Also the Hertz employees weren’t properly trained from the couple of first hand anecdotes that I heard. Two different friends of mine were very excited to try Teslas and both got cars with low batteries and gave them back. It was ridiculous for Hertz to go nearly all in like that and more so to expect the customers who were largely unfamiliar with the tech to try to figure it out on their own.
They should have gotten a much smaller number of them and offered them as an option for existing EV users and for the few who are curious about trying one. I’d definitely do a test drive to get a lesson on how to manage them before renting one.
Executive summary: Renting Teslas to people who just got off a four-hour flight, are in a strange city late at night, and have never driven an EV was a really bad idea. They got into a lot of accidents, and Teslas that have been in accidents are expensive and time consuming to repair.
Then Elon Musk reduced the price of new Teslas, meaning Herta took a bath on the value of their existing EV
Also, their accident rate with Teslas was 4 times all their other cars! And it took them over a year to figure this out. It turns out if you take a bunch of people who are used to the acceleration of a gas car and put them in a Tesla and don’t warn them, a ton of them end up crashing into stuff! Hertz didn’t only fuck over themselves by not figuring this out, they fucked over Tesla too. There was a national shortage of Tesla spare parts 2022 - 2023, pushing repairs for everyone into the multi-month period because so many Tesla parts were going into wrecked Hertz’s. And it ruined Hertz’s economic model because every car sitting there waiting for months for a repair was a car weighing down their bottom line.
Truly one of the case studies that will be studied in business school for years to come for just the total omnishambles of bad decisions made at every level by Hertz.
I recently rented a car during company travel and was given an EV. When I turned it on it told me I had 240 miles of range. Since I knew I was going to put about 150-160 miles on the car, I was fine with it. When I returned it with 80 miles of range remaining, it sounded like they wanted to charge me for not returning it “fully charged”, but I told them there was on charging cable I could see and the hotel had no chargers (true). They let it go.
My boss was given an EV with about 20 miles of range showing on that same trip! (the first leg was a 60 mile trip to another city for the meetings) He told them flatly to get him an ICE car, which they did. he’s also arranged to have a “no EV” inserted in his rental profile.
I’m wondering if I should add the “no EV” to my profile. If they are going to play games with the range they provide at the start, it would seem to be a good idea. Though my rental is through a corporate agreement that allows us to return the ICE vehicles with a less than full tank with no additional charges, so I might just test this in the case of EVs. The agency is not Hertz, though they do try very hard.
Hmmm… the last two times I rented Teslas from Hertz I was innundated with “get familiar with your EV rental” emails for a few days before pickup. I guess that’s why.
OTOH, theoretically it should have been cheaper for Hertz - no oil changes, tune-ups, transmission issues, filter changes, timing and valve issues, etc. Basically, a much simpler car. One of the nice features in the north is instant-on heat. (Downside, they didn’t have heated steering wheels when I bought my car).
Just to add a couple more anecdotes. I’ve rented an EV from Hertz twice in last year or so: first was a Polestar and second was a Mercedes of some kind. In both cases, the car was charged close to full (can’t remember exactly but 90% or more) when I got it, and both times they told me not to bother to charge it before returning. In neither case did I need to do any charging based on the amount of driving I was doing, so it was totally seamless both times: pick it up, drop it off, no charging, no gas stations, no additional cost. As it should be!
For an individual that can work okay but there are issues when you get to fleets. Unless you have enough chargers to charge all the batteries overnight you need someone to come in & move them around so that all of your batteries can be charged & ready to go the next day. Hertz should be able to charged some cars up during the day & potentially not need to do this overnight & at the cheapest rates. I’ve seen estimates that a typical 3-4 man landscaping crew will need 40-50 batteries to get thru a day. That’s a pretty big rack to plug them all in to charge overnight.
Rental car companies typically get rid of their fleets before any of the above needs to be done (with the exception of the more frequent oil changes)
Statistically with a big fleet, someting will go wrong; just ask people for horror stories about buying new cars. EV’s are not Rube Goldberg contraptions with complex automatic transmissions, a chunk of metal that heats up to combustion temps and down again every trip, and all sorts of ancilliary moving parts. It’s about as complex as a glorified golf cart, the complex bits are industrial electronics.
Tesla does not even recommend annual maintenance. The only work I’ve had done is replacing the ball joints, thanks to ourpotholed roads.
IMHO, the problem with the Hertz Tesla deal was very specific to the two companies involved. Hertz went into the deal without proper planning, and went in too big and too fast. The problem Tesla brought to the deal was their huge price cutting which killed Hertz’s financial plan. Hertz really bears the lions share of the blame for the impact of this as well, as it wasn’t exactly unexpected.
