Im bullish on EVs but I feel like rental cars are one of the worst places for the current generation of EVs.
EVs are best for the types of driving we do on a day-to-day basis. Short commutes in areas we know well. Charge at home over night and 95% of the year you never worry about charging.
Renting a car means I'm usually either driving long distances or im somewhere new and I don't know about the local charging infrastructure. Can I charge at the hotel? What about at Disney World or the San Diego Zoo or wherever else I'm driving on vacation? What if there are no super chargers nearby? Etc...
Maybe in a couple decades of battery/energy tech advancements where we can charge faster or swap batteries easier EVs for rentals will make more sense. Until then it's just extra stress you don't want when traveling. I know that's not why Hertz is dropping Tesla (the article sites high repair costs) but it's just my personal thought on rental EVs.
I feel like rental cars are one of the worst places for the current generation of EVs.
This was my recent experience. I was offered an EV car as a rental upgrade in a major city because the local rental place didn't have an EV charger. I figured what the hell because it was a relaxed holiday vacation. Turns out that was a hilariously bad idea.
Ended up spending at least 5-6 hours of my week vacation trying to avoid the EV going to 0% battery. Half of that time was spent on Google Maps - trying to find chargers with the right plug, ones that aren't broken, ones that were available, downloading various apps, etc. Then when I did find a charger I sat in the parking lot waiting for it to juice up.
All of that effort and I still could only give myself the miles back that I spent finding chargers, it was even funnier when the cold weather took miles away. Finally ended up luckily finding one at a local movie theater and asked family to shuttle me back and forth because of how long it took to charge.
Not a knock on EV's really, mostly the charging infrastructure and the rental experience.
> Not a knock on EV's really, mostly the charging infrastructure and the rental experience.
But why not knock on them? They had a lot of promise and a lot of hype when they were being touted as simpler and cheaper and just overall better. Somehow they ended up being more expensive, unless we're talking about Chinese brands, more costly to insure, a longer time to charge than a corresponding IC car and incompatible charging networks. I think they can handle a bit of criticism, it's a big industry, and it can deal with some minor criticism from an orange hacker forum.
I would agree that the discussion on EVs is a bit misguided in general. It always is EVs or ICE cars and EVs must be the winner otherwise you are "confused" or "out of your mind". In reality, both can coexist and have a place for what they are really good at.
> The anti-subsidy investigation covers battery-powered cars from China, so also includes non-Chinese brands made there, such as Tesla (TSLA.O), Renault (RENA.PA) and BMW (BMWG.DE). It is also unusual in that it is brought by the European Commission itself, rather than in response to an industry complaint.
This does seem like more of a political play rather than China actually trying to flood western markets, especially considering that western EV producers are also being subsidized and that the Chinese domestic market is sufficiently large by itself.
Agreed. That's why I added "At least that's what the EU says."
The EU is clearly whining because the Chinese local market imploded, so they are now exporting more of their cars into the EU markets.
Yet, articles like the linked one make it unclear to me what part of EV production is really subsidized and what part is not. I think it would be advisable to be cautious about claims that they are already cheaper than ICE cars. At least, that's how I am looking at it currently.
There might be more than reflexive whining at play, considering the review will include European manufacturers. The Commission might be trying to gear up towards some sort of EU-wide subsidy program to match the Chinese one. It's the sort of thing that individual EU governments are explicitly banned from, by Common Market rules; but when the push comes from some of the biggest German and French businesses, a solution has to be found.
> The EU is clearly whining because the Chinese local market imploded, so they are now exporting more of their cars into the EU markets.
I think it's disingenuous to downplay EU's response as "whining". The automotive industry is a strategic sector, not only in terms of economy but also directly and indirectly in defense. Shifting demand from the internal market to the output of a rival and potential threat means spending their own cash financing a rival to place it in a controlling position.
> But why not knock on them? They had a lot of promise and a lot of hype when they were being touted as simpler and cheaper and just overall better. Somehow they ended up being more expensive, (...)
I don't think EVs were ever sold as cheaper or overall better. I recall they were marketed as cheaper to run on short commutes, but at the expense of having a large upfront price, having shorter autonomies, and requiring relatively high logistics and route planning.
There's also the environmental and geopolitical angle, but it was always clear that potential customers were expected to pay a premium for that privilege. In fact, many countries even put together hefty subsidy programs to make EVs more competitive.
> EVs are far easier and more convenient than gas cars.
EVs certainly have some advantages, but for most of the world's population "convenience" isn't one of them.
If you live in a house with a garage where you can install a charger and you use your car mostly as a runabout, it's great.
The majority of the western world lives in cities with street parking and fewer chargers than vehicles, though, and in that situation it's far more convenient to spend five minutes at the gas station on your way to the office than it is to find a spot to charge your car for three hours which may or may not be anywhere close to where you actually need to go.
If by "majority" you mean, a small minority, then you're spot on!
All you have to do is look at the census. 2/3rds of households have a garage or carport. If you add to this the number of people with private parking, that's like 80+% of people who can have chargers subsidized by the state.
It's always important to look at numbers before you get trapped in your bubble.
> If by "majority" you mean, a small minority, then you're spot on! ... It's always important to look at numbers before you get trapped in your bubble.
Speaking of bubbles, I wrote "majority of the western world," which admittedly surprisingly stretches beyond America.
Two-thirds of households in, say, Berlin absolutely do not have carports, garages, or private parking.
Charging infrastructure in Berlin is fine - I had an EV for over a year and charged on the street no problem. The two major caveats are that you really need a card specifically for paying the charging networks (not a credit card which is a major hassle) and road trips are more difficult than they would be with an ICE car.
I suppose that depends on your perspective. The nearest charging point to my flat is ~10 minutes on foot, which I wouldn't consider convenient in any way.
It's true for me also but I didn't think of it as much of a burden. The car would last for about 2+ weeks between charges with the way I drove it and there was also the option of trying to charge near work which I would drive to sometimes.
The European Union created their Combined Charging System (CCS) standard and has been enforcing it since around 2014. I think Tesla's charging infrastructure in Europe has been forced to comply with that standard since it's inception as a precondition to apply for subsidies.
The US followed suite and has also forced support for CCS when applying for subsidy programs to grow Tesla's charging network.
If you really wanted you could order diesel delivered to your home. And then fill your car in your own home. Nothing stops people from installing their own tanks. It is just that it is not needed as filling occasionally is minimal inconvenience. Much less than having to stick cable in your car each time you park it.
Also, many people in the US (overwhelmingly in the Northeast) heat their houses with heating oil and thus already store roughly 300 gallons (or 1000 liters) or so of this diesel compatible substance in their abodes.
Nope. Most farmers keep a 50gal tank in their truck bed replete with nozzle for fueling tractors etc. And a larger one on the farm, usually 50 to 400gal.
I think you're confused. The future predictions that you all listed are right. No one promised them to you this year. The subsidies exist to support the market until the market can support itself. Taking on those kinds of costs is one one of the intrinsic functions (and reasons to exist) of a government.
There were certainly mistakes (e.g., not supervising VW properly when they went full DGAF on the electricify america rollout).
The parent is saying they still believe in the analysis that electric will work, they just spent their whole comment criticizing their EV experience.
Yeah - I was getting excited about having booked an EV for my Christmas holiday visiting family in the UK (with Hertz). Fortunately researching charging knocked some sense into me and I switched back to a ICE vehicle.
- Even though I was staying in their house there was no way I could charge it without buying an expensive cable, or risking some cheap crap from Amazon (blow up the house or the rental car perhaps?)
- Every damn thing needs an app (and an account and registration - fun if you don't actually live in the country in question). Seriously just put up a charger and a contactless payment reader. Imagine if every petrol pump needed an app to start? May as well go back to having to put pound coins in a meter...
- Oh and it was expensive anyway at 85p/KWh at public recharging points. So 78kWh * 0.85 = 66GBP ($84) per charge, say 230 miles to be generous. I gave the petrol rental back with 600 miles extra on the clock and put a bit over 50 quid in petrol in it.
> Every damn thing needs an app (and an account and registration - fun if you don't actually live in the country in question). Seriously just put up a charger and a contactless payment reader. Imagine if every petrol pump needed an app to start? May as well go back to having to put pound coins in a meter...
This actually isn't true. It is law in the UK that every public charger must have a contactless reader on it. Many of them have apps but you don't need to use them.
Your point about the price is very valid though. With the exception of Tesla Superchargers they are extremely expensive. For some reason Supercharger prices range from 12-35p. The Supercharger network in the UK is pretty good, but driving anything other than a Tesla is a nightmare.
I wish the EU would do that. Driving in Germany is impossible without one of the charge cards. I really don't get why credit cards aren't mandated to work on all public chargers.
The regulation also requires that ad-hoc charging payments can be made via cards or contactless devices, without requiring a subscription. That should make it possible to pull over to any charging station from any network and charge your EV without first hunting for the correct app or signing up for a subscription. Operators are required to clearly list prices at their installed recharging points via “electronic means,” including wait times and availability.
--- end quote ---
It will take time for all chargers to convert though.
Amusingly in Australia, most car rental companies provide free charging and you can return the car at whatever battery suits. They give you a card to tap, and Tesla Superchargers are probably the most expensive charger you can find.
I think your knowledge may be a little out of date. I charge my (non-Tesla) EV at Tesla Superchargers and pay 30p/kWh at the excellent Ionity (350kW!) chargers.
There are 12 Ionity chargers in Greater Manchester, plus 18 Tesla ones. I've used both sets.
You seem to be confusing home/destination chargers and rapid chargers - which is a common mistake for non-EV drivers to make. Unlike petrol, electricity comes to you.
Doesn't really matter, but that's one location that contains multiple chargers.
Of course, very few people that live in Greater Manchester would use a really fast charger like those there whilst in Greater Manchester. Maybe if you're a taxi driver, or caught short somehow? This is the confusion I was talking about.
he regulation also requires that ad-hoc charging payments can be made via cards or contactless devices, without requiring a subscription. That should make it possible to pull over to any charging station from any network and charge your EV without first hunting for the correct app or signing up for a subscription. Operators are required to clearly list prices at their installed recharging points via “electronic means,” including wait times and availability.
> ... trying to find chargers with the right plug, ones that aren't broken, ones that were available, downloading various apps, etc. Then when I did find a charger I sat in the parking lot waiting for it to juice up.
These considerations are why I think we'll eventually move to battery swapping, when the market is mature enough to have standards for batteries. When there are as many battery swapping stations as there are gas stations now, the problem will be greatly diminished.
I used to think this, but my car adds about 300km range in 20-30 mins on one of the many plentiful 300kW chargers in my area. A whole chain of gas stations now has 6-8 high-speed chargers on the forecourt. I plug in, take a break in the heated seat and call a friend, unplug and drive away.
On long trips stopping for 20-30 mins every few hours is ~normal anyway. Stretch my legs, use a restroom, have a drink, get back on the road.
Newer cars charge even faster. I don't think battery swapping is going to be important in the end.
To me battery swapping makes no sense for consumer cars unless it’s used to significantly increase prices (possibly by removing home charging as well): battery swapping requires a ton more maintenance, space, infrastructure, and logistics, constrains vehicles enormously, and requires a very small number of standard battery formats.
NIO now has 9 battery swap locations in The Netherlands. I'm not sure this is better than charging points, but at least we'll get some data on it. Tom Scott has made a video[1] about it.
Oh battery swapping would be entirely automated, no way you'd do it at home (let alone on the reg).
Nio Inc. has videos of the process, and that's what you'd expect (and I assume what tesla tried at one time), you drive to a booth, the car gets locked in and the battery is replaced automatically, then you drive out.
In the NIO case, NIO owns the battery and you pay a monthly leasing fee. One interesting feature this allows is that you can lease a cheaper low capacity battery for the 48-50 weeks of the year you drive less then 100 miles a day, and upgrade to a more expensive high capacity battery for the few times you're driving far.
This map has real time stats on battery swap. Unfortunately it's only available in Chinese. NIO has done 35 million battery swap to date and you can see where the swap stations are located. Not quite as accessible as your gas stations but not far off especially in the large cities.
The market is mature enough to have standards for charging, but is nowhere near being mature for battery swaps. The charging problem will be solved long before battery swaps get close to being a thing, especially with the recent convergence on NACS.
I'd call the charging market far from nature. Installing random apps, practically per charging point? Or requiring a second wallet for all the 'network' cards?
Wake me up when I need nothing more than the payment card I already carry.
It only works with Teslas, forget the other ones. That's part of why the others have failed to deliver a useful EV: only Tesla has a reliable charging network. The others are reliant on half assed solutions made by third parties.
Yes, that's why most of the other brands have announced the will use the Tesla port, to be able to use their charging network. There are still issues with that approach because all Teslas have their charging port on the back left side and their Supercharger cable is quite short, while other cars do not necessarily maintain this. Also they might not charge at full power. It's still a better solution than the half assed ones.
Branding matters, as people do tend to buy the image almost as much as the capabilities.
Musk is inextricably tied to Teslas brand.
All good when he was ‘space Howard Hughes (pre-hypochondriac shut-in)’, since that brand resonated with people with money who were going for the ‘better future’ image.
Now his antics remind everyone of their asshole racist uncle that they can’t stand. Not a good brand association, as asshole racists uncles aren’t as popular with those with a lot of money.
Which part of Europe? See the map. If it's SE Europe, Cyprus or the Baltics, you are basically screwed. Western, Central and Northrn Europe (the populated areas) not so much.
Some supercharger stations also work with other cars. I used them over Christmas with my Kia. Surprisingly they were faster and cheaper than anything else in the area.
1000 stations is nothing. Like there's more than 10000 gas stations in France alone, with just a fraction of a 1000 you won't get anywhere (or at least nowhere near as easily as with an ICE).
Correct. I've lived both in US (Cali) and EU (Sweden) with a Tesla. And apart from that's is a different plug there's virtually no difference at all. 250kW DC charging. No problems.
Here in NL they are few and far between. It's a diverse market, with dozens of companies (hence the hassle with cards). And still nowhere near the coverage of gas of course.
I'm sure they are the best, those Tesla stations, you're just gonna have to go out of your way for them, around here at least. Hope you got the right card. Or your leasing company. Or your car rental. Etc.
Storage of H2 is a challenge in space and weight constrained devices such as cars. Plus, any well to wheels analysis shows H2 coming up behind the alternatives in efficiency.
There aren't claims, these are physical constraints. For heavy vehicles such as trucks and busses (and trains) there might be a market, provided the H2 is an otherwise unused byproduct of some process and needn't be produced, but for the majority of personal mobility major breakthroughs are required to make it competitive.
We had a hydrogen powered Toyota in our fleet for a while and it was great, but we were also down the road from the National Physics Laboratory at Teddington where they had a hydrogen filling station…
This could be solved by regulation. Just start tracking National Physics Laboratory deserts to ensure that no house in the US is more than 300m from a National Physics Laboratory.
Yet there are 3 separate car manufacturers, with h2 passenger vehicles, all with 500km+ range, all being sold for 1/2 a decade. Seems like it isn't a physical constraint?
The biggest issue is the need to build out an entirely new fueling infrastructure with a highly explosive fuel. EVs can piggyback off of the existing electrical grid.
To replace fossil fuel transport will require an entirely new infrastructure regardless - if it's electric the existing grid will essentially have to be built out by a substantial factor.
A hybrid future is entirely feasible with long established city to city truck transport routes using hydrogen from dedicated planned end points and mid points along with lighter EV vehicles and non standard route EV trucking.
I did some (academic) research in a group working on storage (tanks and metal hydrides), so yeah, I know why it's only 3 and they all did it 20 years ago. Sources for such into aren't private, but I have the feeling you've never looked at them.
It's the same cars, from the same companies, using the same tech (structural use of metal hydrides isnt commercially viable yet).
I'm not anti H2, why would I? I'm not part of any crowd. I just did part of my physics training on the subject.
20 years ago, while there were more H2 vehicles on the road, nobody in the H2 storage fields thought it would last. On a basc level, the physics of getting electrons out of a material is better than getting protons out. And then there is an already preexisting infrastructure for free.
I've seen a very good take that it is the ideal renewable fuel for large machinery such as farming or construction equipment. Batteries wouldn't work due to the cost and charging time (when you're using them you need them for long stretches), but weight (and therefore some of the complex/heavy containment). These places (at least in the UK) have their own diesel logistics infrastructure already.
That doesn’t make any sense at all. The point of storing H2 is to use it as a way to store energy. If you store it as H2O, you’re not storing energy any more, it’s just water.
It’s like saying, “It’s easy to ship fragile glass sculptures. You just smash them into little bits and put the bits in an envelope, I don’t see why people use all that styrofoam.”
>It’s like saying, “It’s easy to ship fragile glass sculptures. You just smash them into little bits and put the bits in an envelope, I don’t see why people use all that styrofoam
And here we go. If the storage problem is an issue, how are all these h2 cars getting refueled? And how is the h2 getting to them? And how is it stored before shipping?
Meanwhile, the presumed "problem" was "preventing adoption", yet my counter point invalidated your statement. H2 is a success. It's stored. It's usable, in consumer driving applications. It's being refueled by consumers, right now, world wide.
I think green methanol is more likely, since that's what global shipping seems to be converging on. Methanol is really just a vector for H2, but you can make it without having to first synthesize H2 (although you can do that too if you want). Depending on the method of production, I've seen efficiency numbers around that of producing LH2, but you get a product that is liquid at STP conditions, which is a huge advantage.
I don't think the US is ready for a compressed gas powered car. Natural gas vehicles are basically gone except for some fleets, and there was already extensive distribution of natural gas. The fuel tanks on compressed gas cars expire, and chances are it won't be economical to replace them; it certainly wasn't economical to replace natural gas tanks when I was looking circa 2016. When cars are lasting longer and longer, having a 15 or 20 year ceiling on the life of a vehicle that's not connected to the amount of use is a problem. EV batteries might wear out over time, but that's more connected to number of charge cycles than how much time has passed.
Maybe it took too long, but we've got a single standard for high powered charging going forward, and I think J1772 is universal for PHEVs and slow charging of EVs. Eventually, people running charging networks will figure out how to keep their machines working and add card readers. My favorite broken charger is the wireless ones --- someone has run off with the cable, but hey the advertising display still works.
Honestly, H2's got a long long way (if viable at all) to go as the future of clean cars. There is not much natural H2. In a way, H2 acts like a battery as well using electricity to produce from H2O, and discharge as electricity to H2O. Producing it cleanly, like with green power, isn't efficient yet – it's only around 70% efficient. Plus, getting H2 from the factory to the customer is way way pricier than just using our current electricity grid for charging stations... Converting it to electricity is only about ~30% efficient(?) It will cost a few times more than electricity in the foreseeable future. It will be definitely much harder than have charging stations everywhere.
Not to mention the technical challenges (assume we can handle) of the low volume density, low temperature..
There's no clean power for cars at all. Every extra joule of energy used by cars, should be considered coming from the dirties of fuels... because the first thing we do, when we have an excess of power generation, is turn off the dirty plants.
But outside of that, these things will improve, although your numbers are a bit out there.
One of the biggest upsides of an EV is that you charge at home. Always start in the morning fully charged. No "Dang, need to go to the station". H2 is definitely not a step in that direction so for me it's DOA.
Indeed, for you this seems to be the case. For many, it's a royal pain to charge an EV. Maybe your apartment doesn't have plugs, for whatever reason. You work from home. You have to go somewhere to charge, and then wait.
For such people, and there's a lot of these people, h2 is less work (quicker fill up) than electric charging.
Right now, electric cars are targeting the wealthy. Wealthy people tend to have houses. That could certainly change, but even if it starts to target those with less fiscal fortitude, many such live in apartments with no charging infrastructure.
That is one of the least efficient solutions possible - making hydrogen gas from water is at best 50% efficiency, and then you get to burn that hydrogen in a thermal engine with 30% efficiency.
This is the problem with the anti-h2 crowd. It's almost all based upon lack of understanding.
One person in this thread, was talking about cars, with no knowledge or understand that 3 separate manufacturers have h2 products on the market. Not 3 cars. 3 manufacturers. Another was discussing things as if it's an insurmountable task, that having h2 in cars is "really hard", yet these cars are being sold and used all over the world, with loads of adoption in Japan.
People make up weird claims about efficiency. About storage. About where h2 comes from. On and on and on. It's so ... absurd.
This isn't a 'my team your team' thing, yet it seems like, especially americans, are wired this way. "It's not thing $x, thus evil! wrong!! We must, absolutely must destroy any hope of this other thing existing.
h2 is the future for many application and usage spaces, and I can see batteries the same way too. It's not either or, and made up claims won't help the green movement at all.
They're a maximum 85% efficiency, with a range of 40-60%, and then you're supplying electricity to a 90% efficiency electric motor. So, overall, you have 90% of 85% of 50% of the generated electricity going into moving your car, so at best around 38.5%.
In contrast, an electric car uses electricity to charge a 99% efficient battery, and discharge to the 90% engine. So, 89% efficiency - much, much better.
I wonder if it would be easier to switch to say a part swappable battery, rather than try and make the whole thing swappable. Something smaller, but with a reasonable range, say 50 miles, might allow for a smaller ejection port on the car and possibly even light enough to handle by a person.
Batteries are still surprisingly heavy. I'm sure someone here has a more accurate lb/kWh figure, but my first gen Chevy volt can do about 35 miles on a charge and the batteries weigh several hundred pounds.
A trailer mounted auxiliary battery doesn't need to supply hundreds of amps of current.
