@@KillroyX99 EVs (and particularly Teslas) are FAR more likely to be written off in an accident, so insurance costs are skyrocketing as companies are figuring this out.
Why CEO's apparently have no clue about "proof of concept," "trials" & "phases" beats me. Nothing wrong with buying say 10 vehicles, maybe even 20 in an area with the most charging stations already and see what kind of feedback you get. Then deciding whether to go forward with more, pause, check for feedback then go forward again.
In any corporate setting, at any level, the person who opines critical view is often discarded, disinvited and shutdown. The corporate world benefits only narcissists or bootlickers.
Yes. It's like CEO's and their advisors didn't graduate from high school -- much less business school, advanced degrees like MBA's, etc. Meanwhile, they tend to get paid MASSIVE amounts.
My local Hertz (Denver area) has a great variety of EV brands, not just Tesla. Tesla is the one making the news, but there were about 5 other makes/models there on the lot. Oddly, when a customer returned them to that location, they often had to be loaded up on a large truck car carrier and sent off to a big set of chargers (could not be charged on site!!!). Very stupid, inefficient, costly there too.... About "range", if the Tesla or other EV is only going to be used to run around Denver and maybe a short bit out of town, the 250 miles of range works just fine for a day or two, any longer or farther and you better hunt for an EV charger that actually works, isn't being blocked or used already, and you'd better have a few hours to let it sit charging ---- ALL BAD really.
I think the people that rented these cars just wanted to race them. They are not your typical, practical car renters. And that is why so many got wrecked. I took a look at Hertz's cars thinking I could get a good deal. No good deals around here. They wanted $30,000 for a car with almost 100,000 miles. Cars that have been abused and mostly DC fast charged, no thanks.
I always want to stress out while on a vacation or important business trip. When I used to travel it was ALWAYS important. It was always a strange city. Companies and employers don’t pay for travel unless it’s REQUIRED. Renting a car is critical to a successful trip. I didn’t need complications, expense and time wasting measures.
the main problem was that hertz rented EVs to people that knew nothing about EVs with zero training. of course most hertz employees knew nothing either.
@@WEALTHYBOOKDIGEST , the comment was trying to point out that Hertz sold cars right after price cuts. If they had kept the cars longer they would have made more revenue . Everyone knows that cars depreciate the most in the first few years.
I own a Tesla and I fully agree the ownership experience is fantastic especially by virtue of the fact that you can charge it up cheap overnight or on daytime solar. You do not have those advantages when you are renting an EV whilst out travelling. I found roadside chargers to be very expensive, often unreliable, and several instances they required a local telephone country code to setup an account on your app. I was nearly stranded by this at one point. Electric should be cheaper than petrol or diesel, but it simply isn’t. Until you can have a system where you can simply “plug and charge” at any charger with no apps and all billing is charged through your rental car account, EVs will be an unpopular rental experience. I for one will continue with petrol car rentals when travelling.
If I buy an EV, I will also be installing an EV charging station in my home that can fully recharge my car overnight. If I am staying at a BNB and I rent an EV, I will need to plug it in with an ordinary extension cord that will fully recharge my EV in a week. There's no way in hell that I would rent an EV. How did they not see this?
TBF, depending on where someone is located, there are charging stations and also charging units at many larger retailer's parking lots. The problem is that charging can take an hour or much longer depending on things like the weather. Also, trusting Tesla was always going to be disastrous. Look at how they mislead people about their "autonomous" driving that has led to several deaths allegedly. (Tesla just settle one suit.)
@@steveb796 "most people drive less than 40 a day", and for those that want to go further, what then? “You can add a 30 amp outlet and charge to full”, and for those that live in apartments with basement parking, what then?
As a Tesla owner for nearly six years, the last thing I want is to rent is an ICEV. Stepping down from a Tesla to the typical combustion rental car is like watching a movie on an 420 line B&W TV after HDTV. Oh, and you might have mentioned that one can still rent a Tesla at Hertz.