One problem that a rental car outfit has with on premises recharging is that once you have a reasonable number of cars, your electricity needs jump into the industrial capacity ranks, and you may find yourself with difficult to fulfil needs, and unexpected up front costs. If you had, say 30 cars overnight at any time (I have no clue what a reasonable number would be, this just felt a good starting point) and needed to provide a significant fraction of a battery charge, and wanted to do it over say about 8 hours during an overnight off-peak rate, with some losses in the whole thing and some rounding of numbers, we might see ourselves needing 10kW per car, and thus a 300kW power feed. I had a look at numbers where I live for industrial - large commercial power connection costs. This varies a lot depending upon how much infrastructure is needed - power poles, underground cables, additional pits. But even if you are right next to a substation and need only a simple run, you are probably up for a minimum of 250 USD per kW, quickly rising. This takes into account pro-rata use of available transformer capacity and high voltage feeder capacity. This could easily double, especially if there isn’t local capacity. If you look like needing more than 10% of a substation’s capacity things get expensive fast. By the time you are including the cost of breaker panels, all the internal wiring in the rental garage, and the cost of charge controllers, you might reasonably be thinking of a ballpark figure of 1000 USD per installed kW. So maybe 300,000 USD. Given my very vague approximations, this is only useful as a starting point to think about the problems.
None the less, if this is the sort of money needed, it is going to make for a difficult first year or two. Given the model for rental cars is to resell them with still fairly high residuals (especially relative to the fleet prices they were bought for) this additional infrastructure could figure very large in the startup costs, and may well be similar to the expected cost of ownership of the cars. Obviously you would expect this infrastructure to last decades once installed.
If you had a sympathetic and enthusiastic power company, you might be able to cut some interesting deals, but these would be done on a case by case regional level. So very hard to plan for over the entire company. When the whole thing reeks of a CEO driven vanity exercise, the Tesla deal was probably done before anyone had a chance to drill down into the mundane details of how they got power or cars were charged.
Even on a domestic front it is a bit weird. I’m staring down the possibility that it will cost me the equivalent of three years electricity for the car just to install a high power (22kW) charge controller in my garage. So I currently just charge it at 2kW overnight. This makes it hard to take advantage of the solar electricity coming off my roof. But the numbers are difficult to ignore.
Amen to that. I just couldn’t face the thought of another ICE car with all that grief inside.
I paid a guy $600 to install a 50A circuit and NEMA 14-50 plug in my garage. This worked for the portable charger(32A) until we got a regular charger (40A). Considering I probably would spend $C1500 to $2000 a year for the equivalent gas mileage, I would say the charger paid for itself within a year. Of course, comparing maintenace costs per year to BMW is a false equivalency, but regardless it’s a helluva lot cheaper. Because the charger is connected via a plug, it did not need assorted permit checks etc. You can buy a 50A NEMA 14-50 range/oven cable for cheap.
I charge at 26A because one time in 2 years I popped the main breaker with 40A. Since then, no problems. As I’ve said, with charging scheduled 1AM I am unlikely to conflict with other high household useage.
I agree, industrial users are a whole 'nother kettle of fish. With one car and one house usage, i can manage demand manually. What’s missing from the fleet tech is dynamic charge management - distributing charging so that they can plug in, say, a fleet of 30 cars and let the computers manage the load as needed. Their computers can tell Hertz when cars are due to be picked up, the cars can be set remotely to charge at certain schedules using a certain amperage, etc. The tech control capability xists. What’s missing is a comprehensive overall management software that can coordinate this efficiently for a fleet. It can be done, but hasn’t been… Otherwise, it’s back to men in yellow safety vests constantly shuffling cars to and from plugins.
If you’re “EV curious” renting an EV is a reasonable option, although not necessarily through Hertz, etc.
I’ve rented the VW ID.4, Mustang Mach-E, Kia EV6 and (in a few months) the Cadillac Lyric from individuals on Turo. A good way to rent a specific car, especially if (like me) you’re using it as a chance to do extended test drives of cars you’re considering buying. The Mach-E was a relatively long roadtrip in GA/NC over two weeks with both long distance L3 charging stops and just leaving it plugged in all the time at 110v at the house we were staying in. The latter worked because the mountain town was so tiny that even 110v added miles faster than I was using them.
One might see Tesla selling the supercharger network, but then the staff would be included with the sale. But to keep the network, but to lay off the team? @Stranger_On_A_Train, anyone explain this?
I just read an article in The Atlantic that Tesla is starting to fall behind the curve with their vehicles when compared to their competitors, but their one bright spot is their charging network.