It can supply energy slowly, perhaps at dozens-of-amps.
The only time when an EV gets into hundreds of amps territory is when it is doing real work: Work like accelerating, or going uphill (or both).
Maintaining a speed on a straight stretch of highway is not a huge burden in terms of work, and that is where I think that a trailer-mounted battery might shine brightest.
The car's internal battery can take the brunt of rapid acceleration tasks and get filled back up over time, just like it already does in normal charge-daily EV use.
So to put some of this into real terms:
20A at 355V is 7,100 Watts, or about 9.5 horsepower. That's a ton of real work.
100A at 355V is 35,500 Watts, or about 47 horsepower. Way more than plenty to keep a portly EV heading down the highway.
The connection for the trailer APU doesn't need to handle the peak current draw of hundreds of amps. It just needs to be able to (slowly) pick up some slack and thus provide greater range.
Like the BMW i3 with the gas-fired range extender: The EV drivetrain could consume a ton more peak power than the built-in genset could produce, and that's OK.
It's not like people are using these in endurance racing or something. Most real-world driving is pretty mundane, with only occasional instances of rapid acceleration.
There's a difference between user-swappable and battery-as-a-service. There is a company called NIO that seems to be successfully doing battery-as-a-service in China right now and is trying to expand this platform to Europe. They're also in talks with other manufacturers who seem to be interested in developing a common standard to make the batteries interchangeable so the stations can service other brands too.
There may be safety concerns (e.g. if I understand it correctly, the swapping process is fully automated and the car locks the doors and takes over steering, so I'm not sure how this deals with emergency scenarios where the driver might need to leave the car or intervene) but as far as the driver is concerned they never touch the battery so the risk of accidents from improper wiring is significantly reduced.
Never heard of these guys before, thanks. Insteresting.
But it looks like they have severe limitations on the kinds of vehicles they support and their parameters.
Would never use this as a daily driver for personal use.
This is gonna sound crazy but gasoline is not that much of a fire hazard. I’m speaking comparatively.
I used a gasoline stove for a while and it is bonkers how hard that thing is to light. You can spill the gas or do all sorts of things—the only thing I could do to get a fire out of it was to follow the instructions, exactly, and keep the stove perfectly level. I later learned that gasoline only burns if you keep the gasoline / air mixture within a narrow range. I know that gasoline is implicated in a lot of fires, but it’s also just so damn common and people are careless with it.
Powerful batteries scare me more, to be honest. Not a lot more, just a little. Not trying to fearmonger here. It’s just that I love those sparks and that fire, and have spent time playing with batteries and playing with gasoline or other flammable substances. If you short a battery, it will basically dump as much energy as it can, as fast as it can. It’s easier to accidentally short a battery.
Properly stored & maintained batteries are fine. I just get a little nervous holding a wrench, sometimes.
It is a knock on EVs as longs as the missing/lacking/very deficient charging infrastructure is what literally makes the EVs work or fail. No suitable (and fast) charging means EVs are meant to fail, and deservedly so.
Yeah but petrol cars weren't serviced as well as now when they started (arguably with a much longer range per much faster "charge", maybe). EVs are probably going to be a good idea, it'll just take time.
Imagine in 1995 saying emails will never replace sending around documents at the office, just because there wasn't any infra yet. Wait a bit, or even help !
In 1995 email was very common, but it was always a propriatory system that only could be used in your office. Very little was connected to an outside network.
We had an email system starting before I joined in the mid-80s (a product we made called CEO) but it was purely internal until well into the 90s. I'm not sure exactly when most people had some form of interoperable email but it was well into the dot-com era.
I still use email pretty frequently even if communications are at least somewhat fragmented across SMS, Facebook, Slack, etc.
As long as you live where you can place your own charger. I've ridden with countless Uber drivers who rent EVs from Uber whose experience would disagree with such a blanket statement.
Hopefully everyone converges on NACS and the weird charger issues go away. It would be a pain to have to go to specific gas stations for different car models if they had different nozzle sizes for different models for instance.
My experience renting a model 3 from hertz was both positive and negative.
At first, it was hard since I've never owned a model 3. Even if you are a model 3 owner, you are probably used to using your phone as the key.
They give you a keycard.
anyway, I didn't know how to lock the doors. finally I figured out the lock symbol on the central display and locked the doors. But when I got out, they were unlocked again. The trick was to open the door first, press the lock icon, get out and close the doors.
The easy way to lock the doors... Well, you can google it and find out, it is not intuitive, but easy once you learn.
Now renting a car that can drive itself was wonderful. I had to put a lot of miles on and it helped.
Finding charging is easy -- it is all built into the display. You can navigate and it will integrate charging into your trip. I was already familiar with this, but if you're unfamiliar it might be something to learn. There ARE superchargers everywhere, and L2 chargers everywhere else.
I had to do level 2 charging (J1772) and it I had to call hertz to figure out where the adapter was. (It was in a bag in the footwell of the trunk). Once I had that I could charge at hotels.
Hertz did spam me with lots of "get to know the model 3 before your trip" stuff. I should have read it a bit.
I rented a Model 3 from Hertz last year and drove about 120 miles in it. Due to the super cold weather (like 12 degrees), plus the fact that I drove in the mountains in New England, and I used the heat (it was freezing and I had my child with me), I had the charge the car 1/2 way there, which made me stop in the middle of nowhere for 30 minutes while I waited at a super charger. Honestly this experience stunk.
I think the Tesla is nice if you don't need to go anywhere too far. For trips stick to gasoline.
In France we had this big plan to swap batteries near instantly at the charging station, like we did with horses 300 years ago (but it's an old idea since electrical batteries were used to power vehicles everywhere), and tested it in Israel of all places with Renault... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) . Didn't work but maybe that's one idea ? Now if only we could standardize this...
They didn't really try to bring it to market. If the battery was just leased while it was installed in your vehicle (so you were only paying some reservation charge and a use fee instead of the full up front price), you might not feel so attached to it.
The battery market is not yet mature enough for this. When the big car manufacturers have all had another decade's experience selling EVs, and battery tech has stabilized, the logic of standardization and swapping will become apparent.
Swapping batteries makes sense for scooters because they are not heavy, and it is done already in asia.
Swapping a battery that weighs a ton and is part of the car structure is another story completely.
I think the more sensible solution is to have fast charging and a reliable network. 800 volt batteries and a good architecture enable incredible fast charging, and in the fjture it might be even faster. Combine that with cars with a lot of range, ex. 400+ miles and a 30m stop once 300 miles doesn't sound bad at all.
Battswap is being trialled by trucking companies, with much larger and heavier batteries than in cars. The engineering problems are fiddly and time-consuming to get right but not intrinsically difficult.
With battswap also being done at the lightweight end, eventually there will be convergence in the middle. But I think we have another decade or fifteen years to wait before standardization efforts have a chance and battswap can be vehicle manufacturer agnostic.
Battswap is an obvious way to lower the sticker price of vehicles, which is key to selling the next half billion of them.
We can likely get super charging down to 15 mins with latest tech. Which is an overall better long term approach than battery swapping which requires standard battery sizes limiting innovation
Rented model3 in New England, drove 1 trip, paid some $33 in town for charging cost, for a distance for which the gas equivalent wood have been no more than $15. Spent time hunting for charging stations until I found the supercharger.
Came here and said EV was not cheaper to run for me, many people on here disagreed. I gave up
Probably less amazing if it's a shady place in the middle of nowhere, with a dirty bathrooms, and shady characters roaming around asking for money. I don't see having to hanging out in some of those places for 30 minutes a positive experience. It's got it's excitement, but usually not the good kind of excitement.
I've been to countless superchargers in a good chuck of the country. I've never seen a shady one with anyone begging, dirty bathrooms, or anything similar. They're in reasonable places, mid to upscale, next to grocery stores, etc.
That's good that it's the case. I was mainly pointing out that if it's ever not the case, and the place is not one would enjoy hanging out around, with an IC car it's a 5 minute deal and you're out of there. With an EV it's a half an hour, and possibly going out of your way, which adds extra time.
For instance, when I travel with my regular IC car, I don't plan or think too much about where to refuel, how I am going to drive there, etc. It's usually a last minute decision. Having to spend half an hour somewhere it's a bit more tricky, now the trip revolves around recharging, waiting, possibly combining with lunch or dinner, etc.
Pretty much anywhere. chargers are scattered all over. not every town has them, they are often hidden, and off the beaten path. If you start navigating to them when you are down to 150 miles of range you will ba okay and not have to go too far out of your way.
There’s tons of folk routinely driving EVs from the Bay Area to Tahoe / Yosemite.
It’s like any inconvenience though. I used to bicycle commute everywhere that was within about a 20 mile radius. Rain, shine, or snow. This was so routine that it never bothered me. But if you’re a person who hasn’t ridden a bike in ten years and I asked you to adopt my routine, I can’t imagine you’d be terribly happy.
lol, the keycard was given to me inside a oversized hard plastic holder thing. It was scratched and you couldn't read the card inside if you wanted to.
I wholeheartedly disagree that rental companies are a bad place for EVs.
When I'm traveling and I know that I'm going to have to do a week of heavy driving, I prefer an EV to save on gas. I've rented a Tesla Model 3 from Hertz a couple of times for this purpose: when I did the calculations, the cheaper per-mile cost of using superchargers more than made up for the difference in rental price vs. an economy rental (the addition of free destination chargers when i found them was a bonus). The general driving experience was obviously better than an economy rental, as well.
I know it's not the case everywhere, but along my routes, I was able to find convenient superchargers in parking lots of stores that I wanted to visit (bubble tea, Target, etc), and the car was usually finished charging before i was finished in the store. The couple of times that i stopped at superchargers that didn't have a useful establishment nearby, i was able to appease the kids with the built-in video games.
When it was time to return the car, there was no run-around trying to find a gas station to fill up near the rental center: you can return the car with a quarter charge, and it's no problem, Hertz doesn't charge any additional charging fee.
It would have been nice if i didn't have to use key cards, and if i could use the app to, say, precondition the car. It also would have been nice if the videos saved by "sentry mode" were easier to batch clear. But these are quibbles; the rentals were absolutely worth it for me.
I never rented an EV but everyone I encountered with an EV rental had received it unexpectedly from Hertz and was struggling to charge it.
It you want to give people a poor opinion of EVs, dump them in a rental EV and tell them it needs to be returned with 80% charge and don't offer any support on how to do that.
Oh that sucks. I recently rented a Model 3 from Sixt in Australia, and they said bring it back with any level of charge you want, which was great - I only had it for 3 days, and the initial charge was enough for that.
> or im somewhere new and I don't know about the local charging infrastructure.
When I’m traveling for work and need a car, it’s usually for smaller quick trips where I wouldn’t even need to refill a tank of gas. For these types of trips, a single charge on an EV makes sense. But otherwise, I agree with you. EV rental doesn’t make much sense to me for long trips or vacation travel where you’ll be driving a lot in a place you don’t know.
> When I’m traveling for work and need a car, it’s usually for smaller quick trips where I wouldn’t even need to refill a tank of gas. For these types of trips, a single charge on an EV makes sense.
That might make sense a lot of the time. But there's plenty of exceptions - for example winter time in cold climates can transform a single charge rental into several charges needed. Even with just a few short trips taken.
And honestly, for the former type of trip, given Uber/Lyft, I'm less inclined to rent a car than I used to be--especially if work is paying--unless I'm doing short side trip(s) that aren't as amenable to just grabbing a ride from an app.
I rented a polestar from hertz uk for a summer holiday, it was wonderful. i just let it charge overnight on the mains socket of the cottage, which gave me 200 miles a day, more than enough for a family holiday
Yeah, it’s highly dependent on the country. I rented a car in Norway this past summer. I didn’t even ask for an EV, that’s just what most cars there are. We drove a ton. It was delightful. My vehicle charged up in 30 mins at a fast charger, the chargers were all over, and most charging locations had cafes or fun things to do nearby. I loved it!
In the US, I have a PHEV but when I’m not at home, I don’t even bother to charge it because there are so few chargers, they’re slow, and the ones that exist are often broken.
If you have a private garage. I live in a (non-US) city where there's shared garages (those who do have a garage, a lot of them just park outside) which are old and not always have power sockets. And even if they do, I don't think you're entitled to use them to charge your car. And do EVs work with standard power sockets, or needs some special stuff? I've never driven an EV.
Most EVs seem to come with cables that work with regular power sockets, they're just more limited on output even compared to regular charging (not fast charging, which btw reduces battery life).
I don't know where outside the US you live but in some countries tenants have the right to install a charging station. Of course they're not exactly cheap, especially if the wiring isn't set up to handle that kind of load (from personal experience: charging your car while the washing machine is running on the same circuit in an old house is an easy way to trip the breaker).
Private charging stations can also be installed outdoors just fine and strangers stealing your power is not a problem either (the plug can't be removed if the car is locked and you can literally switch the charger off if you're not using it). Most public chargers don't have a roof so charging your car in the open isn't exactly odd.
Also in many countries even more rural areas now have charging stations. Often you can pay a flat fee per month to freely use charging stations on the same network or to do so at significantly reduced rates. In my case there's even a nearby charging station that charges approximately the same rate I pay for my home electricity provider - although the speed is also similar so it's not very useful if you don't plan to leave your car for a few hours.
The question in the survey is whether they "would cover
a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent".
Got $10k in highly liquid stocks and you'd sell some? Or you have plenty of money in your savings account but you use credit cards for all purchases? Then you get counted as "can't come up with $400".
It's useful to look at how the number changes over time, but trying to interpret the raw percentage is prone to misstep.
I don't have much want or need of an EV, but I was able to bring 240V power into my detached garage and install a 100A subpanel myself. It was all legal, I got a permit to do it from L&I and had it inspected and signed off on. Most states and local jurisdictions allow homeowners to do electrical work on their residences, assuming they go through the same permitting and inspection process as the pros.
I encourage anybody with the time and diligence to do their own residential electrical work. It can save you a lot of money, and add a lot of value to your home.
You actually can charge at the San Diego zoo, which I discovered last week when I (against my wishes) got an EV as a rental. It is terrible. The charger network is brutal for a non-Tesla.
I think most people will only rent a non-Tesla once. If you don’t have the option of charging at home it’s a truly miserable experience. It made me convinced the charging network is the missing piece.
100% agree - I now have 2 EV's as our primary vehicles. They are amazing for normal trips, as I charge them in our garage. But every time I go on a road trip I get a bit of anxiety. I have to pre-plan charging locations on the route, many times I've had issues (all chargers full, multiple not working). It's not for the faint of heart, as filling up at plentiful gas stations doesn't require any thinking. I wouldn't recommend EV's for my older family members, especially if they plan on taking longer drives. If running errands, commuting to work, they are fantastic. While I think the criticism is fair, gas infrastructure has had a huge headstart, so I think we'll continue to see improvements in charging infrastructure and range, which should remediate most of these problems. I still think we're in a bit of the early adopter phase, unless your variables are controlled. Edit : After reading other comments, I think part of my issue was that my first EV was our Audi, Tesla seems to remediate some of these issues with their network. Looking forward to taking a roadtrip with my Tesla and comparing the experience, but I think the point still stands for many EV companies and the consumer experience.
> Im bullish on EVs but I feel like rental cars are one of the worst places for the current generation of EVs.
I don't agree. It really depends on what usage you're aiming for.
For instance, if you rent a car right out of an airport so that you can drive to the hotel and then to an meeting somewhere in the city and afterwards perhaps somewhere else and then back to the hotel, you're renting a car so that you are completely free to travel across town to get where you need to be. These are relatively short drives zig-zagging across town which can include a few hours of parking between rides.
It sounds like an EV is the ideal vehicle for this use pattern.
If instead you need to go on long rides that take hours and you can't afford wasting hours charging then EVs are not as well suited as ICE-powered cars.
I can hardly imagine Hertz was introducing EVs based on parcticality and prudent deliberations.
I can imagine they wanted to have a rapid publicity stunt boarding the trend train of 'Hey! We are so cool and modern and mindful and everything, we have EVs!'. Only to be slapped by reality pretty soon afterwards. As it is ubiquitous with marketing bs.
> rental cars are one of the worst places for the current generation of EVs.
They make more sense for the short term car-club type rentals, where they can be charged the whole time when not in use, then borrowed for an hour or 2 booked on an app. But if you can't charge at home, it makes little sense to use an EV at the moment. It might make sense for small fleets of rental EVs to be based at hotels. You could just take whichever car was charged when you go out in the morning.
The other problem Hertz had was repair costs. EVs are more expensive to repair both because there are less repairers qualified to repair them and because parts are more expensive and more valuable etc.. I expect people driving unfamiliar cars are more likely to have accidents with them, so this would be worse for rental companies than for normal people.
As an EV believer that happily owns a Tesla Model 3, I grimace thinking about peoples first EV experience being a rental car. When I went on a 4 day vacation that would include a decent amount of driving (going from Fort Lauderdale out to Key West & back) I specifically chose the Nissan Altima in the corner of the lot, rather than the fancy EV Mercedes that wouldn't have cost me any more money due to my status with Hertz. If there was a Tesla I probably would have been fine picking it due to the robustness of the supercharger network, but someone's first EV experience being a Chevy Bolt while on vacation is setting the EV movement back years.
The way you rent cars isn't necessarily the way that other rental car customers rent cars. If you're going on a road trip you don't want an EV. But I rent cars about 12x a year for trips of just a few days with very little mileage, just so I don't have to depend on taxis, and EVs are a great choice for me. I don't usually drive more than 50 miles on those trips, and strongly prefer EVs because I find them to provide better driving comfort (more responsive acceleration, better handling) than most ICE cars.
Public transit is not an option in these places (midsize US cities: no subway, very sparse bus service).
Vs Uber: I personally prefer driving myself. No wait, and freedom (shoot, it's 10pm and I realize I forgot to pack toothpaste, I might not want to pay Uber $20 for a stupid round trip to CVS to buy a $2 tube of toothpaste). Also I tend to get carsick if the driver's not smooth.
Also most cities that are small and aren’t college towns have pretty terrible uber experiences. Not enough drivers and the ones that are there will probably reject your ride if they think they won’t get another fare easily wherever you get dropped off.
> but I feel like rental cars are one of the worst places for the current generation of EVs.
How could hertz not have known this? I think this was probably not a business decision but a management decision done so they can call the company green, basically virtue signalling when clearly it was a terrible business decision.
Sustainability is great but I feel like we’re making a lot of bad decisions to pretend like we are sustainable.
To be fair, the current generation of electronic vehicles are a terrible idea.
Sure, at first sight you are not burning fossil fuel in your car so you are slowing down climate change. Plenty of studies show the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lower for an EV than an ICE vehicle. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l... Although perhaps a mere half is not what people would think at first when they just compare tailpipe emissions... and it depends on how carbon intensive is the electricity you are using for charging.
And there's more than just emissions to consider.
1. Lithium mining needs water. The typical amount given is 500 000 gallons per one ton of lithium. Think of fracking.
2. Mining waste for base metals such as copper or nickel is 20-200 tonnes but rare earth minerals like platinum make a million tonne of waste per tonne extracted.
3. The lifetime of the battery which is the problematic component is significantly lower than the lifetime of a typical ICE car.
> the current generation of electronic vehicles are a terrible idea... Although perhaps a mere half is not what people would think at first when they just compare tailpipe emissions
The methodolody used by IEA for that chart uses the 2021 global average grid carbon intensity to calculate its electricity generation. If you live in Iceland, Sweeden, UK, Vermont, or similar regions with highly decarbonised grids, the majority of the chart's Electricity co2e isn't generated for that vehicle.
You've got to consider your local average grid carbon intensity, and how that will change across the 20 year lifecycle of the vehicle.
Critics love to also cite the resource cost for manufacturing PV modules or wind turbines to point out that green electricity isn't emissions free either but that ignores the even worse resource costs of fossil power and the continuous environmental damage from mining/drilling the fuel.
All things considered, green energy is better than fossil and EVs are better than ICEs. Of course where we really need to go is reducing individual transport by expanding public transit infrastructure, electrified buses, trams and trains easily beat personal EVs when it comes to resource use per person.
FWIW a bigger concern than the increased energy demand from EVs is the load this puts on the grid infrastructure. But this is also very much true for rooftop PV.
Yes. Recently I rented a car and put nearly 3,500 miles on it in a week, most of that in very desolate places in the Western USA. In Nevada, we would drive for hundreds and hundreds of miles without seeing another car, much less a EV charging station. I’d hate to be out there in something with as limited a range as an EV.
I am planning on buying an EV for in town driving and keep my gas car and truck for long trips. I frequently drive through Western Nebraska and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one EV out driving around.
When the infrastructure is there and reliable, and range is consistent with gas vehicles, I’ll make a full switch.
I saw a funny picture of a guy that was driving with a gas power generator strapped to his Tesla (On Hitch Mount Cargo Carrier).
Just curious how much he could extend his range. And if this would be a practical alternative.
Every time I wanted to rest car, I wanted Tesla but I always ended up getting gas vehicle because price difference was usually more than 2X. Hertz simply couldn’t beat price proposition of Kia, Toyota etc.
This was the situation I found myself in recently. I would have been more than happy to rent an electric car, but charging infrastructure was a big, unknown variable.