Tom never figured out that not all rental locations could support a charging network. They discovered that specific airports, like Newark Airport, had no electrical capability (no excess capacity) to create a super charging network on site. So employees who got electric cars back with almost no charge, they had to drive that car about 15 miles away to get it to be charged again, wasting each employee's time for about 90 minutes to get it close to a 100 percent charge. Renters did not want electric cars going to unfamiliar markets where they did not know where charging stations were. They would run to Avis to get a gas car when Hertz only had EVs. This goes into crashes but really misses the real reasons why this failed - and the WSJ men had no clue how to deal with reality.
Hertz I'm here if you need to hire me as a consultant. When I heard they bought all these electric cars with no infrastructure and it was one of the craziest things I've ever heard. I didn't think it was true
3:42 Referring to cars, you claim that "[Hertz is] ... selling them to private buyers at a profit after all that lovely depreciation has been accounted for". No. Car rental companies do not sell cars at a profit. They do receive revenue from the sale of cars, but this is less than they paid for them. It would be wonderful if the companies could buy the cars, rent them out for 20,000 miles or so and then sell them for more money than they paid for them, but this is obviously not reality.
@@normanstewart7130 My point is that the maker of the video is being misleading by talking about the technical accounting concept of profit on disposal of assets, without looking at the full picture. In technical accounting terms, yes, there may be a non-cash profit upon asset disposal, however this gets sent to the profit and loss account, where it simply ends up netting off against the depreciation expense. For example, I could buy a car for $30,000 and depreciate it in my accounts by $10,000 every year, so that at the end of 3 years it has a book value of $0. If I then sell it at that time for $10,000, I could claim, "I made a profit of $10,000 on this vehicle!". But this would ignore the fact that I would have accounted for $30,000 in depreciation on my profit and loss accounts, and my P&Ls would therefore show a cumulative decrease in profit of $20,000 ($30,000 depreciation - $10,000 paper profit from disposal of the asset) compared with what my P&Ls would have been had I not bought the car. There is no free lunch: in everyday colloquial terms, as well as in cash terms, I would have lost $20,000 on it.
This is an absolute example of bad management. Tesla got nothing to do with Hertz Failure. Hertz didn’t understand the Market of Rental Cars before putting EVs. EV adoption for rental car and for personal usage is all together a different ball game.
NOBODY wants to RENT an EV. difficult to charg, finding new charge stations in unfamiliar locations while staying in places with no chargers. who wants to do that? LOL
The first thing they got wrong was believing that EV's were appreciating assets. The second thing they got wrong was believing EV's were cheaper to own, operate, repair, maintain and insure than ICE cars. In few words, they got Tesla'd.
Wagner & Ohara must have doubled tripled their investments with this scheme. The losers are the investors who believed them and invested in this story.
It boggles my mind that any competent person could think EVs would be good for a rental business. Forget whether they work for a consumer, as a business move it's suicide.
Hybrid was the way to go. They’re now finding the hybrid cars, even though they’re more complex than traditional cars are actually becoming more reliable because most of them are absent of turbo chargers. Additionally, since resale value is a concern, hybrid cars have a higher resale value. Finally, they fueled and operate like traditional cars.
I rented a Tesla for a week on a recent trip to Oakland. it was fantastic, I really enjoyed the vehicle, and did it just to get it out of my system! I’m not buying an EV. BTW, the host of my trip had Love to charger in their garage made the whole experience really good.
I take a more benign view. Hertz gave us a vivid demonstration via its fleet of the reality of EV ownership, or you might say stress-tested the advocacy of government, Tesla and the early adopters. We now know the reality, and rather than saying it has set back EVs, I'd say it has shown us that the present-day EV is an undeveloped product that should not have been brought to the market. So Hertz has done us all a favour. As far as the investors are concerned, they are no more stupid than those who invest in Tesla despite its constant under-delivery relative to is promises, and its tactic of talking-up new products to justify it massive share price.
You would think the top directors would have taken test trips in EVs before deciding to acquire them for their fleet. Then they would have experienced for themselves this utterly absurd waste of time and money.
IF/when batteries are half the weight, fireproof, last 20+ years and deliver a 400-500 mile range on a 10 min. charge, you'll shut up and take my money.
Great summary of what happened to hertz. The only thing I strongly disagree with is the last sentence of the video. Hertz is not responsible for the set back in the EV industry. There are other market and practical reasons the EV market has stalled.