So it seems like a poor decision to now disinvest in their charging network, but that is veering out of FQ.
Yes, Tesla recognized to sell EV’s they needed to reassure people there was a charging option for road trips. It has built out a network covering most interstates (and the TransCanada highway) as well as plenty of options around most population centers. Charging with their system is hassle-free. Plug and go. In all my travels, I’ve only run across one defective charger (typically a charger setup is 8 or more chargers).
The others - Ford, GM, BMW, VW - have assumed someone else will take care of charging, and the result is a mess of disfunctional chargers and non-standards. Tesla is opening their network to other vehicles with deals for assorted manufacturers, but needs to retrofit their system with special adapters for other vehicles, until everyone starts making cars with tesla sockets. (Note where the EU jumped in early to set standards for charging, things are much better).
The possible explanation is that now that the Tesla plug has become the standard, Tesl will leave it to others to fill the gaps and remote spots in the charging network. After all, how profitable will a charging station be along the Alaska highway or remote northern Canada? Big expense is getting a good power feed to a remote location - it was easy when they were near larger towns or big interstate rest stops.
You can see from supercharge.info map option that the continent (and several others) are well covered.
But the article has a point. My experience from the 90’s agrees with them. the only thing worse for morale than big layoffs is more layoffs, the message that things are not done and surviving the first or second round is not a guarantee that you are safe now…
As for “is the EV empire crumbling?” stay tuned. Tesla says they will have their next announcement on Aug. 8th, which is expected to be the small (cheap) car as well as the robo-taxi option. I think the former will be more important than the latter.
I get the feeling that we have not heard the end of this restructure.
Makes no sense to kill a profitable subdivision. So we might see another bit of Musk led controversy about how it gets reworked. (ie, no longer a Tesla subdivision, but magically, an Elon owned company.)
No doubt Tesla are fast ceasing to be the leading light they were. The Cybertruck looks like being an extraordinarily badly thought out disaster. It must have eaten a lot of R&D, to basically no useful end. Maybe they should have taken the hint from DeLorean - stay clear of stainless steel - it seems cursed. Even more worrying for Tesla is the suggestion the the model 2 is DOA. Elon made a lot about how costs would be reduced by innovative production techniques that reduced the amount of messing about in the car structure installing components. I’m no production engineer, but it sounded like marginal gains in a product that has significant fixed component costs. Yet he was claiming a huge price drop compared to a model 3. Maybe we will just see a model 2.5 that is just a cut down 3. Maybe Elon is breaking with habit and might actually be trying to under promise and over deliver. Hard to imagine.
The trouble with Elon is that he is too much of a fan of Iain Banks’ Culture series, and clearly sees himself as the guy that will springboard humanity into the fabulous future Banks describes. Robots, AI, space travel, and neural implants. All there. Heck, even the Boring Company might be inspired by part of the plot of Consider Phlebas.
That Tesla is really a tech company, and the bright future is going to be all about their robots and AI capabilities, is well, amusing. There is a lot to navigate to save the company before getting too wrapped up in the glorious tech future.
No. The owners of non Tesla cars will need to get an adapter which is exactly what is happening. My Tesla came with an adapter so that I can use alternate chargers.
I live in a condo, converted from an apartment building. There are NO plans for chargers, and there is NO MONEY for chargers.
So.
If my battery goes flat, is there a way to fetch power to it, as per a gas can?
The connector is mostly unimportant. What matters is that non Tesla owners were allowed to use the Supercharger network at all. The NACS plug is mostly a thing for the USA. (Like the name suggests.) It can’t take advantage of domestic 3 phase power that is common outside of the US. So isn’t as useful.
Here in Australia we use the CCS2 connector. All new EVs (since 2019) are fitted with that connector. Including Teslas. And all new Australian Superchargers. Compared to the NACS plug CCS2 is a huge lump. But both use the same communications interface, so the adaptor plugs don’t need any smarts. I can, in principle, charge at 22kW at home thanks to the 3 phase support of the CCS2 connector.
How far is your car parked from your condo? If not too far you can simply buy a portable level 1 charger and extension cord for less than a couple hundred dollars [the problem with level one chargers is that they might take a day to fully charge a car]
Also, new vehicles such as the Chevy Silverado EV can charge vehicle to vehicle. You could also do this with any EV that has outboard power such as the Rivian and the Ford lightning, albeit from a 220v plug in the bed–the Chevy does it from the charge port. The “gas can” equivalent would of course be a portable gasoline generator.
It bears repeating that if you don’t have home or work charging available an EV probably doesn’t make sense.