This is due to high body damage repair costs and has nothing to do with repairing an electric powertrain:
>Let me share a bit more context on the damage equation. First, while conventional maintenance on electric vehicles remained lower relative to comparable ICE vehicles in Q3, higher collision and damage repairs on EVs continue to weigh on our results and negatively impacted EBITDA. For context, collision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle. Second, where a car is salvaged, we must crystallize at once any difference between our carrying value and the market value of that car. The MSRP declines in EVs over the course of 2023, driven primarily by Tesla have driven the fair market value of our EVs lower as compared to last year, such that a salvage creates a larger loss and, therefore, greater burden.
where a car is salvaged, we must crystallize at once any difference between our carrying value and the market value of that car
Hang on though, this part has nothing to do with repair costs. This just sounds like an accounting issue, right? If anything I would expect this to benefit Hertz since they could write off the higher loss in their taxes immediately, instead of waiting until future years to write the value off via depreciation.
On the other hand, I can see how this would make their numbers look worse at a glance since it shows up as though they lost money, but in fact no actual assets have been lost; they have the same car, it was repaired, and the repair was paid for by insurance, but now it looks like they took a loss because an arbitrary accounting rule forces them to adjust their balance sheet in a different way than they would otherwise.
Not sure if I'm understanding this right but it sure sounds like Hertz is flat-out admitting that they're making sub-optimal business decisions to make their numbers look better. Wouldn't that be a blatant violation of their fiduciary duties?
This stuff tends to be very complex. Writing off losses early doesn’t always help you. This is why depreciation rules are flexible and losses can be carried forwards.
For a public company with steady growth I imagine you generally want to amortize losses over a fairly long window. Also if you already had losses this year, and think you’ll grow more in future years, you really don’t want to book more losses now! Hertz has been getting hammered recently. Especially problematic if these are lumpy losses which will make profits less predictable. You’d rather smooth those out and hit your earnings forecast. (At least, that’s the CFO’s mandate.)
It gets even more complex when you consider the interplay with windfalls and rapid growth, but you can probably assume here that they are optimizing for short-to-medium term stock price (1-5 yr). Most CEOs don’t invest in 10yr bets. You might get fired for lackluster growth before that pays off!
More generally, “fiduciary duties” is generally construed pretty loosely. Delaware corporate law defers quite strongly to the corporation; if they can make a coherent argument for why they are benefitting shareholders they tend to get the benefit of the doubt.
This obviously decreases their margins since the insurance premiums go up. And if they self insure as the other guy claims, then the repair costs come straight out of their wallet.
Right, that’s true on the “higher repair costs” side of the original post, but I’m talking about the “market prices have gone down so we have to recognize bigger losses on salvage” aspect later in the post, which is caused by changes in fair market value and doesn’t have to do with the cost of repairs.
Right but the part of the argument I quoted had nothing to do with repair costs: they were making the point that changes in FMV due to EV prices going down in general were forcing them to recognize bigger losses in salvage situations, since they have to re-value the car post-salvage based on current market prices.
So in this case they are basically writing off more value “for free”, because the loss is coming from a genuine loss in value of the asset, but since the asset is a car that may still provide the same amount of value back to Hertz and still last the same amount of time, it’s sort of a weird corner case where you could argue they haven’t really lost anything.
Of course that loss is offset by lower depreciation losses in the future, so it’s not like it’s coming out of nowhere.
One of the reasons large rental companies self insure is so that they can do repairs in house without listing cars as salvaged. They make it back on resale I think I read this from car dealership guy.
That's (yet) another reason why I don't buy the insurance that covers incidents of my own fault for my beater. A crushed bumper will deem it salvage and the insurer will take it away but I could still drive it (and from a relative's experience, at much lower cost than the insurer would pay).
But on a newer vehicle, it takes a lot of damage to get branded salvage.
Also makes sense for Hertz to do it in-house as they'll have a somewhat standardized fleet. Can "borrow" a rear bumper from a vehicle in for more serious heavier-duty front-end repair to get at least 1 back in the fleet.
When a car is salvaged (i.e., declared a total loss), that means that the insurance company has taken possession of the vehicle, offering the insured the market value of the car for their loss (where market value is the value of the car in its salvaged state). The car that was worth $X on their books is now $Y in cash, and $Y is usually significantly less than $X, because salvaged cars are usually worth way less than a normal used car (though sometimes the car is worth more as spare parts, for uncommon vehicles or for models no longer in production).
even if it were true, aren't they exacerbating the issue by "crystallizing" the loss on every single EV rather than just the ones that are salvaged? hardly seems like a reason to sell-all.
Insurance is not free money. Hypothetically say I was losing a car once per month… then my premiums would reflect that. The purpose of insurance in that hypothetical would be to insure against losing 2 cars per month but I would be paying for that first lost car in full because at that point, it’s not a risk… it’s a consistent monthly cost.
Gigapress mono frames don’t like damage. Even light damage. The whole car is totaled when a comparable ICE build process can be repaired for modest costs. More of a Tesla problem than an ev problem.
I had a mostly great experience with Hertz Polestar in Switzerland. Easy to drive, did well on the road.
The most painful part of the experience was attempting to charge it before returning it. Finding a compatible, working L3 charger was very difficult, even in Zurich and the experience of downloading an app to start the charging process was terrible. It of course, didn't accept my non-Swiss credit card and I had a get a local friend to help with the payment part.
> It of course, didn't accept my non-Swiss credit card
If I can't use the vehicle without needing to carry a working cellular-connected computer running a specific operating system in my pocket and/or having a specific category of bank card, that's a hard 'no' for me. Either have the car negotiate payment with the charging network or give me the option of handing currency to a person at a register. Otherwise I insist on a dino car.
Charging Teslas with Tesla Superchargers is as streamlined as possible: just plug in. Charging non-Teslas at SCs is almost as good, you just need to tell the app which unit you're plugged into.
It's third-party chargers that are an endless source of frustration.
> Charging non-Teslas at SCs is almost as good, you just need to tell the app which unit you're plugged into.
That's not the "just need to" that works for me. For privacy reasons I don't carry a device that constantly reports my personal information to Apple or Google. Can I install this app from F-Droid? Strike one.
Now supposing I decide I'm cool with being tracked by Apple or Google all the time and use a device I can get the app on. Do I need to register an account with the app? With my personal information? So the fact that I am driving a specific Tesla vehicle along with my location can be tracked by Tesla? Strike two.
Now supposing I decide I'm cool with being tracked by Apple or Google and Tesla, do I need to register a Visa or Mastercard with the app so I can also be tracked by the payment provider, who will sell my transactions to random third-party eReceipt brokers who will dutifully add my travel habits to the profile they keep on me? Strike three.
Nope. Not playing any of these games. Gas car, cash. Thank you very much.
Agreed. Got a Polestar for a surprisingly cheap price on Hertz recently and I was really impressed with it. If I were in the market I think I’d take it over a Tesla.
Ooof. I own a Model 3 and was really looking forward to my Polestar 2 rental in NZ over the holidays. It felt like a massive downgrade in pretty much every way to me. The biggest thing was the responsiveness, it was on par with a standard ICE vehicle in terms of how sluggish it was. I was incredibly disappointed given that I would love to look elsewhere (from Tesla) for my next vehicle.
I rented a Tesla from Hertz recently. The throttle response was incredible. Everything else about the car was truly awful. Opaque touch UI. Fiddly steering wheel buttons with unclear functionality. Dangerously unpredictable self-driving. Insistent seat memory that constantly tried to crush me on entry. Had to install an app to unlock the car. Really a terrible vehicle.
A friend of mine rented a Kia Nero EV and it was excellent. It’s just a car that happens to be electric. I didn’t even realize it was an EV until the third day.
I do tend to agree that a lot of peculiarities of Teslas are unnecessary and/or bad, but for what it's worth most of the ones you listed are less of an issue for a vehicle that you own. Unlocking with the phone is convenient, you tie seat memory to the user, and you learn the button functions. (Some aspects are still definitely stupid, like the intermittent wiper function, the auto high beams, and autopilot on anything but clearly marked highways. And of course the lack of stalks on the new ones.)
Anyway, they're a terrible choice for a rental fleet. You want rental vehicles to behave as much as possible like the average vehicle, so there's a minimal learning curve. Next to manual transmission vehicles in North America, Teslas have to be about the worst choice for that.
Yeah but the Tesla implementations of these features still suck. "You get used to it" is a shitty sales pitch. Basically any other car with these features has a better implementation. Tesla does it different but not better. It isn't a matter of familiarity, these designs are just bad.
My 15 year old BMW:
Has seat memory tied to the key. I don't have to fiddle with a menu to save the setting. It just... remembers.
Has steering wheel buttons with labels. Using steering wheel buttons and three fingertip-reachable and physically distinct stalks I can run my (intermittent rain sensing!) wipers, cruise control, blinkers, headlights, radio, and phone (which can stay in my pocket!).
Has an iDrive knob that controls all non-driving-critical features but can still be safely operated when driving. This includes the navigation system but also things like car settings.
Keyless entry where I just grab the handle and pull (this is one operation, not two) and the car unlocks. This works on the front doors and the trunk. It also works to start the car. No phone interaction required. The key fob stays in my pocket. In 8 years of ownership I have changed the fob battery once. There's a physical lock cylinder in the door if my key fob or the car battery die. I can lock the car with a touch as well.
Has physical buttons for almost everything (except car settings and nav). Seats (including heaters), mirrors, windows, blinkers (including hazards), head lights, cruise control, radio (volume, tuner, track, presets), dual zone climate control, hill descent, etc.
They really don't suck. The Tesla UI is the best I've ever used in why car. They're unfamiliar to you.
The seat memory does remember. Not just for the physical key, but for your phone. You do nothing. If my wife gets in the car, it sets up the car for her. If I do, it sets it up for me. Neither of us touch anything, it's automatic depending on where our phones are.
The steering buttons aren't labeled for a reason! Because you can remap them. Which is awesome, because I can set them up exactly how I like them. I can put all the functionality you mentioned on the steering buttons.
It doesn't need an idrive button. It has voice. I don't look at the car to navigate. I tell it what I want. Same with other non critical functions.
It needs zero phone interactions. I walk to the car and open the door. That's it. I don't look at the phone. Don't wait. It just works. For every door and the trunk. You just never think about it.
The Tesla does all the things you listed vastly better. You just haven't learned to set them up and use them.
Every car has voice, it just does not work well in the US because street and establishment names are often not real words in English, people don't know how they are pronounced and, even if they do, the car itself has different ideas about pronunciation. iDrive guarantees that you can get to the "Manet st" and not the "Monet st".
>The Tesla does all the things you listed vastly better.
Don't you need to get into menus to change the A/C air direction/temperature/pressure in a Tesla? How is it better than operating a physical dial/lever for example? Especially for the people on the rear seat? Also, the glove box latch is in the menu too, is not it?
>I never have trouble telling it what street I'm going to.
Well, good for you, perhaps you are the person the voice models had been trained on.
>And no. I never go into the menus for the AC. I do it though voice.
What about the passengers on the rear seat? And how is it "vastly better" to change the AC direction through voice than just to pull the lever until it's blowing in the right direction?
Is this why I have to ask my Uber driver to turn the rear seat heater on? How do I even interact with the voice control as a passenger? Am I supposed to say "Hey Elon, warm my ass"?
Hey! There's plenty to be critical about. It just isn't the BS being brought up in this thread so far from people who just don't know how to use the car.
But you're spot on! The fact that people in the rear have no amenities is one of the big downsides of Tesla. And that rear seat heater? You need to pay extra to unlock it! I hope they choke on their $200
That is mostly just your opinion, not facts. I returned my car because of problems like these (and the awful build quality). Not everyone agrees with what Tesla do, and that is fine.
There are plenty of things to complain about. But the ones you mentioned are literally not problems. You just didn't know how to use the car if you needed phone interactions to open the car, or didn't have seat memory working, or didn't set up your steering buttons. That's not a matter of opinion, those are facts.
Oy, I wouldn't hold up a 2008 BMW as a paragon of usability. That early iDrive system was awful. Three different ways to differently manage climate temperature? Navigation straight out of the Macbook Wheel[1]? I could go on. The auto wipers were definitely better than the Tesla though.
I do largely agree with you re the Tesla, although the steering wheel controls I could argue both sides. They're multi-function, which allows you to customize their operation and do a lot more than you can with dedicated controls.
Edit: though I guess it's 2024 now. IIRC the 2009s had slightly less bad idrive.
I have had nothing but good experiences with iDrive in my car. Certainly better than a touch screen. It is a 2010 LCI E90, maybe the iDrive was improved?
Yeah, I rented a Polestar from Hertz and this was my takeaway too: less fun to drive than my 3, clunkier control surface and not particularly better in any noticeable way.
Okay, you're welcome to buy a golf cart or something. You're also welcome to drive a Tesla and turn the driving mode to "chill" or "comfort". In a Polestar you don't have a choice -- their "sport" mode just turns off traction control. An electric car being incapable of responsive driving is objectively bad.
BMW is well known for their poor longevity with electrical systems. I wonder how this will play out in their EV lines, or if because they've removed the ICE related electronics and things such as engine bay heat if matters will improve.
Actually in the EV world BMW is known for the longevity of its batteries. BMW had EVs in the market already in 2013-2014, the BMW i3. And the reported degradation of those batteries has been minimal.
BMW is currently having all excellent EV cars, and that’s even with shared architecture with their ICE counterparts. Specially their electrical motors are above everyone else’s, due to the lack of permanent magnets, which allows for finer control of their power and instant disconnection. I am expecting to BMW to beat Tesla completely when they finally offer their dedicated EV platform in 2025-2026.
Rented a Polestar from Hertz last year. It died in the driveway at 80% battery and wouldn't come on. Hertz had to have it towed 350km to the nearest Polestar service centre. Hertz refused to deliver a replacement car and just refunded the rental. Did not make me love Hertz or Polestar
my Polestar experience was great, except for the fact that for a car that has the dimensions of an SUV, the tiny windscreen and windows made it feel a bit claustrophobic, like being in a sports sedan
If a brand popped up and offered a gasoline ICE with old toyota-level reliability and longevity, and without electronics (save for maybe bluetooth for some music) I'd pay a sizeable premium for it.
I'd be fine ditching bluetooth. I'd be fine with an AUX cable. Most people have their phone on some charging mount anyways, so there's already a cable running to the location so wireless isn't much of an advantage here
Yep I can confirm this works quite well since it's what I used for over a decade until I got a new car a couple years ago. Bluetooth can be annoyingly flaky in many cars but plugging in a cable literally just works. My old sound system and traditional controls worked great and I have considered replacing the more modern system that came with my current car with something more like the old one.
My pet peeve about BT in cars is that it can interrupt phone calls when your spouse starts the car or arrives home. I guess it's nice that cars have good BT range, but it would be nice if it could sense whether the phone is in the car, or perhaps 30 feet away, in my bedroom (and I'm on a call!).
I was looking at used compact cars but the market was insane. Even with a COVID markup on the new Rio, the price was competitive with used Corollas/Civics that were 10 years old and had 75K+ miles. This is my 6th or 7th Hyundai/Kia and they've all been fantastic.
Edit: I forgot but I have some bad news, Kia is probably killing the Rio so you might be out of luck. Makes sense as the dealerships heavily promote the Forte and barely stock any Rios. The salespeople were a little surprised we loved the Rio so much, I think it's just too small for most Americans.
Yeah, looks like '23 was the last year. I'm also reading that it's a bit underpowered. I like small calls, but I don't like struggling to get a up hill. Though, I have driven a few Hyundai-labeled hatchbacks (can't remember the name) from around '15, and they were quite good. I don't know much about their operation. Is Kia the same underlying tech?
so far I'm really happy with my 21 tacoma... it's got just enough tech but lots of physical buttons. I just use android auto with a wireless dongle. the only issue with that is it takes about 12-20 seconds to pair on car start. The stereo is just a 2 din box as well with minimal car interactions, just a forward back/up down volume button on the wheel. which reminds me the volume is left right not up down, which is crazy.
it's a very nice mix so far of just truck and modern.
Hertz doesn't care about customer complaints, other than as a KPI that they A) still have customers and B) aren't "wasting" money on such luxury things as making sure the customer's rental is actually available when they contracted for it.
The Model S has a fair amount of aluminum in the body (about 400 pounds or so, IIRC). The Model 3 is much more biased towards steel for most of the body, due to cost.
A lot of guys are telling you it's because it the workability of aluminium which is purified bullshit. Panelbeaters rarely work panels nowadays, they replace them. The problem with Tesla is that they're gaping assholes when it comes to supplying parts to third party repairers. Repairing Teslas is expensive because that's how Tesla wants it to be.
To an extent, for banging into shapes, but it's challenging to add more material to it if needed. None of the options are especially good compared to welding, though that's just my opinion (compared to fasteners - size, brazing - high temperature but maybe).
Other materials have their own issues, but if you cast large pieces of anything you also make it super expensive to replace parts that can't be repaired onsite.
It’s got nothing to do with being an EV and everything to do with Tesla requiring monopolized first party repairs where they dictate prices and refuse to sell parts to third party shops.
Tesla uses Giga Presses to build the body of some of their models. While lighter and stronger than a body build of smaller parts, it also makes impossible to repair damages by replacing some of the smaller parts.
Don't know if the Tesla cars owned by Hertz are built using a Giga Press.
Plus, they’ve spent years prioritizing production and sales, not service. As a result their cars aren’t designed with repairability in mind and their service centers are backlogged, and even when they can work on your car they may not get parts, because they go to new cars.
Getting replacement parts from Tesla has been consistently reported as time consuming. Even if the repair is the same cost, there's more loss of use if you can't get parts in a timely fashion.
Someone told me if butterfly door gets jammed (and it would in rainy weather), it costs $20 to fix just one door! This person has sweared that he will never ever buy another Tesla again. l How did Tesla didn’t got this right?
I rented a Tesla from Hertz once in Houston and the whole experience was terrible.
Got to the counter and the agent first suggested that I take a gas car for $25/day. I was confused because that was so cheap, although the Tesla was already heavily discounted. Apparently, this was $25/day above what I had paid for the model 3 and it was for a compact economy car. I stuck with the Tesla.
The agent warned me that repairs were very expensive and I need to have insurance, which I had bought and my company also provided. Stuck with the Tesla.
I was told I need to return the car charged or I would be billed for "filling it up". I was confused why they couldn't charge at the airport and also explained that if I charge near my hotel it will likely not be 100% when I get to the airport. They couldn't say if that was ok.
I went outside to get the car and they had to go get it, a few people asked me what I was waiting for while I stood there. People getting gas cars were quickly served.
I got the car and was again told that I need to return the car charged, explained again that it won't be 100%. The agent said that 85% is fine. He asked me if I had driven a Tesla before, I had not, I expected he would show me the vehicle and provide some guidance. He simply handed me a QR code and wandered off.
I got in the car and it was only at 80% charge. I figured out how to drive it on the way out of the parking lot.
I had a similar process the first time I rented a Tesla from Hertz (about a year ago). Counter-person was surly, gave me the key for the wrong vehicle (!) and gave me incorrect instructions on how to use the key. Hertz did send out an email in advance on how to use a Model 3/Y, including key entry (incorrect, unfortunately), door operation and charging.
Recently I rented one again, and the process was much improved, which I take as an indicator that (despite this sale), they haven't turned completely bearish on Tesla. Counter-person much more knowledgable and agreeable. No mixups. Also, the software has improved. The rental now provides an on-screen tutorial on using the car, and you can now use your phone as a key. Huge quality of life improvement.
Hertz could still do better. They need fast chargers at their location. All cars should be available "fully" charged (80%) with no need to bring the car back full. And they need to get rid of that ridiculous key-cover for the physical key that prevents you from just slipping it into your wallet like God intended.
I don't know why Hertz is making a big deal out of bringing the cars back charged, other than as an excuse to make some extra cash. The cars probably sit there long enough that they could plug all their Teslas into 120V outlets and charge them fully; their only expense would be a little bit higher electric bill.
Now whether they should charge them fully is another story. No higher than 80% is best for long battery life, unless they know the customer is picking up the car today, in which case 100% is fine.
The location I rented from didn't have a fast charger, and the first time I rented, my car had just been dropped off a few hours earlier and was still charging.
Setting max charge to 80% is fine, but I think it would be nice to add a paid option to start at 100%. Most folks won't need it, but for those who are road-tripping (me), it makes a difference. Happy to pay a little extra in that case.
they probably make a sizeable amount of money on people returning cars without enough gas and thats one less revenue stream if they dont do the same for charge
This honestly sounds like a failure from Tesla just making stuff work in non-standard ways.
Where I am in Europe there are a few car sharing apps that have electric cars, and all that I've rented (VW, Peugeot, Nissan, Hyundai) just work the same as ICE cars. You press the button on the key fob and it unlocks, you press Start and the car starts.
Charging was not terribly complicated either. Scan the RFID tag on the keys against the charger, plug in the cable and wait for it to show it's charging.
Tesla is big on rejecting "standards." Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Their door handles on the Models 3 & Y are more aerodynamic but unintuitive, and exiting is non-standard too (for no apparent reason).
On the other hand, the fob-less key is a massive advantage. Connect your phone, and it is your key. You don't even have to take it out of your pocket. You've also got a backup, physical key card that fits in your wallet. I hate bulky key fobs, so this is a huge win for me.
As for charging, nothing beats Tesla. Plug in to a SuperCharger and 1) charging starts immediately, no scanning, no app, no nothing, 2) the SuperCharger network is extensive and reliable--on my last road trip, I stopped in a small town that had a SuperCharger with eight working stalls and a Level 3 charger that had onenon-working stall; bummer if you're not driving a Tesla; 3) the navigation is SC aware and will route you to the nearest SC, pre-condition the battery for faster charging when you get close and even let you know how many stalls are free as you're approaching.
