is pretty far out of the norm in the modern world. Most EVs will go from 20-80% in 20 minutes or so if you're at a reasonably modern fast charger. I think a big part of the problem is that Hertz did a terrible job of instructing people new to EVs about the quirks of the platform. Charging to 100% is almost never necessary or even a good idea. It takes so much time that you're better off just making one more charging stop instead. The built-in computer in the cars is excellent at figuring out where to charge and even does stuff like pre-warm the batteries right before you arrive to make the charging go as smoothly as possible. But of course if Hertz doesn't tell you this you instead have a panic attack as you suddenly realize you have no idea how to find a charger in your area. It doesn't help that there are two competing standards currently so you have to know which kind of plug your car has and where the available chargers are. Of course the on-board computer has all of that information, assuming you know to ask. Given how many stories there are of people wandering around looking for chargers, it is clear that Hertz did a terrible job of informing customers of how their cars worked.

ypzhang2 3y ago

They did think about it and that was their plan? It would be helpful not to strawman arguments that can be directly refute by reading the article. It didn't work out because of real world execution is harder than just saying that they are going to do it.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

In the real world, commercial fleets (lease cars, uber drivers, delivery vans, buses, and increasingly trucks, etc.) are electrifying very rapidly. Reason: the economics have proven to be better. That debate was over years ago and it was very brief. Most car leasing companies are pretty much done switching to EVs at this point. TCO is way better for them. The market is bottle-necked on production volume. There is no demand problem for EVs at the right price point. Of course there are some manufacturers unable to meet those price points. And there are lots of attractively priced products in the market now. What went wrong with Tesla and Hertz relates to poor financial planning, poor execution combined with a Tesla specific problem of poor repairability. All of that is fixable. But maybe Teslas aren't the ideal vehicle for this. Having driven rentals, people using their bumpers for bumping into things is something that is a given. When those bumpers are really expensive to repair/replace, you have a problem. Charging infrastructure is actually a minor issue. The real issue is drivers having to figure things out for the first time in a rental car. That pain is easily offset by the low cost of charging. But of course you have to make that matter for the user and really deliver on that. Hertz made a mistake there by not just including that in the rental price. Just plug it in and don't worry about it. Electricity is cheap and Hertz is charging a premium so what are we talking about here? They should have just done a deal with Tesla on this. Tesla actually used to do include free charging and it helped them grow their customer base enormously. Don't worry about returning the car with a charge either. Herz can plug it in while they clean the vehicle. And so what if it isn't at 100% charge? Probably better for the battery if it isn't. This is both simple to do and it totally removes charging as a friction point because it is cheap, easy, hassle free and there's no pressure to top it up.

silverlyra 3y ago

> Hertz could have become the EV rental company if they turned every rental office they have in the US to a fast charging center They did build out fast charging – but at some locations, the local electric utility couldn't support it: > While the company had installed its own charging network as part of the electrification push that started in 2021, some older airports, such as New Jersey’s Newark, don’t get enough power from the electricity grid or lack the infrastructure to support the number of so-called Superchargers that Hertz needed to get EVs back on the road in a half-hour or less. Once a Tesla was returned to those locations, Hertz employees often had to drive them for miles to find a Supercharger[…] The image of Hertz staff driving around Jersey, searching for an open supercharger any time a Tesla needed a fast turnaround … tragicomedy. I would think that only a gradual pilot rollout of Tesla rentals could have saved this from getting out of hand. Instead they ordered 100,000 full-price Teslas, and congratulated themselves on getting a lock on a market … a market which proved to be much smaller and more expensive to serve than they'd imagined.