Hertz's problems are REAL problems with EV's. These things losing 70 + % of their value in 2-3 years, and costing a fortune to repair are REAL costs, and I'm very glad I don't own one, and will happily let them depreciate another 70 %, before buying one deeply used.
Yet, we are still being tortured with the uncomfortable Tom Brady commercials with a black woman who just makes them worse. No chemistry at all. They are just weird. Tom should dump his skiing buddy.
Hertz took a different direction in where it thought the market was going. I dont see it as greed, but a risk they accepted for a first mover advantage. The bet didnt payoff, but the company is not bankrupt either. You can make the argument that companies like Blackberry and Sears were too slow to evolve, while Hertz went too quick.
They will continue to sell all of them this year. I now am seeing 2023s with relatively low miles like 35K. Looks like Carvana is an aggressive partner in the process. Carvana will be the biggest recipient as they make fast $5K on each Tesla they take in for their own account. So they will soon be close to the end in a few more months/quarters, but actually are metering them out.
@@mteifke That is funny! Hertz Acquired their cars in 2020-2021. This is from Consumer Report Nov 2021 issue: Consumer Reports Still Ranks Tesla Reliability 27th Out Of 28!
lol hertz didn't set back EV adoption...EVs did that. All the Hertz experiment did was expose the truth. the cars are expensive to repair, expensive to insure, sink like a rock in value, and are a pain in the ass if you don't own your own home and have a charger installed. none of this was new information. this had all been documented, here on youtube, for years by car enthusiasts like Hoovie. what it wasn't, was common knowledge amongst the stupid. now everyone knows they loose range at a horrific rate in the winter, can't be fast charged when cold, are expensive to repair, parts are difficult to obtain and have long lead times, they eat tires (which is the single most expensive maintenance item on a car) . That is why EV sales have plunged off a cliff and Hybrid sales are surging. Hybrids have none of these problems and can be owned by people who rent. Even a toyota rav 4 plug in can be charged over night on a standard 120 v 15 amp outlet. taking one on a road trip they are CHEAPER to refill than fast charging an EV and take fraction of the time. a Camry Hybrid costs less than Tesla 3, is better made, parts are actually available. doesn't blow through tires, and deprecates at a slower rate than a Tesla 3. and the general public has figured that out. anyone remember the iphones? yeah everyone wanted one till they realized they could buy an Andriod phone for less with more features. thats where you are at now with EVs. what i find most interesting is the EV "revolution" there is one btw its just not cars its bikes. sales of ebikes shot up 269% between 2019 and 2022!
"EV revolution" maybe EV reality would be closer to the truth. You can't sell EVs with hours long charge times to people who have minutes to get to their planes.
If consumers weren't used to the better performance of an EV, Hertz could have put them in "Chill" mode, to replicate the sluggish performance of an ICE car.
chill mode is no where near ICE mode, would have little effect on the number of accidents. most people do things with rentals that they would never do with their own vehicle.
At least they were going to have charging stations at the rental outlets. That way you could drive you EV there and plug it in at night. Then of course you would have to get another vehicle to go to your hotel or whatever. The EV industry was a scam from the beginning. Nothing was thought out and they are just trying to force everyone into them. Not efficient and as damaging to the environment, if not more so, than petroleum based vehicles.
That China would initiate a price war which forced Tesla to react, or that the reliability and user friendliness are lacking are problems of EVs which are not their fault. Or that buyers avoid EVs because of the risk the battery poses, which in turn let the prices drop down - along with other issue like charging or the actual costs (from tire higher wear to the insurance) when owning one. The phase of the so called early adopters, often well off people who have the money and look for new ...attractions, is over. EVs were and are not fit for the mass market, and that is not their fault.
I've rented from hertz and I think another thing they screwed around on was shared education to the drivers. I rented a model 3 that the battery broke at 12000 miles probably because the previous driver always charged to 100% and you can't do that.
April 26, 2024: Within the last day or two Hertz announces it will sell another 10,000 Teslas from its fleet. I welcome this news because I normally couldn't afford a used Tesla. This will mean the used ones will certainly drop further. Maybe with six months I can buy a used Model 3 Dual Motor for under $14,000 with less than 100,000 miles. Time will tell. I recently rented a Model 3 from a guy on Turo, It's a fun car and my 817 mile trip went well.