Assuming it works and has enough stalls. My experience with Ionity has been pretty bad so I’m just sticking with the Tesla Superchargers when I’m driving in a foreign country.
I'm not sure that experience would have been any better if you had tried to rent a gas vehicle. I had almost the same experience as you (attempts at backwards up selling, poor communication about returning the car fueled up, and customers served in a random order), but with a gas vehicle in Denver in 2019 at a Hertz.
I went out of my way to charge the vehicle before returning, returned it with 98% it but was still charged extra. Complaints to their call centre got me nowhere and I just resolved not use Hertz ever again.
The only winner here is Polestar. That will be the next car I'll buy.
It's very odd that you start with a policy complaint against Hertz that is factually false^1 (maybe the agent didn't know?) then the conclusion is to buy a Polestar.
Why would you allege that what @aspos says is factually false? Perhaps this happened before their policy was updated, or perhaps the person working there didn't know (or was a jerk).
Strongly recommend Turo. I tried it recently after a similarly terrible experience with Hertz. Never going to turn back to traditional car rental companies -- it's so much easier, saves you significant time, and is (sometimes) cheaper.
I have never seen Turo be anywhere close to competitive. Are you comparing to rack rates or something?
I'll take unlimited mileage and the lack of weird car rules any day, also. I don't understand the other convenience factors either -- car rental places tend to be located on-site at the airport or the train station?
It's also a lemon market for customers. Turo gets all of the people who aren't qualified to rent at the major car rental places, and the prices are adjusted accordingly.
That hasn't been my experience with Turo at all. I've rented via Turo several times in San Diego this past year, having started at the suggestion of a friend. Why? Because Turo can usually use short term parking, and that is always faster and more convenient than going through the rental center. Consider these scenarios:
Traditional airport car rental: Exit baggage claim and catch shuttle to rental car center. Stand in line (almost always), deal with hassles (upselling agents, car not ready, car given to someone else, different car available, etc. Find car in lot, then wait in security/checkout line to leave garage/lot. All that takes 30-60 minutes.
Turo: AirBNB-style app-based car rental with in-app comms with the vehicle owner or rental service (more and more, Turo rentals are via car rental services rather than individual owners). Show up at airport having pre-arranged where the car will be. Exit baggage claim and either pick up the car at the curb or (more typically) in short term parking. The retrieval process is so simple: car will be unlocked with keys in it, and you just get in and drive away. The only thing you have to do is message the owner through Turo that you have picked it up. The return process is just as easy: drop it in short term parking or arrange for the owner to meet you curbside at Departures. It's 100% frictionless relative to the traditional method.
I've found prices to be roughly on par with traditional rental car companies' rack rates. There are some exceptions, and I've also found that Turo is using VC funding to partially subsidize rentals right now, so it can be a bit cheaper in some circumstances. There's also a much wider range of vehicle options, and if you need something specific (pickup truck, full size SUV, minivan, convertible, exotic) Turo can't be beaten.
I know I sound like a shill, but I suggest you try it sometime. The time savings alone -- especially if you're traveling with kids -- makes Turo worth its weight in gold.
As with all gig economy services, do your due diligence with the user ratings, etc. Whether it is cheaper depends on the area, but that definitely isn't the selling point for me. The selling point is not having to stand in line at the rental car terminal for 2 hours and then haggle with the person at the kiosk over what should have been a simple, pre-paid transaction.
The USP of Turo is that you know exactly which car you are getting. So, for instance, if you're going somewhere snowy you can be certain that you will get a car with 4 wheel drive and snow tires (rather than the 2WD jeep on old summer tires that I have sometimes ended up with from airport rentals). If you are renting a car to move a large item, you can look up the measurements and be sure it will fit rather than be stuck with a cargo van or a car much bigger than you need.
When Turo worked it was great for me. However, in my most recent experience with Turo my reservation was cancelled by the other party while I was mid-air and I landed with no car and no recourse and had to scramble. It was miserable, bad enough that I’ve gone back to renting Teslas from Hertz (where my experience has been in contrast to other anecdotes here—pretty seamless).
Thanks, I will give them a shot. My experience post pandemic with car rental companies, and Hertz in particular has been abysmal. Any sort of rental status with car rental companies ranks below VIP status with a rundown motel in the middle of nowhere. Credit card companies have been the only saving grace, as customer service for car rental companies is non existent.
I am not a huge tesla fan but to expect that car rental employees will babysit every customer and show them all the cars in detail is... unrealistic.
I was once spending maybe an hour to figure out how to start and move a rental mercedes after picking it up, and next to me was some german guy in exactly same situation with same model. Eventually we managed to figure it out with phones.
I agree, if it was just the issue with showing me the car it would have been excusable, although I'm not sure what would happen to someone less tech-savy, but anyways. It was the combination of issues at every step along the way that made the experience less than stellar.
> to expect that car rental employees will babysit every customer and show them all the cars in detail is... unrealistic.
Not every customer needs explanations. I think it's completely realistic to expect a business to show me how to use what they are selling to me. How they profit from that is their problem - when they start having compassion for customers' finances, I'll have it for theirs.
I don't think it's likely they'll change their process just for EVs. I've never had them explain a car to me, they just toss me the keys and point in the general direction of the car. Figuring out how to make it work has always been my own responsibility.
I think its generally ok as most cars handle the same and unfamiliarity isn't likely a safety issue (except manual/std transmission or if you can't figure out lights/wipers...) but the single pedal driving, while intuitive is different and lots of people aren't familiar with it yet.
Whether it's likely and whether we should expect it are different questions. Don't let them normalize lower standards, as if customers should support some right to higher profit margins. Unless they are giving you a cut, profit margins are 100% not your problem.
That is such a backwards policy. I rented a Niro EV from Enterprise and they said I could literally return it with a 5% charge; they’d just plug it in and charge it overnight on site.
Maybe the rep suggested the gas car because you hadn't previously driven a Tesla, and by your own estimation, they were providing lower wait times and faster service for their gas fleet.
I hadn't told the agent at the desk I never drove a Tesla, that was the guy who handed me the keys. It seemed mostly about concerns related to charging and high costs of repairs.
> I was told I need to return the car charged or I would be billed for "filling it up". I was confused why they couldn't charge at the airport and also explained that if I charge near my hotel it will likely not be 100% when I get to the airport. They couldn't say if that was ok.
This is the same with gas cars. It's very frustrating because they're directly being dicks to their customers. You have 3 options
1. Bring it back with a full tank of gas (annoying, as you have find a gas station and plan time)
2. Pay up front for a full tank of gas and 1.5x to 2x the price of normal gas. Now you'll be trying to drive it extra so you can use all the gas you paid for but not so much that you run out.
3. Bring it back not full and then they charge you even more.
It's infuriating how adversarial it is and I'm surprised no company advertises they don't do this to their customers. No idea if there are good ones out there but have never been to one.
I can see it with gas cars because they then have to have someone drive it to the nearest gas station and fill it up, which even for an airport with an on-site gas station probably would be at least 20 mins, possibly more.
But with an electric car, they just have to park it (which they have to do anyway) and plug it in (although I suppose if you left it near zero, it could mean they can't re-rent the car for some amount of time).
When you rent a gas car, you don't have to bring it back full. You have to bring it back with as much, if not more fuel than it left with. So if you get it with 1/2 a tank, you can bring it back with 1/2 a tank. They usually give you a chart when they give you the keys that tells you how much fuel it has currently, and how much fuel you would need to add from empty to avoid paying extra fees.
So whether you're in electric or gas, obviously nobody is going to expect 100.0% fuel capacity on return. This is customer arm flailing, being pedantic and dramatic about something that is very clear. "Maybe if I make a bunch of noise they'll treat me special!"
Most rental cars I've used already had 100% fuel, so I definitely had to return them at the same level. I think there is a little more flexibility with ICE, since analog fuel gauges are probably less accurate than EV charge level meters.
So I was usually able to find a gas station near the airport rental, and get as close as possible to topping off (if the car was a full tank when I first picked it up). I've never tried to rent an EV, so I'm not sure how easy that would be in a comparable situation. Probably not very.
In my experience, it's not always 1.5-2x the cost of a full tank to pay up front. The last time I rented, which was a couple years ago, it was only 10% more, well worth the potential BS, and I returned the car with like 10 miles remaining on the dash, no worries whatsoever.
That's not to say rental agencies don't universally suck, they certainly do, but, I wouldn't really say that's a major sticking point. Really the biggest problems seem to be them under-provisioning their fleets, and going after you for damage you didn't cause, both are far, far too common.
In my experience in Europe they always advise you take the up-front tank as it's cheaper, and it's true you usually pay around 10% _less_ than most gas stations. However that's still only worth it if you manage to return the car with 10% of a tank remaining (which basically never happens)
But it takes less than 10min to get gas near the airport. You can't charge near the airport often due to lack of super chargers and it would take nearly 45min to get 100%
That sounds like every experience I have with Hertz (I've never rented an EV from them). And most other rental companies for that matter. I've started using Turo more often.
Not sure about the economics for the rental companies, but for a consumer, there are practical reasons why electric aren't quite as attractive.
When you rent a car, more than likely you will be in unfamiliar territory. So it seems that it just adds to the stress of travel and yet another thing you have to pay attention to.
Will my hotel have charging spots? Will I be able to charge at the client site I'm visiting? How do I plan this long leg of the trip that I need to drive?
Yup. I own a Tesla and it's been a great car. I charge it at home, and I know how the supercharging network works.
I've been OFFERED electric rentals in:
* Tromsø Norway (on a roadtrip through the Lofoten)
* Nelson NZ
* Brisbane AU
The reality is, when I rent a car on vacation, I'm typically doing more miles per day than when I'm at home. That's because I'm not sitting at work 9 hours a day! Plus, I don't know their charging situation. Even if it WAS Tesla, no doubt these places have fewer Superchargers per capita than California (even though of course Norway has a TON of good EV charging). I have no idea if I can charge at my (multiple!) homes throughout the trip.
I'm already dealing with the cognitive load of a different country, a different currency, often a foreign language, different driving standards (maybe on the other side of the road). Finding places to stay and eat. I don't need one more chore!
To put it simply: An EV is more convenient as our primary car, full stop. An EV would be less convenient as a rental car while on vacation.
Norway has 503 Superchargers, 1 per 11,000 people.
California has 307, 1 per 130,000.
I haven't checked NZ or Oz, or looked at a map for Norway. There are also 10 times that many non-Tesla chargers, of which some will be the highest power.
All three countries have 230V domestic electricity, so in the worst case you can charge at about 2.5kW (more, e.g. 3kW, if you're more confident of the wiring).
Thanks for the correction. BTW when I mention housing, I meant hotels :) Of course chargers at hotels are common, but, again, one more thing to worry about (especially if it's pay-per-use and requires some app/membership situation).
When you rent a car, more than likely you will be in unfamiliar territory. So it seems that it just adds to the stress of travel and yet another thing you have to pay attention to.
Will my hotel have charging spots? Will I be able to charge at the client site I'm visiting? How do I plan this long leg of the trip that I need to drive?
As a Tesla owner, driver, and 3 times Hertz Tesla renter, let me attest:
- Hertz staff are poorly trained for Tesla rentals
- The "must use same credit card" thing is worst than an absolute nightmare
if one doesn't have the exact same credit card, landing late at night on
a holiday weekend. The experience is so extremely bad, it sounds fictional!
FWIW I rented an electric volvo in november and its built in map (displayed by default even if you weren't using its nav system, which I did not) displayed charger sites. As it happened my hotel had a charger in the parking garage and the valets plugged my car in for me.
One anecdote does not data make, and I didn't know at the time of reservation that my hotel would be adequately equipped.
As a second anecdote, I also rented one from Hertz (Polestar 2) and while it could navigate me to charging stations, at least 50% of the time I was unable to charge at a given location due to technical issues. It was bad enough that I had to divert 30 minutes off my planned route to find a working charger.
I look forward to owning an EV someday but the rental experience right now and in my state was VERY stressful.
Indeed: for awhile I was going to a place on Saratoga near Doyle in west San Jose, and they had a non-Tesla charging station in the parking lot. Almost always, every spot was occupied, even in the middle of a weekday.
The greatest barrier to EV adoption is the obstinance of early adopters that lack the capacity to understand why someone would use an ICE vehicle. Consequently, it hampers improvement in areas that need to be improved upon for wider EV adoption. It's quite ironic.
At least one great barrier is the reactionary response to anything associated with 'liberal', including anything that has to do with climate change. IIRC there's a correlation between politics and EV purchases. If even Musk can't persuade other reactionaries ...
On a recent trip, I reserved a gas car, but at the airport they tried to give me an EV. I went to the counter and asked for a gas car instead, since the place I was staying didn't have charging, and I didn't want to spend my vacation figuring out EV charging for the first time.
I would've considered the EV if I knew ahead of time, so I could've researched the charging situation before the trip.
I accidentally booked an electric vehicle a few weeks ago. I was halfway to looking up charging spots on Long Island when the guy at the Hertz counter offered me a Dodge Charger instead.
For the record, my hotel did not have charging spots, and the only ones I saw driving around were at the Broadway Commons Mall[0]. All of them looked full. I'm very skeptical of "charging infrastructure" being a prerequisite to suburban EV adoption - you have a house with a spare 220V circuit, right?[1] - but in this case my home is an eight story hotel building. Either it has chargers or I'm not renting an EV.
[0] Specifically, near the back next to the Round1 entrance.
Said mall also has an Avis/Budget office. No clue if the LIRR lets you carry luggage onboard, but if they do I probably should just take that instead of paying extra to rent at JFK...
[1] "My landlord won't let me plug in my car charger" is the usual response to this
> Said mall also has an Avis/Budget office. No clue if the LIRR lets you carry luggage onboard, but if they do I probably should just take that instead of paying extra to rent at JFK...
protip: lots of rental agencies only charge the premium for airport/train station pickup, but not for dropping off at one. YMMV.
I'd be reluctant to rent an EV at this point. But I own one, and I for sure won't ever being going back to gas. I can't see myself giving up the convenience, or paying $50 every week to fill it up. And only at special locations that stock gasoline. That's a hard sell.
Good on you, you're an early adopter of electric personal transport tech. We need people like you to tough it out until the R&D dollars yield something that's actually at feature parity with what already exists currently.
Parity means you can charge your car in 5 minutes and then drive 3-400 miles, as you can in a gas car, access to repair facilities, and an average lifetime equivalent to regular cars.
We're not there yet, we will be, but it's going to take some time. The people who say 'electric cars suck' are the same sorts of people who leave negative reviews of a beta product, missing the forest for the trees in my book.
Same goes for the people who ignore critique and offer only praise. Gas/Diesel cars have a hundred years of engineering behind them. Their capabilities exist with purpose, and ignoring that is folly.
> Parity means you can charge your car in 5 minutes and then drive 3-400 miles, as you can in a gas car, access to repair facilities, and an average lifetime equivalent to regular cars.
So yes, it sounds like your definition of "parity" means it can do everything a gas car can and more.
If electric cars were first, would you demand that gas cars need to be able to power your house to reach "parity"?
I don't think you're using a good definition of parity. Two things with different strengths and weaknesses can be at parity if they mostly even out.
In the US, the Kroger grocery chain offers discounts on gasoline depending on how much you spend on groceries during the month. Wonder if at some point they'll start offering discounts on charging, especially if you're shopping while charging. When I had a Nissan Leaf, I used to charge at a Kroger halfway between home and the office, but that was a third party charger with no association with the store. It would have been nice if my Kroger Fuel Points could have discounted my charging instead.
I think it's an eventuality that Gas stations pivot to charging stations in a tangible way. They already don't make much on fuel, so, provided they can get sufficient utility power, and a future exists where charging an EV is as fast as filling up a gas tank, they'll probably happily continue to exist selling snacks and drinks as they do now.
I have rented several electric vehicles and while charging is more difficult than getting gas it isn’t really an issue.
The most challenging experience was an electric camper. It had a 100 mile max range. I drove it from LA to Seattle without major issue. The only pucker factor was around Silicon Valley where I struggled to find functional fast chargers. No shortage of chargers, just very few that work.
The state of chargers is atrocious. Many of them do not work and the apps are horrible. Signup flows that ask for too much information and don’t set form metadata for auto-completion. Just endless papercuts.
I used A Better Route Planner which does a good job of tracking what chargers actually work but still has an infuriating UI.
For a regular rental car situation I would not hesitate to get an EV. In fact that’s my preference now that I am over the learning curve.
I don’t see how that’s different than needing to figure out gas station locations and not knowing how much you’ll use between points since you don’t know traffic or efficiency of that vehicle.
Efficiency is mostly irrelevant - unless you're going into the wilderness, you have a gas station within minutes of driving, and unless you are extremely careless, the chance you may end up in a place where you can't drive to a gas station is pretty much non-existent. Gas station locations are available on any phone that has internet connection, which again unless you are into extreme roughing it, is everywhere. I don't remember any time where I needed ever to plan around filling up, unless a) I am driving very long distance for hours (even then it's pretty easy) or b) I need to fill it up before returning the rental (usually there's a gas station right next to the entrance, with a properly inflated price to punish the fools that couldn't plan it in advance, but sometimes you may need to make a detour to get to it). With EV, it looks like much more of a chore.
That comment would be much more valuable if it contained something beyond unsupported statement and something that I assume was meant to be an ad hominem attack.
Gas stations near highways tend to have big signs you can see from the highway, in addition to being near most offramps in built-up areas. In rural areas, there's usually signs on the highway letting you know when there's a gas station at upcoming offramps and which direction to turn to get there. When there is a large distance between gas stations, there's typically signage letting you know about that too.
I don't love looking for gas stations before returning a vehicle, but I know I can find one within a few minutes, they will pretty much always be "functional" and available, and it will take only a few minutes to fill up.
With an EV, I might have to go 10+ minutes out of my way (doubled for roundtrip), they might not work, and they might be full. And if I have to return with 80% charge or higher, it could easily take 30 mins or more of charging.
Also, it's really easy for the rental place to see exactly what percent you returned it with. In gas cars, as long as you're in the ballpark of "full" you're usually good to go, partly because there's not an easy way for the rental clerk to tell exactly how many gallons are in the tank.
If you return with <80%, what happens? Do they charge a flat fee or by the kWh? Most cars will taper charging speeds as you approach 80, 90 %. And then you have to drive from the charger to the car rental place. Hmm.
Yeah, I dunno! With gas, they would typically just charge you some exorbitant price per gallon, but if it's just for a gallon it would only end up being 8 bucks or something. I have no idea how they deal with electricity, but I could imagine the penalty being pretty high if it means they can't turn the car around for an hour or more.
I still remember the “last chance gas, no services next 90 miles” that you can still encounter in the high desert. But most places people drive there are stations everywhere.
And if you ARE going into the wilderness, you can easily bring a few Jerry cans.
I rented a Tesla on a recent trip lasting a few days, and I feel there are other reasons for which is a bad rental car than charging.
I've rented a lot of cars, but when I got this one I spent ten minutes completely dumbfounded trying to get it going. They gave me a key card but I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Swipe it, I guess, but where? I tried the door, but the pillar? Would've never guessed until looking online. Pretty much all other cars have keyless entry with a push button on the handle. I couldn't figure out how to adjust the side mirrors, which I always need to do in any rental, until I gave up and looked online.
Oh and when I got to where I needed to go, I left the car unlocked because I couldn't figure out how to lock it out or even whether I had locked it. I might have even left it running so that someone could have driven it off, for all I know.
I am very used to Android Auto in rentals, which I love because of easy access to the places that I care about (vs the last place than some other rental customer went to), the music that I care about, and the voice assistant that I'm used to. Instead I found the Tesla screen beautiful but distracting and useless without Android Auto.
It felt like a design very focused on eliminating hardware controls that are commonplace on most cars - very unusual - and with a strong proprietary, "we know better" bent.
So I feel like if you're going to have EVs in your rental fleet, maybe a Hyundai or Kia or Chevy is a better choice than Tesla.
I couldn’t agree more. Tesla has a major problem of not following the standard interaction design of cars. If you have to Google how to do something on your rental car, the designers have failed.
Even opening the back door while inside is unorthodox. There’s not a handle to pull, instead it’s a push button that looks like it’s for the window?
I've been in some Tesla taxis, they usually have to have an arrow sticker pointing at the open button for the door. It's definitely a non-standard car, and while in some cases it can make sense, because the mechanical contraptions behind some of the levers and latches are not a thing anymore, in other cases it's just a way to scream "we're different!" that doesn't help users, or a cost reduction measure.
(Also, the ride quality in the back seats is abysmal)
> Tesla has a major problem of not following the standard interaction design of cars. If you have to Google how to do something on your rental car, the designers have failed.
I'm not trying to fangirl here, but broadly isn't this seen as innovation when you design things in a new and different way compared to your competition?
That screen is seriously distracting and the worst thing is you have to look at it even to check your speed. There is absolutely 0 information displayed behind the steering wheel. I always wonder how did this get approved.
Theres videos online of these teslas catching like 5 seconds of air off hills in Silverlake and destroying parked cars after landing. They must not even have an accelerometer.
The speed is within your view in the top right corner of the big screen. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be.
I thought the lack of stalks and a center screen was going to be an issue. Now I feel like it’s overblown and YouTubers/the media need something to complain about.
I am not a youtuber or the media. I was seriously thinking about buying a model y late last year so borrowed a model 3 and a y from friends to test it out. I found it distracting TBH.
Not to mention the suspension issues (google "tesla whompy wheels"). After reading that junked the idea of buying it.
I had the exact same experience as you, with one additional fun complication. Hertz never included the CCS charging adapter with my Telsa rental. Also they charged me $130 for not returning it.
Fun car. Incredibly unintuitive. If you're renting an EV, make a checklist.
Kinda. It would have reduced friction due to my unfamiliarity with the controls, but missing connection equipment can affect all brands. Charging apps would be another that would affect non-Tesla more.
I'd only ever driven an ICE. Connectors and apps weren't a thing I was prepared for.
True. I was only talking about the non charging aspects, bc I drive an EV at home and the charging bits are known to me already. If you're not used to using EVs, best not to rent EV except if you know you won't need to charge.
Sounds like a customer service issue, as a starter. In a long running business where "things just work" - due heavily as you point out to existing standards in product design, I can see the problems you ran into being an area that eventually starts to get overlooked at a large company; or perhaps there were people down the line who were pointing out this problem but no one at senior enough level with decision making power was design-product oriented?
My theory is that at a company that has a reputation of "disrupting the business" and being innovators, it's not easy to raise your concerns and tell everyone that maybe not all conventions are stupid, or even if they are, they are still conventions that the end users rely on for being able to interact with the car (change mirror, open the doors, change AC).
You either raise a stink about not following conventions and risk being fired immediately or sidelined forever, or you play along and the company finds out 5-10 years later that these decisions were really bad and it's not only YouTubers who hate the new designs. From a risk-reward point of view, I can see how employees decided that it's not worth it.
Yeah, I think this is why Elon Musk's companies can thrive - the flat "hierarchy" he's setup:
- try to hire very smart, competent, passionate people
- give them as much rope as they need, even if that means they hang themself
- when oversight-controllers see something as a problem in passing/review then course correcting
Where I live, there is a car sharing app which also offers Teslas. Each time I take a Tesla, I spend 5-10 minutes to set the basic stuff (seat, mirrors, steering wheel). And I know how to use a Tesla and their interfaces.
Its not just tesla. I had a similar experience driving a prius. Is it off? Not sure, theres a low hum and the headlights are still on. I had to wait a minute to see it actually shut off before I trusted that I actually shut the stupid thing off and could walk away. Never getting a keyless car for myself. Zero point, nothing gained, other than to add another vector for carjacking from spoofing these radio frequencies.
It would be reasonable mitigation , but there are plenty of great EVs on the market now that have similar range and drive quality to Teslas without requiring adaptation to unfamiliar controls.
This is not really surprising due to the business model Hertz was going after. They expect their used vehicles to have better resale values than what they currently have... which is a bunch of Tesla's bought at more or less the peak of pricing and now to be sold when prices have come down to sanity. They rode the market and lost.
Also they got a LOT of EV's, I give them props for doing so... but rental cars should be a little more diverse of fleets. I realize it's easier to maintain a few types of vehicles, but that's not the business they are in. Additionally, Tesla is not yet the type of company that can readily support fleet purchasers. It'll be a while before they are, so until then you're looking at a lot of pain.
Its really no different than buying Apple for business use in 2010 (give or take). Lots of companies were starting to do it, but at that time there were only 4 Apple stores in the US that even had a "business team". Apple was not setup to handle it and still, to this day, are very very slow to roll out business centric features and functionality.
Companies like Hertz have a lot of issues that people don't consider, and making another division in the fleet makes it worse.
Over time, one-way rentals tend to congregate specific vehicles in specific areas, and so you have to have ways of "undoing" that. Having EV cars slowly pool in an area is going to be perhaps MORE annoying than just having too many SUVs, because most people will say "ooo free SUV upgrade" but will balk at "ooo free EV upgrade".
That with the double-whammy of dropping resale value (because new ones are cheaper) along with additional customer complaints, means they really have no major reason to continue.
If the EVs were working for them, they'd buy more to replace the ones aging out of the fleet.
> but rental cars should be a little more diverse of fleets. I realize it's easier to maintain a few types of vehicles, but that's not the business they are in.
Why do you say this? I get frustrated when I rent a car, not knowing exactly what I’ll get. It’s just another stressor while traveling. I’m actually a fan of Hertz being pretty consistent with their models across locations.
> Also they got a LOT of EV's, I give them props for doing so...
Why give them props?
It sounds like an obvious waste of their money and resources, one that could easily have been foreseen and calculated. How can a company that specialises in cars like they do, make such an obvious error, like buying 20k EV cars? They are not consumers making lifestyle decisions, they are meant to be running a business!
Because they were trying to be forward-thinking and do the right thing, environmentally speaking.
> they are meant to be running a business!
By this logic we should still be using coal for all power or maybe crude oil. And kids should still be working in factories. Not everything is just about running a business. You can be a successful business and still make good choices for the world.
I really enjoy Tesla vehicles, but I had a bad experience renting one from Budget. The cars require a Tesla account with a credit card attached in order to use Super Charging stations, which is managed by Budget and then they add the charging costs on to your bill at the end. Half way through the rental period the card they had attached expired, and I was locked out of using Super Chargers. I spent a long time on the phone with customer support, and they said because the cars are provisioned by a third-party company, there was nothing they could do other than offer me a replacement vehicle. It wasn't convenient to swap the vehicles because I wasn't close to Budget, so I had to use much slower chargers at a mall parking lot to get around. I complained to Budget when I returned the vehicle and they discounted me 50% of the bill for the inconvenience.
> The cars require a Tesla account with a credit card attached in order to use Super Charging stations, which is managed by Budget and then they add the charging costs on to your bill at the end.
Hertz did it correctly, they use their account and just charge your credit card after your rental period is over. Just like they do with parking tickets or tolls.
"pricing troubles, skyrocketing repair costs and low resale value"... They turn their fleet over every 2-years or so, so resale value is important, and with prices of new EVs coming down, the resale value will be significantly lower than a new model.
And they tend to be, along with needing less maintenance.
Tesla, however, has a ludicrous parts system compared to any traditional car company, for parts that have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the car is using an electric powertrain. Ask for the cost of a new front bumper... it's not pretty.
And as far as fender bender risk goes, it also doesn't help that a Tesla is, in practice, far more powerful at low speeds than the typical car the renter is used to. Pressed the gas pedal when you meant to brake? You'll be in for a surprise. They are also probably unaccustomed to the car's behavior when you lift the gas pedal completely: Being able to do one pedal driving is great if you know the car, but probably a big surprise for someone renting.
> They are also probably unaccustomed to the car's behavior when you lift the gas pedal completely
It's been at least 4 years since I drove an EV so I don't remember what they do. I expect the car to slow down and eventually come to a halt. I remember that I wasn't surprised by anything in particular so it's probably what it did. What do Teslas do?
Teslas do aggressive regen braking when you lift your foot. And it's not possible to disable that behavior, unlike other EVs.
So-called single pedal driving isn't very familiar to most drivers, making it unsuitable for rentals where users would prefer not having a learning curve.
Also if you ask the community how to disable regen braking you'll be told that you're driving it wrong, see:
So it's like driving a high downforce racing car: you lift and the aero drag brakes the car more powerfully than a normal car does when braking with the pedal. Definitely not something people are used to.
Does that actually disable regenerative braking? If so, that's definitely driving it wrong, though it would be Tesla's fault for not having a brake pedal regen option.
It generally is, but that could be the difference between owning one and running a fleet. They are low maintenance and rarely require repairs, but when they do, they can be awfully costly. That could result in a low median cost but higher mean cost. Owning 20k means you are going to have to deal with that average, but an individual owner probably lucks out with the median cost.
Can confirm. For a fleet owner, cost to repair vehicle is generally modeled as an [1] exponentially distributed rv, which has a positive skew, so [2] mean > median.
Personal ownership, typically yes. Rental cars are a different beast, with the amount of miles and abuse they receive. When I had a gas car on Turo, I had to deal with all kinds of weirdness that never happened when I drove the same car.
Where does this myth come from? Looks it's about 10% battery degradation after 200K miles. Tesla is rating their batteries for 300K to 500K miles.
Most American company ICE cars are scrapped by then. Not to mention all the ICE related maintenance costs over that time like oil changes, transmission fluid, timing belts, hoses, etc. etc.
Sure, but when the overall degradation is pretty minimal, this doesn't matter terribly much. I'm at 96.5% rated capacity after 12K miles. That's pretty typical. I should be down near 90-93% capacity at 100K miles. I probably won't keep this car long enough to get down to 80%. At that point I -might- consider replacing the battery, but given how old the car will be, it's not too likely. The only way the battery ever gets replaced in this car is if it fails altogether.
Right now if I had to pay that out of pocket it would be more than a new engine, but not by a huge amount. By the time I don't have a battery warranty, the cost will most likely be in line with a used engine for a similar ICE car.
Problem how? That sounds like the opposite of a problem to me. Everyone is used to a car massively dropping in value immediately after purchase. If the battery drops right away and then that slows down a lot, you won't need a replacement for a very long time.
It's not a myth at all, and Tesla's "rating" is a lie. Look at data on Prius battery packs and what Toyota rates them for(100-150k). I understand I'm comparing a hybrid to an EV, but there is much more data and I actually trust Toyota.
Buying an EV with 100k miles and the original battery pack for 20k is a bad idea.
Lithium-ion battery lifetimes are based on charge-discharge cycles.
The Prius battery is far smaller (about 5-10x smaller) than a Tesla battery, so it is cycling charge / discharge far more often.
So you'd expect the same quality battery to last 5-10x less miles in a Prius than a Tesla driving the same distance. It's likely that Tesla's investment in battery quality and active temperature controls mean the Tesla battery is also treated better and higher quality.
Topping that battery up with a generator in the Prius complicates things, both reducing kWh used per mile (some from generator) but also allowing a discharge - recharge cycle to occur multiple times in the same trip.
I have a Tesla, and I use it in the worst possible way for the battery: road trips with deep discharges and frequent 100% fast charges. I'm at 100k miles, and it degraded by 9%.
I don't think you do. Prius's have only recently started using lithium ion batteries, for one. And they cycle the small battery a lot faster than a BEV. Everything we've learned from hybrids suggests BEVs will get hundreds of thousands of miles from the battery (and so far, from the cars which haven driven that far, this has proven correct).
New Mercedes-Benz EQ models can be easily had for 20-30% off MSRP. Yes, this is partially due to MB setting the MSRP unrealistically high, but it’s indicative of the broader market for EVs right now.
So Hertz is continuing their narrative to blame EV's for their own executive mistakes.
If you dig deeper you'll find that:
- most of their EV's were rented to Uber drivers.
- All Uber rentals, gas and EV, have higher milage, higher maintenance costs and lower resale values.
In other words this state of affairs was highly predictable. That it wasn't taken into account is the fault of Hertz executives. They're trying to shift blame off of their own shoulders.
But hey, they hired Tom Brady (who also got paid to shill for FTX) to do their EV-focused commercials. Surely it's a good business when their commercials don't, you know, extol the benefits of their company and products, but instead hire a celebrity in a pretty low-brow disgusting way to try to sell a product: by pandering to the people with "hey, this famous person is in our commercial and for money he says our product is cool, so that means you should like it too, if you want to be cool like Tom Brady". Surely their fundamentals are rock solid.
Yes, that sounds likely to be good business. The purpose of a commercial isn't to provide a thorough and unbiased technical brief, it's to cause more people to buy a product.
From what I read, they were mostly only able to rent them to existing ev owners, after which, they rented them to Uber drivers to try to at least get some revenue from them.
I've been seeing a lot of headlines the last month about demand for EVs falling. Of course, it could just be a PR campaign by Big Fossil, I'm not in a position to judge that.
I had another idea about it and I'm wondering what other people think: by buying Twitter/X, Musk has waded deeply into the culture war, and we see on HN plenty of people who just can't stand to see his name. It seems a sizable community, could the supposed downward trend in the industry simply be a lot of refusal to buy Teslas? It would not necessarily reflect directly in Tesla sales because reduced demand for Teslas could be made up on margin by other undecided EV brand buyers seeing more availablity of Teslas and switching because they feel Tesla is an upgrade. In a like manner, some of the former Tesla buyers might not be willing to downgrade from a Tesla, so they hang on to their car longer, get a hybrid, etc.
There are a lot of reasons, many of them bureaucratic.
If you own your own home in an urban locale with a garage and drive more than 12k miles a year an EV is probably perfect for you. If you live in a condo good luck dealing with the condo board to install a charger. If you park on the street tough luck charging. If you don't drive enough gas is cheaper. If you drive too much you will spend too much time charging.
The problem is that the number of people that fit in this category isn't that big. The market may be saturating.
The other issue is modern cars generally. The average age of a car on the road is going up because modern cars are too complicated and too expensive.
A large reason for this is IP laws. I can still buy parts for my 90's car because the aftermarket still supports it. Modern car parts are full of computers and the aftermarket will never support them because they can't ship copyrighted code. After 10 years they will be scrapped because there will be no parts available. We will end up with a bimodal car market. 90's cars and cars <10 years old with nothing in between.
Everything in a car used to be covered by patents but they mostly expired in the 70's. Now it's copyright which will outlive us all.
I’m on a condo board. In fact I am the condo board atm. I would love to install infra to have ev charging available in our garage. Unfortunately ev load balancing hardware is prohibitively expensive and installers are borderline incompetent. I was quoted like 20k per spot and they couldn’t say if it would work or i would need to pull new service line in and how to do it. So we dont have ev charging.
> Modern car parts are full of computers and the aftermarket will never support them because they can't ship copyrighted code.
Once a car gets older, there's usually no shortage of the electrical components on the secondary market as they're getting scrapped. And they're easy to ship. Or someone figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.
We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts together and you can't swap in a headlight from another vehicle because the VIN doesn't match the computer's. Fuck you Apple.
>Once a car gets older, there's usually no shortage of the electrical components on the secondary market as they're getting scrapped
Usually the lifespan limiting component is the same on all vehicles of a type so there's a shortage of exactly the part you need which makes it economically nonviable.
>figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.
Car PCB's are often conformally coated or require destructive disassembly.
>We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts
> Usually the lifespan limiting component is the same on all vehicles of a type so there's a shortage of exactly the part you need which makes it economically nonviable.
Varies across a country/continent. I'm in the salt belt so it's the body/suspension that gives first while it's whatever heat-deaths first in the US south.
And we have bad drivers in north america which helps the market for non-front/rear body components.
I used to have a '18 Model 3 Performance (P3D as they were called then) and I sold it after a little less than 3 years.
1. The interior quality was shit. By 10k miles everything was rattling and the quiet nature of the car meant even with bass thumping everything was just annoying af.
2. The car software felt like it got worse. I had bought FSD for $2k back in 2018. I thought it worked fine for that price. As it became more expensive, and pretty much 5x in price, I thought it was a ripoff. Around 2021 it felt like FSD had gotten way worse. More phantom braking, more getting tripped up and literally pulling into another lane for no reason, etc.
3. Going somewhere farther away became a huge PITA. It was fine waiting at a supercharger 20-30 minutes the first like two months. After that it became a hassle and eventually something I would dread. What a collossal waste of time.
I ended up going back to ICE and I probably won't ever get an EV again unless there are substantial improvements or even hot swap battery stations.
Yeah EVs are "cool", but at least for me if I'm being completely honest and not lying to make myself feel better, the allure wore off pretty quick.
I holding onto my hybrid until the industry comes to its senses and realizes that PHEVs are the solution to electrifying daily commutes with sensibly sized batteries while simultaneously sidestepping range anxiety for long trips.
This is the true wisdom. However, the industry needed to realize this fact about 5 years after the Prius/Insight hit the market in 1997ish.
Now? You have a choice as a carmaker: invest 50 billion dollars into PHEVs which will be mere stepping stones to then having to invest ANOTHER 50 billion dollars into EVs, or you just bite the bullet now and do the 50 billion ICE-EV upgrade. Figures obviously arbitrary.
If our government was smart, it would have taken one look at the Prius/Insight, realized that every single commodity consumer vehicle should use that architecture (for the regen braking alone) and mandated it to be in all cars/trucks by 2010.
You might have bought into musk's used car salesman pitch and were not one who used their car for just commuting. Few years ago things he said most ppl followed then he bought twitter and things went a bit south for him (putting himself in the sh!t show that is politics) and now EVs.
For me the thought of plugging in my car at home and cutting gas station visits by half or more sounds great! Yet I road trip frequently and if I'm paying tons of money for a car the experience better match that of an ICE car(no problems working in cold weather like Fairbanks AK, EV chargers need to be in every nook n cranny of this and other countries like gas stations are & most importantly don't inconvenience me making me wait 15 to 60 or more minutes to charge my car on one of my road trips when I paid thru the nose for an EV/Telsa).
- We're in a recession (at least if you aren't upper middle class or above)
- Dealers are still acting like there's a supply shortage, so prices are still up but lots are full
- Everyone (pretty much) but tesla has commited to migrating to NACS, so if you buy a car now you'll need an adapter, and depending on where you are tesla's chargers are have half the speed if you're using the adapter (like if you're on a 800v based car)
- Gas prices seem less volatile at the moment (we'll see how much that stays as the election gets closer)
> In the year ending in November, real wages grew by about 0.8 percent for all workers and 1.1 percent for the 80% of workers who are production and non-supervisory workers. Further, wage inequality fell. The ratio of wages at the 90th percentile compared to the 10th percentile fell by nearly 6 percent over the year.
My use of recession there may be a bit glib and poorly chosen, but people are feeling like job security is way down, and finding a new job is a way slower prospect than it has been. Every non-upper middle class and up person I regularly talk to has locked down their finances, upper middle and up seems to be less effected but still less likely to buy big purchases with interest higher than it has been in 15ish years.
I do thank you for your links though, those recovery stats are better than I thought they were, I probably should have put that reason on the bottom of my list with a disclaimer, I try to be much less doom and gloom than some of my family but it came across stronger here than I meant it too.
I thought Tesla's were low reliability across ALL vehicles (ICE included) but were the most reliable of all EV's?
I guess it comes down to what "reliable" means. In my opinion if it has a failure but runs, drives, is safe and comfortable it's "reliable". For example I read lots of complaints about squeaks or rattles when music is played. I don't call that "unreliable"
> I thought Tesla's were low reliability across ALL vehicles (ICE included) but were the most reliable of all EV's?
My impression is very much the other way around: EVs are more reliable across the board for all vehicles (especially over ICE; most of the categories of unreliability that ICE invented don't exist at all for most EVs; catalytic convertors, belts, transmissions, spark plugs, ...) and somehow Tesla has managed to be the least reliable EV manufacturer despite their head start and despite some manufacturers intentionally sabotaging their EV car efforts to try to sell more hydrogen (Toyota) or dumber reasons.
It's reported that Tesla vehicles have an average of 171 mechanical issues per 100 vehicles. For reference, the average number for most automakers hovers around 120 problems per 100 vehicles.
Yes EVs should be more reliable on paper, but Tesla's aren't.
Not exactly half the speed, but that the vehicle needs to boost the voltage coming from the charger in order to charge the battery. For some cars this is limited to around 100kW, way less than charging the battery from a sufficiently high voltage directly.
For high end cars like Porsche Taycan you can configure the rated wattage of this DC-DC converter.
most existing tesla chargers are 400v (I believe the cybertruck is their first to use 800v), so for other fast charging cars (like kia/hyundai GMP based ev6/ioniq 5) you only get half the speed, so as they update this will start to fall away as an issue.
The existing chargers for these cars are much slower than the slower Tesla chargers, so it's not like these cars will face an overall worse experience.
No, these cars charge at maximum 240kW when the voltage is sufficient. But on a Tesla charger without sufficient voltage they charge at 100kW. Therefore the experience is significantly worse.
This is only true for somewhat old and obsolete Tesla superchargers, like V1 and V2. Since the introduction of Supercharger V3 they're all 400-1000V, so any car, with any internal voltage can charge at their rated speeds.
I believe you've mixed up the versions. That's only true for Supercharger V4, not V3. V3 did not support high voltages. V1 and V2 did not speak the CCS protocol so they were even more obsolete.
We just bought an EV (VW ID4) and it's fine, but the charging situation in the US is kinda fucked for road trips. Besides usually taking way longer than filling up gas, making sure there are charging stations on the way is a pain, they might fill up and then you're kinda just screwed (have to wait a long time for people to move), and the UX for these things is atrocious.
Gas filling is dead simple and fast even though I have no 'account', but filling up our EV at an Electrify America station takes considerably longer to start even with an account already present. The UI on the charging station is really clunky and slow, with some extra steps there for apparently no reason.
I've also heard plenty of stories of persistently broken chargers on various networks, only Tesla seems to have their shit together for EV charging.
More range, more charging stations, faster charging, easier charging, more reliable charging, these are all necessary imo.
I don't think it's PR. The transition to EV is comparably piss poor to anyone who is using their cars for more than short commutes.
We go skiing every year and we drive approx 1200 km to the same spot.
This year on the brand new EV with 500km range.
Well not so much 500 in -20°C. More like 200.
We had to stop every 2.5 hours and charge. And in some places wait in line for maybe 30 minutes in supercharging stations.
The trip is usually about 12 hours with regular stops.
This year was close to 20.
And it was the same during the stay at the cabin, closest supercharger was 35km away and there were only 2.
The EV is a company car and policy bans non EV, not even hybrid are allowed.
For a 4 hour trip to a customer in winter cold, if I am lucky, I charge twice. A minimum of 20 minutes per charge. And no wait times on a good day.
Waiting 30 minutes to charge for 20 minutes. Well you do the math.
In my old car Id just drive the car on full tank the 4 hours front and back.
Maybe 1 short rest stop on the way back.
Now with the charge max to 80% hysteria and battery range being non existent in cold weather and endless lines in the charging stations I am starting to hate the EV.
I do have a home charger but we do not drive only 20 minutes per day.
We live outside the main city and works as consultants.
I am seriously considering changing employer because of this.
We're talking about the markets with high pickup rate which have recently seen a downtick.
It's only unexpected if you don't study literature of market adoption behaviors of emerging technologies. This lull absolutely was coming. It always does in behavior-based products, especially those with infrastructure requirements. Here it was in broadband for instance at about the same point in 2004: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad...
> It could just be a PR campaign by <vested interest>, I'm not in a position to judge that.
The really wild part about the world today is that is true of literally everything you ever hear. There is a very good chance there are billions (trillions?) of dollars on the other side promoting whatever narrative they want to further their own goals.
"Fake news" was just the first thing out of Pandora's Box that I doubt we'll ever close.
I think it definitely has to do with Tesla, but perhaps not much to do with Musk. Tesla's price cuts have made other EVs look expensive by comparison, which is why they're piling up on lots while Teslas are still selling well. When you read past the headline, invariably what they really mean is that "the growth rate for non-Tesla EVs is slowing." In no case, however, do they mean demand is falling -- sales are still increasing.
Definitely Teslas became less attractive to a lot of people with Musks behavior in the last year. But also interest rates are up, and EV enthusiast market may be saturated, so now you have to win over just regular people.
I don't like Musk, but I am also under no illusion that CEOs of other major car companies are any better. They may just hide their opinions a little better than Musk.
The reality is that Tesla aren't very good cars from both reliability, price and range perspective. Musk has done a brilliant job hyping the car, but reality starts setting in. For example, FSD will likely remain in beta for years.
The market expanded just fine. It's just some EV manufacturers that are under performing. The growth dropped slightly from a stellar 60% in 2022 to a still very impressive 30% last year.
> it would sell about 20,000 electric vehicles, including Teslas, from its U.S. fleet due to higher expenses related to collision and damage, and will opt for gas-powered vehicles.
The repair costs and turnaround time seems like Tesla's achilles heal right now. Insurance costs on a Tesla were the primary deciding factor in me putting off a Tesla purchase. From my preferred insurer, the premium was 50-60% higher than for a similarly priced ICE vehicle. And Rivian is way higher than Tesla to insure.
I really think EV makers need to prioritize repairability in their next push. It's more important to me than extra range. It will both lower initial costs and reduce EV depreciation. An out-of-warranty EV has to be very cheap for it to make sense.
I tried renting an EV from Hertz a couple months ago. I reserved a Model Y. They waited until the morning of to call me and tell me they didn't have one for me. Said they might have a model 3 (but not the model Y I reserved) 3-4 hours passed my reserved pickup time. I waited an hour or two, then found a model y on Turo that got the job done. Then Hertz tried to charged me for cancelling... they did fix that but I was furious when I saw it going pending on my card.
I'm going to avoid Hertz from here on out as much as possible. Especially if I want an EV. Perhaps the problem isn't Tesla, but Hertz. At least based on my experience, that's what it was.
Rental agencies don't actually "rent specific cars" - they sell rentals at specific price points and fill those obligations with whatever they have laying around at the time.
Which is why it's almost best to just rent the lowest, cheapest thing, because they'll give you whatever they have.
This stops working when you need a particular aspect of whatever it is, especially if it's an aspect nobody really "cares" about - like whether it is EV.
Most people care it has enough seats, and enough luggage room. So a larger SUV works as well as a car for them.
My wife and I went to Kauai and specifically rented a Jeep so we could take it on some moderate trails to see waterfalls and whatnot. We were somewhat dismayed when we arrived and found we had been "upgraded" to a BMW X5 and there were no actual off-road vehicles available from the company. It was a nice car, for sure, but not what we had wanted.
I've never tried to take a rental truly off-road but I've definitely had them on very unpaved roads they probably shouldn't have been on. You can get true off-road vehicles in locales like Death Valley but they're very pricey compared to a standard rental.
I've definitely had a number of minor scrapes etc. over decades and I've never once had an issue--though I've almost exclusively dealt with the larger companies for whom minor scrapes etc. are presumably considered normal.
Generally that's true, but Hertz specifically does have a few classes of vehicle that only contain one model, and they advertise those as something like "guaranteed make/model" / "reserve this exact car".
And while they do run out, most of the time you will receive what you booked, and at larger airport locations they'll typically substitute something close in size and nature to what you booked if they do run out of your specific class.
... and sometimes they have no viable plan for having something close to what they've promised.
Not so long ago Ireserved a car, from a large national company, to go on a backpacking trip. I picked an early pickup window, so I would have time to drive a substantial distance, hike, and get to my desired stopping point before nightfall. I arrive at the rental place at 8a, and find that they're fully staffed but had only a a single large van available for rent. If I waited around until mid afternoon, I was told, _maybe_ something would show up. One of the staff told me that the prior week corporate had decided to open up that site even though there were no cars.
I'm surprised that Turo/Getaround/etc don't message more aggressively about "you'll actually get the car you want, when you want, which somehow most car rental companies think is unachievable."
They never seem to have enough small cars in Europe. I'm fed up of being 'upgraded' to a crossover/SUV. I think it's worse with eg Enterprise because their fleet tends to reflect what people own, because they do so much crash/repairs business. But it happens with most of them
Which country? Had no issues getting small cars in France. Got a Fiat500 last time in France on Hertz. I suspect French rental cos like to "upgrade" the 1-way rentals to get rid of them due to unpopularity. Only time I got upgraded to an SUV (2-lane wide Jeep Compass) in France was on a 1-way.
At least they called you. I traveled a lot this last fall and pretty much always reserved a hybrid with Avis because I was going to drive long distances. What I actually got at the counter most of the time was "let me see if we have any hybrids available" followed by receiving some random car that was not, in fact, a hybrid (and often as far as you can get from a fuel-efficient hybrid, a regular gas SUV).
> I'm going to avoid Hertz from here on out as much as possible.
This is good advice for everyone. Hertz is the company who likes to lose track of their cars and then call the police and report the car stolen by the person renting it. They're a truly shitty company, not worth the hassle.
Car rental companies generally don't guarantee specific models. Even if you select like a convertible Mustang, odds are they won't actually have it. They'll give you something that "meets or exceeds your reservation", like a chevy suburban.
Turo is much better if you need a specific vehicle. In Alaska, Hawaii, and Utah I've rented 4WD vehicles when I needed 4WD. They almost all still say in the contract that you're not allowed to take it off road. I always contact the renter ahead of time to make sure it's okay if I go on dirt mountain roads that need 4WD and I've always found someone who approves. I'd guess you can get what you want on Turo.
While that's true, a guarantee like that is only as good as the penalties. There is no penalty for Hertz not giving you a specific model AFAIK. In reality with Hertz it means slighter-above-normal chance of getting that model.
Now if it were "exact model or your rental is free", that would be something to behold
I have had an EV since 2018, love it to death, but would absolutley never rent one. The biggest pain point with EVs imo is charging infrastructure. My personal car, I can charge at home so it becomes a non-issue.
But if I'm traveling to a new city that I'm not super familiar with, I do not have any desire to plot out where charging stations are, is the hotel going to have charging, is it going to be operational, etc. Too much headache and cost of public chargers on top of premium cost to rent an EV just doesn't make much sense.
Same here. A few years ago I rented a local Tesla on Turo for a day trip that was several hours away, but since I just needed to drop it off "whenever" (by the next morning), I could find somewhere to charge it at my leisure. Then this fall I flew somewhere and was asked by the car rental company whether I wanted an electric car instead of the one I had reserved. With a return flight to catch under possibly tight time constraints and no idea where I would charge the car or how long it would take (both right before return and just driving around; I was going a long distance to a pretty rural area), I declined that sweet sweet offer in favor of a car I could fill up anywhere in under five minutes. If car rental companies actually want to rent electric cars, they would be wise to say you don't have to worry about recharging them, they'll do it themselves either at no extra cost or at whatever the cost would be if you did it yourself (not the "we'll refuel it for you at the low low price of $15/gallon!" that they offer for gas cars).
I charge my Tesla at home and I love it. But I visited family over christmas and driving around in their Rivian I was reminded how absolutely shit non-tesla charging still is. I'm not at all surprised EV sales are dropping when charging is as awful as it is.
I have a non-Tesla EV (Kia EV6). I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten it if I didn't charge at home. (We've done a couple of long trips in it, including cross-country, but I had lower expectations of what the experience would be like)
Yes, but not in a way that benefits anyone immediately. They made deals with each individual brand (I think every US make except Stellantis now), in which those brands will start putting Tesla charging ports on the cars in future model years, and in some cases offer adapters to existing owners starting in 2024 or 2025. Each brand also needs to integrate with Tesla for payments in some way, since 99.9% of their charging stations don't have screens or payment terminals. The predictions I've read are that will mean new versions of each company's mobile apps, rather than having non-Tesla owners use Tesla's app.
I've rented out a couple of cars on Turo, one an efficient 4-cylinder gas car, the other an EV. The EV renters seemed to have a realistic expectation of what to expect in terms of charging (I also included a level 1 charger for those with access to a plug).
Recently rented an EV (Nissan Leaf) from Enterprise - they were happy to upgrade me from my economy, but one catch - it was at 20% battery. Luckily the hotel we were staying at did have a charger (called ahead) free.
Amusingly the rental place told me as we were returning the car that it had been sold in the interim.
It's amazing to me how little effort these companies take to resolve the charging questions - there wasn't even a charger at the rental place.
Some have Tesla superchargers, but not necessarily Chademo for a leaf. It would take hours to charge on their L2 and they probably have fewer L2s than EVs.
It is pretty easy for them to fall behind on charging vehicles during peak periods, especially something like the Leaf.
love the time I rented from Avis and got assigned a Kia Niro EV with, not shitting you, EXACTLY ONE PERCENT capacity left! I wasn't sure if I could get it off the lot! I exchanged it for a Bolt that fared better. Love that car.
I recently rented a tesla from hertz - I had made sure my hotel had charging in it's parking lot. I arrive at the hotel to find that the tesla was missing it's j1772 adapter, which is what the hotel charger required. I had to hunt down a supercharger and hang out there for an hour. Pretty lame. When I returned the car I complained and was told that there is no guarantee from hertz that the adapter will be included. Without the guarantee renting an a tesla is a scary prospect - I probably won't do it again.
this from someone who has a model y at home as my daily driver and I love it.
This article doesn't mention that, apparently, Uber drivers are renting or leasing cars from Hertz. Hertz markets this to Uber drivers.[1] This is apparently terrible for Hertz. Uber drivers put a lot of miles on the vehicles. Plus, Teslas are expensive to repair. On top of that, the auto rental business is a speculation in used car futures. That's why it hurt Hertz when Tesla reduced prices.
This all reflects on Hertz's accountants, who should have seen this coming.
I’ve owned several EVs (though not at this particular moment) and generally think they’re terrific. But I agree with several other posters - the typical scenario where I’m renting a car is exactly the one where EVs’ current shortcomings are most prominent.
Plus I can really only think of two types of vehicles that I’d ever want to rent - either an econobox to get me from point A to B to C in an area underserved by Uber/Lyft where I could not care less about what I’m temporarily driving, or a convertible. I guess maybe also an SUV - but in any event, those three categories are (as far as I am aware) just not yet well matched by any EVs on the market.
I recently rented a car from Hertz. I knew I wouldn’t need more than a single full tank of gas for my trip (and if I underestimated I could just stop at a gas station). I wasn’t sure what might happen with the (cheaper!) Tesla. So I opted for the ICE vehicle.
(Where could I charge it? The hotel? Do I need to find a super charger? Etc. Just more headache than I wanted on a vacation).
Literally made the same decision last night for a rental. I had no idea how to charge an electric car and did not want to have to deal with figuring it out on top of everything else.
They charge you $25 if you return it not fully charged, which is bananas, because why couldn’t they just plug it in while they’re cleaning the car? It’s not like gas where they have to drive the car to a gas station.
Is that a $25 recharging fee, or $25 for the electricity? A full tank of electrons is around $25 equivalent in the UK. (I realise it's cheaper in most of the US.)
Their webpage suggests you have to return it at the same level of charge as you got it at, or pay a $25/$35 (depending on membership level) convenience fee to return it at any charge level.
I recall a similar rule the last time I hired a gas car, but feels like for EVs it could use a tweak or two.
You're likely going to spend more than $25 to put gasoline in your rental before returning it, and $25 is the approximate cost for a supercharger, so that charge seems very reasonable. You could have just taken the electric car and returned it empty.
That may well be the case. But I’m not driving far, it’s just while my car is in shop. Gas is $2.90 here, and the rentals was a Chevy bolt — so not a Supercharger right, some non Tesla connector I have to track down?
I think it was $25 flat if not as same level, so I can fill it to the level I received it and hope they kept accurate records (ie knew it wasn’t full).
I think if I had ample time during all this an EV would be interesting but I just don’t want to make a mistake and make this repair even more expensive.
The last time I rented a car (2 months ago?) if you returned it less than whatever you receive it at, you get charged for an entire tank of gas with the $3-4/gal markup. So receive it full and return it at 15/16ths and you're looking at a $80-100 bill easily on the larger vehicles.
It's likely similar where if you receive it at 100% and return it at 98% you're getting charged the full $25. It's just another revenue source for the company.
The refill charge is nuts anyway even for ICE vehicles. Put an 1 m³ construction site tank+pump for diesel and one for regular gas on the site and that's it - these things cost about 1000€ [1].
From the start, refill charges have been an utter scam.
This seems to be an extension of the biggest problem with EVs: The edge cases.
Even if the edge case is only 1% of your travel, do you want to buy a car that can't do it?
It can be anything. You're living in Minnesota and your dad in Chicago had a heart attack. An ICE can get you there in about ~7 hours. An EV... you're going to need 1 supercharging station at a minimum, probably 2. Or, you just decide you want a road trip from Minnesota to Texas. You pull over to the nearest supercharger in Arkansas to discover you're forced to hang out in a town where you really don't feel safe for an hour or two. That's great.
EVs make far more sense in Europe than America, with the current range they can offer, combined with general proximity of relatives. I'm not saying they don't have a future in America, I just won't be surprised if we are the slowest adopters.
As an European, no they don't. Europeans often use their cars for long travels cross borders for work, vacation or visiting relatives where public trasnportation doesn't serve them, and the lack or underdevelopment of charging infrastructre makes them viable only for people with their own house, garage and charger at home or for businesses which do short trips around town like deliveries or realtors. Everyone else has ICEs.
I consider my probable edge case, driving to the capital for example airport there, 160km+something nearly all of it motorway so slightly worse range if I drive at legal limit. So I would like to get there in one go as being 2 hours early anyway is big time sink. And then when I'm coming back I just want to get to home not stop in middle to charge...
Or I might want to do same with some client or relative there.
Train station is very near, but not that near... And it still means connection to get to actual airport...
And new EVs are pretty expensive, compared already paid car...
> And new EVs are pretty expensive, compared already paid car...
My family has neighbors that just buy and repair older cars and sell them pretty low cost. The quality of their work has been considered very good by third-party mechanics. My parents recently bought a 2005 Pontiac with a V6 from them for about ~$4K with 135K miles. One accident (deer sideswipe), only body.
Do you know what a 2013 Tesla Model S with 135K miles goes for around here? About $17K. If we're lucky, we could maybe negotiate it to $15K-$14K; but that's still almost four times the cost. And sure, the Tesla is eight years newer, but I make a similar comparison because it was very much a 1st-gen product... My money is on the Pontiac lasting longer.
Sounds like a transformation issue. In the beginning (I assume) before widespread filling station networks getting gas was an issue. Now it's not. That's not a quality of gas vs EV, it's a quality of ubiquity.
It is a transformation issue. However EV's are being promoted as a viable alternative to ICE vehicles generally speaking. The reality is that this is far from true.
For many people/families, an EV could be viable. For an even larger percentage of people or families with 2+ vehicles an EV could be very viable. Still, in most scenarios the ICE vehicle is the safe choice, with the pros and cons well understood.
IMO some of the EV pushback is from people (like me) who have nothing against EVs, but feel they are still a solid decade away from being a no-brainer choice, with much of the holdup being infrastructure related.
I'm all for saving the planet (note: I don't believe that EVs overall are as net environmentally positive as they are portrayed), but I'm not going to do it while stranded at a charging station.
True, and this is why sales for EVs basically automatically increase as infrastructure is built out in a particular area. Once consumers understand the capability and what is their, their buying patterns are fairly rational.
In my experience, most people outside of the EV bubble underestimate how much infrastructure is already there.
At least for Tesla. For CCS cars in the US, it isn't so great.
You might be if you need to return the car at 100%, the last few percent of battery takes forever to charge due to chemistry. I don't know what Hertz requires, but returning it at 100% is stupid. It's hard on the battery and takes forever. Charging to 80% takes a lot less time and is easier on the battery, so hopefully that's all that Hertz requires.
Edit: a different commenter says you need to return at 75%. That's reasonable.
Yeah, and tbh, I'm hearing that their return fees are actually pretty reasonable. If you can return at less than 75% for only $25, just do that. Supercharging isn't particularly cheap anyway, so you can't save that much money with a long wait.
That still wouldn't be true for a used Tesla. Most used sales are Model 3 or Y. Both charge really well. Even older used Model S or X are more like 30 minutes than 2 hours, especially if the location is bad and you'd rather get to the next one.
Given that your article (from 2022) states Hertz will pay $168 million to people accused of stealing cars, it seems pretty unlikely Hertz is still making that mistake. Seems totally safe to me. Have there been any recent instances of this?
You raise a great point. Maybe they’re good citizens now. On the other hand the Italian restaurant down the street from me was shut down from multiple health code violations including roaches. They’ve reopened. But I’m super hesitant to trust a restaurant that couldn’t stay on top of their roach and other health problems. Or see Apple settling their patent infringement claims and now we’re here again with another patent infringement case. Maybe I’m just too cynical now. I think I’m going to need to see some glowing reviews and press about how Hertz is doing great with customers again.
This is ridiculous, in Australia it takes a minimum of 2 years and 4-5 court hearings and escalations to get someone into jail. At each level they would have thrown this out and charged Hertz for wasting time.
(This is my personal experience of a straightforward theft case where I was the victim and the police actively wanted to get the person behind bars)
“[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle,” Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call.
---
This is concerning. These cars are essentially delicate ipads with wheels and repairs for them are costly and specialized. Driving, in general, is dangerous and accident prone. Waking up to twice your repair cost or insurance premiums must not be great for Hertz.
Also the article doesn't mention the EV value cut-off unrelated to MSRP. When the battery reaches 50-60% of its top capacity, then range anxiety is back. No one wants a 150-100 mile Tesla, or worse in the winter with the heating on.
Range issues aren't a big deal with regular owners as with regular use they only lose 10-15% range in the first few years, but Hertz drives theses hard everyday, unlike someone with a suburban commute who gets groceries on the weekend. Who knows what their internal data is suggesting. Id be very, very hesitant to buy a Hertz used Tesla. I'd want to see how bad the battery is first, especially what its real world range is in the winter. I wouldnt be surprised because how hard these cars are run, they'll have more battery degradation per year/per mile than a well kept car babied by someone who loves their Tesla.
I just took a look on their website and the long range sedan I'd be interested in at that trim level 2024 model is going to be about $50k. Hertz has a 2022, a less than 2 year old car, with 80k miles for asking $31k. A 40% depreciation in 2 years is very rough.
Their resale value is particularly punishing. Hertz doesn't keep cars for all that long, so a tough depreciation isn't something they can ignore.
As I have been traveling last year, I've seen several promotions from car rentals to get an electric car. Never took it - first of all, I don't want to drive Tesla because it's not safe (no physical environmental controls, which means, especially on unknown roads, distracted driving, not worth the risk), but I also don't need the trouble of figuring out where I can charge it, would the charger fit, etc. I know with a gas car I can use maps app to find a gas station, it'd probably be within 10 minutes drive and it will work, and I'll be on my way in 5 minutes after. I don't have such guarantee with an electric car. Also, I've been recently on a trip with a friend and they rented an electric (not Tesla). We had to build all our plans around "where can I charge it".
I'd probably go for a hybrid, since it doesn't have any downsides like that, but not for fully electric. Of course, it's just my own opinion, but I suspect there are a lot of casual renters that are like me, and Hertz is seeing that.
That doesn't appear correct to me. Compliance EVs always had horrid depreciation curves. That was because they were compliance cars. But even then, the Bolt has actually held value pretty well, especially recently. Tesla held value really well right up until Tesla started cutting the prices of the new ones. The same thing happens to ICEVs if you cut the price of the comparable new model.
You want to see depreciation? Go look at an Audi. The phenomenon probably has more to do with market position than technology. More expensive cars typically depreciate faster unless they are supply constrained.
> Consumers don't buy used phones for the same reason
Ah, you sound like an Android user ;-). iPhones have pretty good resale value.
When I rented from Hertz late last year I asked about how people felt about the EVs.
The agent said people used to EVs loved them, and almost everyone else wouldn’t touch them with a 10’ pole.
Between the cars dropping significantly in value (all EVs have), the lack of maintenance savings if no one is driving them, the cost to repair body panels when hit, and most people not wanting to touch them I can’t blame Hertz.
Just too early for the mass market in most places and the wrong brand choice due to repair costs (though choice was very limited at the time).
I know it's not the reason for dropping EVs but one thing a rental car has to do is work exactly like any other car. Meaning like any traditional car. That means it needs a key/kefob with a lock button on it. It needs a normal UX for the driver It needs a way of refueling/charging the user can be 100% confident they can pull of - in a new city/country and with a new car. Without having to google.
An EV you buy yourself seems to be a short week of frustration as you learn where the charging infra is, get 100 new apps for charging, learn the quirks of a car UX the manufacturer thought they might as well change since everything else changed and the car is now apparently a phone. But at least after that frustration it can be a good experience. But with an EV you rent for two days, you can't have a week of frustration. It just doesn't work.
> Besides costing more to repair when they’re damaged in a crash, Scherr also said, EVs are also getting in more crashes.
then
> Our work with Tesla is to look at the performance of the car, so as to lower the risk of incidence of damage
I'm curious if they are working with tesla to <reduce> the performance? Are people getting into accidents because they aren't used to teslas' acceleration vs. a typical gas car? Or are people getting into accidents for other performance reasons, eg: cornering / braking?
Are people getting into accidents because they aren't used to teslas' acceleration
Most likely. Even the lowest end Tesla can scare the pants off of a passenger who has never been in an EV before. I know this from personal experience. An EV driver noob who stomps on the pedal has a chance of panicking and death-stomping on the pedal more.
Apparently the big problem is repair costs. They should buy Cybertrucks, those things are indestructible. One got in a head-on collision recently and didn't even get dented, no one in either car was hurt
It can work if the other car took more of the damage than it would have compared to a collision with a "squishier" car. Would be interested to see a Cybertruck vs Cybertruck crash.
Postulate two spherical cybertrucken in a vacuum suspended from the same point by wire under Earth gravity acceleration. After contact each vehicle moves away from the point of contact with the energy equivalent of 1/2 the sum of each vehicle's input kinetic energy.
parent said: "no one in either car was hurt". If the cybertruck didn't have any damage it means that no energy was dissipated by "squishing it", basically it made the impact twice as bad (compared to a regular squishier car) for the occupants of both cars.
Maybe indeed no one got hurt, but then it means that the crash was at super low speed.
I really doubt that, but one thing that stands out is the usage of stainless steel body panels, which make repairs both harder and more expensive. Go ask anyone that had to repair a Delorean what they think of stainless for body panels..
I’m surprised to hear that people have had some anxiety about charging when renting Teslas from Hertz. My experience was quite the opposite. Just use any supercharger and it bills to Hertz who bills to you. The hotel valet had EV charging and charged the battery up all the way every night. The only confusing part was figuring out what charge level I needed to return the car at (I think it was 75%).
Otherwise it was great and I would love to rent a Tesla from Hertz again.
I second this. I've rented Teslas from Hertz about 5 or 6 times now for long trips across California and the experience was flawless. I couldn't believe how well everything just worked. The integration resulted in a seemingly Tesla-controlled experience where there was little friction reminding you the car belonged to Hertz.
Yeah, it really varies. If you have a hotel with good ev charging, an EV can be a convenience. I've had the experience of renting a gas vehicle, and then realizing my hotel had EV charging and would have actually been more convenient. :)
I have been almost exclusively renting electric cars since late 2022. This makes total sense.
Tesla is very strict about their parts distribution. They will only send parts to authorized Tesla service centers, of which there aren't that many.
This is extremely unfortunate for rental cars, as they get beat to absolute shit and are in a near constant state of repair.
I've rented several Teslas from Hertz and Avis. Almost all of them have had at least one visible non-OEM replacement part on them, and half of them had that part installed incorrectly. Examples:
- A replacement backup camera that was pointed way too far downwards. Because this car didn't have ultrasonic sensors, it couldn't do distance estimates reliably. Parking that thing was like going straight back to 2006 every time.
- A passenger-side window that didn't align with the top of the window frame, causing air to leak into the cabin and kW/h averages to skyrocket.
- Heaps of el cheapo tires. This isn't a problem specific to Tesla, but it's a worse problem with Teslas since their cabins are already loud as they are and non-EV-rated tires throw off energy consumption.
It's not _as bad_ with Hertz since they are a Tesla partner, but it's the wild west with other rental car companies. Teslas offered by Avis are almost entirely bought individually from who knows where and I think every single Tesla I've rented from Avis has had something up with it.
I can also believe their claim regarding low customer adoption. Most of Hertz and Avis's customers are business travelers on corporate expense accounts. When they want to rent a car, they need a car _now_ and do not want to worry about things like fueling and parking the car.
Teslas are a completely different experience from a "normal" car. Their interior is also very polarizing, especially now that Tesla is experimenting with a stalk-less steering wheel cluster. This makes it not only more difficult for rental car companies to put those cars to work, but it also adds toil in the backend from dealing with car returns and clogging the (almost always understaffed) reservation desk with exchanges.
Non-Tesla EVs are also impacted by this. Many business travelers just _won't_ with charging apps, especially when they only fuel the cars either just after getting them or just before returning them.
Also, with business travel, I generally haven't been allowed to expense fees to returning it with less than a full tank. With EVs, this would mean that I couldn't pay even a reasonable fee for this service.
That'd be enough to make me avoid them on business travel, even though I also tend to rent EVs when traveling for leisure.
A rental Tesla has to be one of the worst ideas, people crash rentals way more often than their daily driver. Teslas have a high cost to repair and long down time...
Over Christmas I flew to another city and rented a car for week. Hertz had great deals on EVs but not so great for ICE so I specifically avoided hertz and went with Avis instead.
I like EVs and have a charger at home for my own car, but maybe due to that I also understand the difficulty of finding a reliable charging situation in a new place. On top of that I was visiting and parking at my parents house, and they don’t have a charger installed.
> On top of that I was visiting and parking at my parents house, and they don’t have a charger installed.
Yeah, and hertz doesn't tend to give you a mobile charger. I can't blame them, they are a separate cost and they tend to "get lost" with rentals, but it makes the EV option a lot less practical.
I imagine if you're operating on the scale of Hertz it's cheaper to self-insure. Anecdotally it seems like Teslas have higher damage in a collision (eg more expensive and fragile electronics in the bumper) and are more expensive to repair. The last body shop I went to even had a separate hourly rate for Teslas
Loss of use is is a huge cost for a rental company.
If you rent a vehicle out for $75 per day, and it needs a $1000 repair, and a repair takes 2 weeks, the loss of use is more expensive than the entire repair!
Repair times have been getting longer across the entire automotive industry, as parts availability hasn't been great, but Tesla vehicles are notorious for long wait times for parts availability and availability of the specialized labor sometimes required.
Isn't that just pure gouging? If a Tesla is harder to repair it'll take longer and be more expensive for that reason, no increased hourly rate necessary.
Or... you need a person who is specialized in working on EVs. EVs are still not the majority, so anything different from the norm will need different training, and thusly higher hourly rates to work on them.
When Ford started making putting aluminum bodies on their F150s, they had special training programs for doing bodywork and repair on them. I guarantee that cost was passed down to you.
It may not even take longer to do the repairs, it might take the same amount of time once you learn how to work on them. That said, I guarantee the shops and insurance companies are recuperating the costs of that extra training.
When Ford makes a new car they write a large book on how to repair every body panel on it. For hidden parts how much damage was acceptable before you had to do something. All dealer body shops are required to have book before the dealer can on sell the fist car (along with books and training on other repairs). I believe most body shops don't buy this book, but at the time I worked for a company that made tools and those books were used to decide what special tools we needed to design/make next. I left before Tesla was a thing (2 years before the roadster), so I don't know what Tesla does, but I suspect this is one of those details they didn't realize was important.
This is pretty common among more expensive brands from what I understand. When I had work done on my Tesla it was the first time I had encounter it, but the couple of repair shops I was referred to by Tesla also had individual hourly rates for BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, etc.
A lot of that is those vehicles require special tools that are expensive. Nearly every car needs a 10mm socket to work on it, so every mechanic has a few and in turn they are cheap. Only VW and BMW need a triple square socket, so they are not common and more expensive, and you only work on a few cars that need that so you have to charge more. Mercedes requires all mechanics have a 4 wheel dynamiter and some repairs require the car be on that for calibration making those repairs more expensive. (Note that I haven't been in the business for 15 years so the above is probably out of date)
Insurance rates will be dictated by the other 3 factors you listed. Insurance doesn't care about physical damage, only what it costs to repair said damage. Whether the car is cut in half, or only a sensor that is broken, only the cost matters to them. So you're left with frequency of damage, and cost of damage per incident.
Actually that's a good point. People that aren't used to electric cars maybe can't be trusted with the absurd acceleration.
Even my parents Leaf leaps like a fish when you start it, I can only imagine how many people get into fender benders when driving a Tesla for the first time without really having a chance to get used to the feel.
I rented Bolt EV from Hertz in San Jose airport. Returned it with full charge. The person receiving the car on return confused range with total miles driven and charged me for not returned the car above the charge level. I explained to him that he is reading odometer wrong but he was so adamant that I am wrong.
I am sure Hertz didn't even train their customer facing staff with how EVes work.
There is a massive disconnect between the attitudes toward EV's of people who have owned EV's and those who have not. Range anxiety tends to dissipate after a short time of real world driving experience.
You're just not going to rent EV's to many non-owners, even if they are going to be driving less than 100 miles (typical business trip where you fly then rent a car).
> Range anxiety tends to dissipate after a short time of real world driving experience
disclaimer: havent owned. but i disagree with this, and others have mentioned in thread already. range anxiety dissipates for most people because 1. they mostly drive daily commutes of areas they know and 2. they become intimately familiar with the Tesla and how it finds the next supercharger for you on route.
Both of these dont apply when renting a car most times.
I’m not an EV owner but plan to be one on my next purchase.
The EV renting experience is bad. I got one though Avis, I believe a Kia Niro. I was told that I’d be charged if I brought it back under 80%. It was at 81%. Ok fine, I’m driving less than 50 miles and returning it. I’ll find a charger, since my AirBNB didn’t have charger.
We tried to use the on board map to find a charging station. It took us two tries to find on that was actually public, which was at a fire station. It took over an hour to go from 70% to 85%.
I never had range anxiety about the car itself, but trying to return it full enough was anxiety inducing, even though it wasn’t that big a fee.
I feel my experience would have been really improved if 1) they made the fee be a sliding amount based on how close you returned it to where you checked out and 2) there was an onboard L1 charger you could use with a normal plug.
EVs are great commuter vehicles, but they make absolutely no sense for rental cars (or pickup trucks). You pay for a rental car by the hour or day, why would you want to have a vehicle that can drive for a certain period of time and then have to sit for a significant period of time before you can use it again?
Not to mention the annoying logistics question of how Hertz would deal with EVs returned with a low charge. With gas vehicles they can happily charge you an excessive fee and spend a few minutes filling it up. With an EV they can still charge you, but the next customer may not be able to use the car for hours. I assume Hertz would ultimately have to float more unused vehicles at busy locations to cover for EVs charging after they were returned.
I've owned a couple of EVs in my life, and I love them and would never go back to owning an ICE car.
At the same time, I don't think I would ever want to rent an EV. Do I know that wherever I'm staying I'll be able to charge? Sure they said they had a charger but what if it's busted? Also, these days if I'm renting a car (as opposed to just Ubering) I'm usually going to use it quite a bit - having to deal with range anxiety or planning out charging stops is the last thing I want to do.
EVs are great, but the broader infrastructure is still not as convenient as gas. When I've got a car at my house I know when and where I'll charge it, but when traveling it's just an extra hassle I don't want to deal with.
So you never traveled with your EVs and used them only between places you either knew had a sure place to recharge or didn't have to because they were in range to come back home?
Not OP, but I'd say I feel similarly if the EV were non-Tesla. If it were a Tesla, in the continental US, I'd be totally fine renting it. Superchargers are all over the place. But I'd definitely try to find a hotel with a level 2 charger, because that's nearly as convenient as charging at home.
Teslas are extremely expensive to own. As the article says, collision repairs are extremely expensive, partially because of the design, partially because Tesla essentially fully controls the repair market. Also as mentioned in the article, depreciation is very high. I'm not fully sure why this is, but there is to some degree the same effect with luxury brands -- BMW, Mercedes, etc, where a lot of the signaling value is lost when the car is old, but the parts/maintanence are still extremely expensive.
BS. Cheaper by far than any gas car, in time and money! Half the cost to fuel. No more emissions check. No more oil changes. No more visits to the gas station.
As the article says, collision repairs are extremely expensive
I suspect this is also BS. That's par for the course with media outlets w/Tesla.
I'm not a media outlet. Friends of mine with Teslas that have been in accidents had large bills. Auto insurance for Teslas is expensive for this reason.
As for the fuel cost, it depends where you live. In California, if you have PG&E, it's roughly a wash despite our very high gas prices (electricity is even more outrageous)
My own experience with having our (now-lease-returned) Model 3 backs up collision repairs being more expensive. I live a major metro that has a single repair shop certified to work on Tesla vehicles. They have a multi-month wait, and they charge more to repair Tesla vehicles than the equivalent luxury vehicle because they can.
A newer luxury SUV with an MSRP 2x of our Model 3 had a lower collision premium on our car insurance policy.
I don't think it works like this, if you get the Tesla insurance. Switching to Tesla insurance indicated to me, that the current premiums are heavily distorted.
Car rental companies regularly rotate through their fleet. I suspect these are cars that are supposed to go up for resell anyway and they are just not replacing them with equivalents.
EVs are already not a good fit for rental cars - I don't think travelers on vacation want to figure deal with a charging plan. It's also really hard to sell even a luxury sedan as an upgrade when everyone wants an SUV. I'd be curious to know if something like the Rivian would fare better as a premium option.
> It's also really hard to sell even a luxury sedan as an upgrade when everyone wants an SUV
I don't want an SUV. I get angry at rental companies when they try to give me one.
I increasingly don't recognize this country I grew up in with the car culture. In the early 90s nobody wanted SUVs either. The truck and SUV craze was apparently sparked by an emissions regulatory loophole, where larger vehicles were excempt because they were meant for work.
The term "SUV" has changed tremendously, when I was younger an SUV was a Suburban or maybe the smaller Bronco - barely would apply to a Jeep.
Modern "compact" or "crossover" SUVs are just hatchback cars. Some are quite small, they're just named differently to make people buy them.
The real loser has been minivans, station wagons, and actual hatchbacks. There's no reason to buy a sedan when on the same footprint you can get an SUV with more room.
> There's no reason to buy a sedan when on the same footprint you can get an SUV with more room.
This is a popular opinion, but there are still advantages to a sedan. e.g. driving dynamics, weight and aerodynamics and therefore fuel economy, price, etc.
It's just that many buyers don't prioritize these things.
The emission loophole is part of the reason but the main one, I believe, is that the US vehicle manufacturers have used a boat load of advertising and other methods to convince people, over the last 60 years, to buy trucks and then SUVs due to the 25% "Chicken Tax"[1] that was imposed on truck imports starting in 1964. Trucks were some much more profitable because they did not need to compete with imports. Ford recently has stopped selling all cars but the Mustang in the US.
This tax remains in effect to this day with that trade war a distant memory.
It baffles me... When I'm driving in an unfamiliar place, the last thing I want to be driving is a lumbering beast that is longer and wider than what I'm used to.
SUVs are popular because of the death of car culture.
Car enthusiasts still like small sedans with handling and looks and etc. But the average person just wants the biggest, most comfortable car they can get for the money.
I had a millenial co-worker ask me why selling a 2-door car was even legal these days.
I guess when I say car culture, I don't mean enthusiasts and tinkerers. I mean that general American culture is car-dependent. People think their car is very important and part of their identity. I see on social media all the time people say that lack of a car is a sign of struggle, that you haven't made it, that you can't be trusted. That sort of thing.
I don't necessarily love it as a characterization because Americans also have a love of huge refrigerators and couches and washing machines but no one says we have a refrigerator culture (even though it may be true). When you think about the number of boring base-level Corollas that get sold, it's hard to think of it as an identity thing.
I think a fairer description would be that American culture values space, personal property ownership, and independence. Car ownership is a means to an end.
I think the larger size of appliances and furniture in the US isn't because of any particular love of larger sizes for those things, just that suburbia tends to give people more room. I'm not sure of the direction of causation: do Americans value space and personal property ownership and independence on first principles, and then spread out in large house on large plots of land because of that? Or did those values grow out of the incidental ability to have lots of house space?
Our fridge/freezer is on the larger size, but is also usually pretty full, so we definitely get good use out of it. Our washing machine is reasonably large, but, frankly, not large enough, as I can't fit our king-size bed's comforter in it, and have to use a laundry service to get it washed. Our couch is a pretty good size, but my partner and I want to be able to stretch out on it (at opposite ends) simultaneously, which doesn't seem like a wild or unreasonable thing to want to do.
And I prefer a smaller car! I refuse to purchase an SUV, despite my need to drive in snowy mountains several months out of the year (I of course found a sedan with a 4WD option). I hate driving SUVs; they feel bulky, unwieldy, and unstable to me. Before I bought my current car, I would rent a 4WD SUV when I needed to drive in the snow, and I hated the experience every time.
Car ownership is not really independence. Eg. It isn't very independent to sit in traffic with a crowd of other car owners, waiting for them to move so you can also move. Then you are also dependent on fueling stations and other infrastructure.
> But the average person just wants the biggest, most comfortable car
They want the biggest, because it makes them feel comfortable, despite objective data and car parts that SUVs are more dangerous and less comfortable.
One theory is that millennials have been taught that higher and bigger is better because of age related vision deterioration by their parents and it has now caught on.
Anecdotally, I asked this line of questioning recently of family that had the choice of a 20 hour road trip - 2 people in (solid rear axle) Cadillac Escalade versus a similar year Mercedes Mid Size SUV. The reasoning given was comfort. But objectively, the mid size has independent rear suspension, more responsive steering, quicker pickup, lower weight (and better center of gravity), lower miles, fewer maintenance issues, fits in more parking spaces, is not as tall to get into comfortably, better fuel economy, and more comfortable seating. The conclusion that the extra large SUV is more comfortable perplexes me.
Well, the simple truth is that the best, most versatile car on the road is a minivan. But no one wants to admit that so everyone pretends they like SUVs despite being worse in almost every way for daily driving.
Really? I dislike the feel of driving an SUV, but I find minivans to be lumbering beasts. Granted, I haven't had the displeasure of driving a minivan in many years (whereas I have had the displeasure of driving SUVs recently), so maybe they've gotten better.
They are not particularly fast, but for just ride comfort they are superb. Both the Sienna and the Pacifica have very comfortable seats and very good noise dampening.
But because their profile is much more aerodynamic and they are lower to the ground, they just drive very smoothly. Especially when covering long distances on the freeway.
It's also amazing to be able to open every door and control every feature with a physical button on the dash and be able to haul full sheets of plywood in the back.
My personal cars have all been sporty little manual hatchbacks, but if I just wanted all out comfort it's really hard to beat a well equipped mini-van.
1) bad drivers like being seated high and this helps when overloaded with information; and bad as beginner, constantly bad or just age-related
2) cargo cult culture in literally everything these days, including what some less-than-bright footballer buys for a car (or some famous dev or company uses for building their products), so these 'suv' are seen as luxury, and not garbage dump of companies making real cars (TM) like BMW.
Severe rolling risk, slow reaction times and generally just a bad drive thanx to basic physics, high consumption and overall maintenance... not that great a choice for many
It's the long wheelbase and bigger wheels that have more impact on comfort than IRS vs. solid rear axles. A big vehicle just doesn't jiggle around as much which is surprisingly tiring when you are travelling.
I dunno if I agree with that; I drive back and forth from the bay area to Tahoe area several times a year, mostly in winter months. In the past, I would rent a 4WD SUV for the trip (variety of makes and models). A year and a half ago I bought a Mercedes sedan (with 4WD) and that drive is way more comfortable and stable now.
Maybe I just had bad luck with the rentals I chose?
My own car is a compact, and I would rent a SUV or other large vehicle for that exact reason. Sometimes, rarely, I need a big car, I don't have one, that's what rental is for.
When travelling, I tend to prefer public transport, except when in a group or when I need to carry a lot of stuff, and again, for that I need a big car.
And not an EV. EVs are ideal when you can charge at home. When renting a car, it usually means I don't have a "home", and planning for charging points in a place you are not familiar with is a hassle. And EVs are not ideal for road trips where each leg typically exceeds the maximum range.
So yeah, I understand why rentals would be dominated by large gas cars and trucks.
A nice "feature" for rental EVs would be hot-swap - driving around and your rented Model 3 is a bit low on charge? Bring it by any of the rental locations and be off in another one fully charged in minutes.
Unfortunately people who like small cars are a minority. Most people want whatever is the current fad, and small cars are out. I do not know how to change this. (come to think of it, even though I prefer small cars I drive a large truck because once in a while I need a truck and I don't drive enough to justify two vehicles)
> Most people want whatever is the current fad, and small cars are out. I do not know how to change this.
The only thing I can think of is to emphasize their superior fuel economy and get people to appreciate the superior handling.
Make people drive an obstacle avoidance course in both a small car and a huge SUV. Maybe some people would accept that the safer car doesn't have to be the bigger car, but the one with enough agility and stability to avoid it completely.
I would guess that for the most part safety is more of a function of attention and driving safely and predictably rather than relying on the superior handling to get out of scrapes.
Many times people that prize handling of the car end up pushing the limits and driving dangerously aggressively accelerating and braking, following closely, aggressively lane swerving.
Yep. When I get upgraded to an SUV I exchange it for something along the lines of the car I had originally reserved. I've asked them to put something in my file saying "don't upgrade to SUV" but it appears beyond the capabilities of their system.
The last time I needed to rent a car, I seriously considered renting an EV. I find them more pleasant to drive, my usage could have been accomplished on a single charge, and Hertz doesn’t penalize you for returning a discharged EV like they do for returning a gas car on an empty tank, so it would have saved me having to find a gas station near the airport on my way out of town.
But they wanted more than twice as much for a model 3 than any other compact sedan, so I ended up with a gas powered Kia instead.
My favorite rental car in recent history was a Fiat 500 we nicknamed "The Little Brown Toot" [1]. A 2 door with 4 seats, but we had to fold down the back seats in order to fit our suitcases. For my wife and I having a long weekend in upstate Mass for a friends wedding? It was perfect, we didn't need anything else. And it was a hell of a lot less stressful to get around and find parking in Boston at the end of our trip.
I don't think I've ever rented an SUV in my adult life. Other than the one time I needed a vehicle to go to the snow (and in that case, we ended up with an AWD equipped minivan anyways).
I would much prefer a Tesla Model 3 to most SUV options. Granted I have an EV so it doesn't scare me, but that's not everyone. A rental fleet should be diverse. Just because I don't want an SUV doesn't mean others don't. Different people, different wants and needs.
> EVs are already not a good fit for rental cars - I don't think travelers on vacation want to figure deal with a charging plan.
Agreed. Travel already involves enough work of having to figure out how to operate in a different location. Gas stations are everywhere and the time to fill is predictable across all ICE cars; I don't want to have to plan EV charging into my trip as well.
Last time I rented a car from Hertz back in November I was surprised how many EVs they had on the lot. I would've thought EV rentals would be kind of niche, but they had several available.
As an aside, I was also surprised that they had a special line/desk that was only for Uber/Lyft drivers and there were people in that line. I guess I would've thought that by the time you paid for the rental costs you wouldn't make any money driving for Uber or Lyft.
True. Though one of the Uber drivers was there specifically for an AWD Tesla. I'd guess that's not cheap to rent and would eat into profits. Also the people ahead of us in line rented a Bolt.
The years of these vehicles (2021) is about the same as all the other vehicles they're selling (though there are some older ones which I suspect might be trade ins?).
The only thing really of note is that they're not buying more of them, selling off cars that are 2 years (or about 30k miles) or so old is standard rental car policy. Sell it whilst they can recover much of the capital outlay.
This is exactly the point.
This is really a non-reup on Tesla as a rental fleet option.
It’s important to note that they have been renting half this fleet to Uber drivers at approximately 1/2 their consumer rental rate, according to TheVerge:
> Hertz is scaling back its EV ambitions because its Teslas keep getting damaged / Also, Uber drivers, who are using about half of Hertz’s Teslas, are damaging their cars more than Hertz expected.
And:
> repair costs are about double what the company spends on gas car fixes, Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told Bloomberg.
Apparently they tried to pull more vehicles into the leisure category (aka consumer rentals not Uber driver rentals) to mitigate repair costs, but it didn’t work.
Also, the price cuts Tesla has been making are turning the company off on renewing:
> Price cuts have taken another toll on Hertz. “The MSRP [manufacturer suggested retail price] declines in EVs over the course of 2023, driven primarily by Tesla, have driven the fair market value of our EVs lower as compared to last year, such that a salvage creates a larger loss and, therefore, greater burden,” Scherr said.
It's a cascade of issues, but it really comes down to "people didn't want EVs when offered". For want of renters, the Uber was used. For want of Uber gentleness, the repairs mounted, etc.
I honestly can't fault them, they tried a thing and they ran into real issues.
I suspect that Tesla themselves could manage a (smaller) rental EV fleet for those who wanted them, and do decently well (they could rent out used cars they've prepped for sale).
This is an absolute dream for anyone with a services business ready to re-up or replace their fleet of vehicles.
Most of these hertz teslas were barely driven and those with defects are generally pretty easy to catch and they're desperate to get rid of them at bottom of the barrel prices.
It almost makes me want to quit my dev job and start a plumbing or electrical biz.
I would say part of this is related to resale value of their fleet. The daily rental companies have been taking a bath repairing their fleet of vehicles due to supply chain problems that force them to hold on to the vehicles for longer than desired. An offset for these companies has been the strong used vehicle market so they could sell a vehicle with 60,000 miles for more than they ever did in the past. The problem is that used EVs don't hold up in value compared to ICE vehicles. I personally know of a case where a customer purchased a Mercedes-Benz AMG EQS 4MATIC+Sedan and sold it after 6 months at a loss of $50,000 because there was no market for it. The EV resale market is a hot potato that no one wants to hold on to.
Funny, I just tried to rent a Model 3 from Hertz today, and I was “upgraded” to a Corolla (which they made me pay $33 extra for), even though I was guaranteed a Tesla online.
Why? Because I’m not yet 25.
Of course, the website let me book it even after I entered my age. Really horrible user experience and customer service.
I only recently started sticking with Hertz because I can reliably get a Tesla from them. It's easy to be a gold member, I walk in, get my car without any hassle at all, scan the QR code in the car, all of my settings magically appear, and it's like I'm driving my own car at home.
On the other hand, I think it's insane and a real shame that they just handed unsuspecting people who booked the cheapest car an EV. That's a flat out deception and a major hassle if you aren't ready for it.
As is usually the case, Hertz may have raced into the trend a little too quickly, and now they will back off for a period of time. I don't think this says much about the long term trend under which we all end up driving EVs in another 15 years.
This is interesting. Last summer my family had a trip to LA and rented a car through Hertz.
I'm a Gold member through Delta status (which is 1000% better than trying to use Hertz without the status), so they had an upgrade for me - a Tesla Model 3, which was by far the cheapest option.
I live in Utah, drive a (hybrid) F-150, and had never driven a Tesla. It was fun and novel but a PITA to figure out charging (at Disneyland no less).
When returning the car I was a little surprised to see what seemed like hundreds of Teslas on the lot.
We have another SoCal vacation this summer, and I expected to see a Tesla at the top of the list again, but I was surprised to see that it wasn't even an option, and the other EV (I think a Bolt) was 50% more to rent than the standard Jetta. So we got the Jetta /shrug
It's the people who wanted to "rent a car" and ended up with a Tesla without understanding the difference and got annoyed/angry that will really sling the deal.
Even if 10% of the customers would be fine with it (I'd love to rent one to see what it was like) it's not worth bifurcating the fleet.
I was under the impression that EVs would be a better fit for exactly this kind of a purpose - they're easier on the consumables other than tires and more resilient to abuse. Is it the lack of 3rd party part availability that makes damage repair more expensive?
Whoever thought it made sense to use EVs for commercial use such as cabs hasn't dealt with the problems that EVs pose.
1. The number of public charging points available is very small compared to the number of gas stations. Very difficult to use EVs outside very urbanised areas because of this one reason.
2. Even at the base, you will need a large number of charging points and also access to much larger electricity load - all of which costs a lot more money and infrastructure.
3. It takes time to charge - and even the fastest charging units are usually a bit slower than doing a gas refill.
4. The costs can easily jump if the batteries need to be replaced for whatever reason.
I tried renting one in Hawaii last month. Figured it would be a great idea on an island where I could drive all day and easily charge overnight. Wrong.
- Our hotel (and many others) did not offer EV charging. In most places, there was no assurance that the chargers would be functional.
- Oahu has very limited level 3 charging. Finding a supercharger meant driving out of the way.
- Hertz wanted me to top-it-off before returning. I was mindblown when I realized that they had a fleet of EVs but no in-house charging equipment.
Had Hertz offered to charge it themselves upon return, I would have still taken it, but asking me to sit around for a few extra hours at an L2 charger just before returning the vehicle was definitely a deal-breaker.
I'm considering renting a Model Y from Hertz in Calgary for three months, but their pricing model is a complete mess:
23/01 -> 30/04 C$10,952.88 (C$111.76 / day)
... but pick it up a day earlier and it's C$4,000 cheaper:
22/01 -> 30/04 C$6,777.00 (C$68.45 / day)
Also:
13/01 -> 15/02 C$1,747.00 (C$52.94/day)
... but split it into two rentals and it's C$400 cheaper:
13/01 -> 01/02 C$727.00
01/02 -> 15/02 C$619.00
Total: C$1,346.00 (C$40.79/day)
Nothing makes sense.
Also, I need winter tyres. That'll be C$25/day extra... No discount for monthly rental. Doesn't make sense. I'm here with my money Hertz, but there's no way I'd deal with such a cluster-fuck.
Here, the local car sharing service had two plans. The first was pick and and drop off wherever you want cars, the second pick up and return cars. The former were electric, the latter gas powered.
The electric cars were never powered up. Even when parked beside a charger, people simply wouldn't plug them in. When they did, the cars would charge for lengthy periods of time, and hence be unavailable. Gas won.
Despite eletric being half the cost, and more covenient as a one way option, people chose to willingly pay more, and use gas.
Today, the same system is gas only. Electric isn't suitable for this use case.
When I return a gas powered hire car, I'm required to return it with the same amount of fuel as I picked it up with. I sign a contract that states I'll be charged a higher-than-pump price to top up the car if I breach this requirement.
Does the same (or an equivalent, eg: Plug it in to charge upon return) requirement not apply to electric cars?
Copying this over from the other thread - It makes sense... EV's pay for themselves over the long run, much longer than rental cars stick around for. They typically lease them for up to three years and then flip them for newer vehicles. EV's have lower TCO, but only if you keep it for a decade. With a higher sticker price and insurance, it makes sense the rental sector is having cold feet.
Anecdotally, the exception was Japan, where my wife and I rented a pristine ten year old Aqua direct from Toyota, but that sort of vertical integration seems to be rare here.
My other issue with renting EVs is my credit card insurance's limit will be based on MSRP, which is a problem because:
1. EVs are more expensive up-front (supposed to pay for it through reduced opex)
2. ex-US/Canada, MSRP includes VAT, inflating it.
3. Nobody effectively pays MSRP for EVs because of various tax credits.
4. Every CC's CDW policy I've read said that they don't cover you at all if you exceed MSRP
Maybe my insurance will think #2 is an oversight, but I don't want to test that. Some say "MSRP exclusive of taxes", but again, I don't want that fight.
Yesterday I went to their website looking to hopefully rent a Cadillac LYRIQ to try out before buying and I was shocked to find that their website is stuck in the early 2000's. Unbelievable.
Rented a model y last month from them and drove nearly 6,000 miles round trip to visit family out of state. Had to stop more than I did when I’ve previously done the drive in my ICE car, but other than that, very smooth experience. The supercharger costs were more than I expected, but basically a wash with gas. More chargers of course are needed (looking at you SE Arizona and West Texas), and it’d be nice to see EVs have a useable range of 300+ miles of highway driving between charging stops.
We are 5-10 years too early to be renting EVs. I have seen folks in Vermont who have rental EVs because those were the last on the lot. There is not enough infra, you need a bunch of apps, you need to understand how EVs work with weather and driving conditions, etc. This just hinders EV adoption because all of these people will never get an EV for the forseable future because they aren't early adopters but were forced into it. So yeah, it's kind of obvious why Hertz would dump these cars.
I rented a car on a holiday a while ago. I wanted to try electric or plug in hybrid. The car we chose was not available and he said the plug-ins didn't have the charging cable. The guy kept pushing for a brand new car they had, that was also hybrid. I said sure
It ended up being an SUV that even being hybrid consumed more gas than an average non hybrid sedan.
I had a feeling they didn't want me to rent an electric, or the clerk was pushing me away from it.
Article says that the reason was huge mainly costs which I don’t understand. I thought EVs should have fundamentally much lower maintenance costs given dramatically reduced moving parts. Teslas need far less often oil changes and other services. Also, Tesla should theoretically lasts for million miles while gas vehicles rarely go beyond 2k. So, average TOC per mile should be very small for EVs. Where does math go wrong?
I've rented Teslas from Hertz twice, about one year apart. The process has improved considerably in that time, so I don't think this is an indication that Hertz has turned bearish on Tesla.
The improvements include an on-display tutorial for how a Tesla differs from other models in their fleet (including door operation, use of keys and charging) and the ability to use your phone as a key. This last is very nice quality of life improvement.
I love electric cars, I currently own two of them, and owned several others before.
That said, I can absolutely understand why a person wouldn't want to rent one: lack of charging at hotels or places you're likely to visit. At home, I know I can charge at home, at the office, and I'm familiar with the supercharger locations. In a strange city, I just don't want to have to worry about it.
I’ll never forget the evening I spent driving around Phoenix desperate to find a place to charge the rental Tesla I had because I couldn’t figure out the charging station near my hotel.
I eventually found the adapter in the trunk, and I am confident there were a dozen “right answers” I ought to have known about, but it was a rental and I didn’t at the time own an EV myself.
I live in one of those upscale glass tower estates in central London. There is fancy valet underground parking for some 500 cars. There are 2 slow chargers in total that don't even work 50% of the time. Owning an EV is a fucking joke for most people and I don't see that changing any time soon. Rebuilding entire world's power grid is gonna take forever.
It may also have to do with the fact that the refreshed Model 3 is now available for order in the US, and the Model Y is probably not too far away. I feel like the used market is about to be flooded with those cars, tanking resale value. (which has already dropped substantially)
Resale value is a big aspect of rental car companies' profitability models.
EVs cost more in almost every way... I had to pay $900 for 3 weeks of super charger ... And since it was a rental the cost was a surprise at the end.
In addition to that, they gave me a model 3 when I was trying to rent the most basic gas model (for the same price). I'm glad I got to try it but never again. I thought I was getting a good deal...
How can the economics come even remotely close to working out? I was under the strong impression that Uber drivers make dirt and that it's difficult to do much more than break even, assuming you own/lease your own car.
Either Hertz is insanely cheap or Uber pays more than I thought.
I drive an EV every day in NZ, but even when I went on a road trip through Arizona/Nevada/California I rented a petrol car simply to avoid the additional overhead of having to worry about the availability of charging infrastructure.
I completely understand why they don’t work well as rental cars.
EVs are bad at long distances and take a long time to charge.
Rental customers are usually on a tight schedule and need to travel long distances.
I don’t know why they thought this would be a good idea.
I've rented Teslas from Hertz and Avis. The experience was nominal; the only issue the first time was my lack of familiarity with Teslas, and Hertz's onboarding for them was weak. But otherwise everything has been fine whenever I rented them.
We recently went on vacation to Germany and rented a Polestar 2 from Hertz.
The car was good but charging was infuriating. Had to download a new app for each charging spot and they didn't include a home-charging cable so we couldn't charge at family home we were visiting. Overall wouldn't recommend which is a huge shame. At home we drive a Tesla M3, charge at home from solar and supercharger network is flawless when doing road trips.
Very puzzling that Hertz + Tesla hasn't streamlined the charging process for rental vehicles.
EV owner 6 years here, rented an EV in Portugal and was a disaster.
Nearly stranded at a rest stop, spent 2 hours trying to charge, apps wouldn't accept payment, apps wouldn't activate Ionity charger, spent an hour on long distance cellphone call to Ionity call center where they manually activated a charge for me after great difficulty.
The other thing for people who think they can plan around it is that remember with typical rental agency you have no idea exactly which EV model they are going to give you at check in.
So could be the one with 220/240/280mi highway range. And then they might hand it to you with the battery at 80% full.
Your plans to safely get to your destination on 100% of the 280mi battery may be quickly spoiled by getting a a 240mi EV at 80% full and being -90mi short.
Anyone else having MSEdge hang on particular links? Well, this one is it. Hang my Edge with many other open tabs twice. First time didn't even get past cookie banner, second time could press reject all but still hang.
I rent often and almost always from Hertz. They have recently been trying to push me into renting an EV, which would not work for the ranges I drive. I have waited in line behind other customers arguing about not wanting an EV.
I'm old enough to remember, that on the announcement of the initial contract (which by the way was advertised as 100k cars), Tesla shares jumped ~25% in the following 2 weeks.
And a week after that, Elon started selling Tesla shares.
I would think that car rentals would be one of the slowest areas for electric adoption. You're immediately limited to people only intending to drive short distances, which is less common for car rentals than day-to-day car ownership. Of those, many will be people far from home where they're not familiar with the charging infrastructure. Maybe they can stay at a hotel with chargers, but what if there are only a couple and they don't get one one night? It just sounds like a way to make planning a trip more complicated.
Being able to "charge onsite" is a minor advantage, if any at all. They get to charge for cars brought back not full, and either they're active enough that they have on-site refueling (delivered by a gas truck) or they're inactive enough that sending the new guy over to the gas station isn't a major issue.
Is that really a thing? I'm super paranoid when I have a rental car, the idea of taking it back and having them basically able to charge you what they like for any damage gives me the fear.
I feel like there's a big market opportunity to create an EV-only rental car agency that will eventually get rolled up by an Avis or Hertz.
Besides the body damage repair cost mentioned in the article, one other reason for Hertz' decision has to be customer complaints. Car rental agencies frequently have to give people a different car than the one they reserved and for whatever reason, a lot of Americans have a bone to pick with electric vehicles. Having traveled extensively for work over the years, I've seen some pretty stunning meltdowns from the people ahead of me in the Hertz line when they got, e.g., a Traverse instead of a Tahoe (i.e., a marginally smaller SUV than the one they reserved).
Imagine the theatrics that ensue at the Honolulu airport when an entitled boomer out of central casting (sorry to stereotype) gets a Bolt instead of the Malibu they reserved. I could totally see how such incidents, at scale, would bubble up to Hertz leadership and drive decisions.
It doesn't seem like there are any electric-only agencies out there except for the Tesla plan to let owners monetize their vehicles during owner downtime. Feels like a good market opportunity and the US Gov would probably subsidize the shit out of it.
Regardless of the repair issues they cite, I wouldn't ever rent an EV.
Last summer I was attending a wedding in slightly-upstate New York. I flew into Newark airport, and went to rent a car that I'd pre-reserved. They tried to give me an EV. I had no idea what the charging situation would be where I was going, so I declined and asked for and ICE car instead. Good thing, as I didn't see any kind of charging infra at my hotel or at the wedding venue, or anywhere nearby.
Renting an EV would mean planning ahead of time and becoming familiar with the charging infra in whatever place I'm visiting. That seems not worth the effort or potential stress.
On top of that, I've read of plenty of situations where people go to rent an EV, and find that it's barely charged, and then have to waste an hour or more finding a place to charge it before going about their day. The rep at the rental place will just shrug and say they didn't have time to charge it fully after it was returned.
This feels more like an indictment on Tesla than on EVs. Tesla couldn't actually deliver the cars they sold, and their parts are grossly overpriced which is ironic given the quality of parts they're putting out.
Slightly OT, but used Teslas are dirt cheap these days (relatively) thanks to all the fleet sales. You can find a ~3 year old Model S off lease now for under $30k.
> While Hertz isn’t directly pointing a finger, it appears that Tesla has been largely to blame.
> Tesla has been aggressively cutting its vehicle prices leading other automakers to do the same for their electric vehicles. When automakers reduce the prices of new vehicles, that pushes down the value of those models in the used car market, causing rapid depreciation.
How dare Tesla reduce their prices without asking Hertz first
Obligatory: "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
I've never driven an EV before. I don't want to learn about them when I am renting a vehicle...my relationship with rental cars is pure utility: get me from A to B
By the same token I would never rent a diesel or a manual transmission vehicle...I don't want to learn about them via the rental experience
FYI, you appear to be shadowbanned, I had to vouch your comment to make it not dead. And most of your comments are dead when I look at your profile. I couldn’t find ground zero for what caused your comments to become shadowbanned, but you can reach out to dang to find out why and ask if he’ll consider unbanning you.
I had to learn how to use an automatic when I rented a vehicle in Texas. That was the first time I’d ever driven on the wrong side of the road which was also interesting.
I haven't driven a gasoline car in over 5 years, so similarly I don't want to have to try to remember how to work one, and I'd rather just rent an EV for familiarity.
As more and more people have electric cars, it makes sense for the rental companies to transition to them, so that renting doesn't feel like you're being offered a horse and buggy.
Your comment is equally inflammatory to me. Behind the diction and emotionality of the poster, there are some entirely reasonable points that recapitulate the article itself.
I agree that there are reasonable points, that was the purpose of my comment, I thought the poster had something to offer, but am of the opinion that people won't take them seriously because of their approach.
Emotion is even a valid addition to the conversation if they thought it added to their point. What is unproductive is expressing that emotion by calling a car brand "absolute cancer".
I think it's valid to be upset about Tesla as a brand. I think it's valid to call out repairability issues. Coming across as hysterical means that people won't take you seriously despite that.
I looked at some of the Hertz listings this morning. I saw a lot of cars with 50k - 80k miles on them. Isn't that about the time they let go of rental cars anyway? I get a lot of rental cars and they usually are new or have ~2,000 miles on them.
that isnt logical. A tramp bursts into your store and tries to sleep on the floor. Telling him thats not cool isnt classy? Thats not the world we live in in either case.
Really, because my understanding, based on an earlier Hertz president interview, was that the maintenance cost was 1/2 what their typical fleet vehicle was.
I own a 2017 Model S and the maintenance cost over these 6 years has been 1000 USD (change brake calipers at the end of year 6). For EV owners it’s definitely lower but damage collision repairs are probably more expensive.
