I’ve never fully understood how rental companies manage the risk caused by drivers not having an incentive to treat the vehicles well.
There’s a thousand ways you can incrementally damage a car that cannot be detected until some time in the future.
I guess with rentals some maintenance tasks can at least be handled. I know someone who leased for three years and never got the oil changed until the day before returning it.
I don't want to touch on what I see as a futile debate about whether people are generally better or worse now.
However I do feel the need to point out that there are currently more slaves in the world than at any other time in history. I don't mean in the idomatic sense of wage slavery or anything. I'm talking about literal slavery - forced labor and ownership of people.
Much of the stuff you buy today probably had a slave involved in its production at some point. Corporations say they can't ban slave labour from their supply chain because it's impossible for them to tell what resources had slaves involved in its production. The slave produced supply and legitimate supply of goods is too mixed to adequately track
Fairly certain horse rentals were a thing. Might be a bit of a stretch but post houses would fit the bill [0]. So, this lets us go back to the 2nd century BC. Just need to find some data on renter behavior now.
You should probably get it changed once a year--although it also probably isn't some grave error to let it go a couple years if you haven't been putting a lot of miles on.
OEM maintenance manuals for wvery newish car I had, across miltiple brands, since MY 2008 an initial service interval of 3 years, and then 30,000 km or two years. Yearly oil changes stopped being a thing in the 90s, unless we talk about heavy use and / or harsh environments.
According to my manual (a Hyundai), some of the "severe" usages which suggest a quicker oil change interval are:
- repeated short distance driving
- extended periods of idling or low peed operation
- more than 50% driving in heavy city traffic during hot weather above 90F
If you've got a commute in heavy traffic in a Southern US state or just a really short commute of only a few miles where you're not really getting things well up to temp, its pretty easy to hit these "severe" situations.
I own my car, and that's about how much I drive; less, actually, I think. Not having a daily commute and mostly only using the car for longer trips (I live in a walkable city with decent transit) helps. It's nice to have a lower insurance rate for driving much less, too.
I've considered it might be overall cheaper ditching the car and renting (or ubering, which I do sometimes) when I need one, but I value having the car ready to go at an unplanned moment's notice. And I just prefer having my own car that I'm familiar and comfortable with.
I'm only about 5,000 miles these days and I don't even live in a city. No commute. Don't drive into the city all that often. Take long weekend trips of up to maybe high triple digits miles--but, again, not that frequently.
But absolutely could not live where I do without my own car.
Edit: long perioda of a car not driven has the effect of not all gearbox and enhine parts being lubricated, that has a negative effect on oil as all that corrusion is ending up in the oil. That so has nothing to do with yearly millage, pulling a car out of storage every 11 months to drive 50,000 miles in one go has the same issues, and a lot more on top.
It still does. Especially after heat cycling, and taking on all the garbage that gets past the rings, and all the moisture that collects in the crankcase. Maybe sitting on a shelf is fine, but in the engine it definitely will break down. It lasts longer than conventional but isn't indestructible.
How far in the future? High turnover is priced into rental cars. They normally only last 2-4 years or 25k-40k miles.
Meanwhile, all preventative maintenance (oil, etc.) is trivial to ensure happens on time and problems can be solved earlier because no one has an incentive to ignore the warnings (because a repair would be inconvenient or expensive). And they must get a great deal on replacement parts and mechanic services are no where near retail.
If you're only keeping the car 2-3 years you can get away with pushing the oil change intervals out or skipping some of them and other maintenance. I would not believe that rental companies are strictly following the manufacturers maintenance schedules, when they can save money and not suffer the consequences of deferring maintenance.
They sell the cars when they are done with them, and regular maintenance is monitored by the onboard computer. It would be stupid to save a few dollars to obviously ding the resale value.
Apparently, this is still mostly done via paper records. I believe either electronic or paper records are easy to forge. However, that gets into "technically possible, but unlikely". After all, what you are suggesting is that the Hertz (or other large rental) company, to save a marginal amount of money, will commit widespread fraud and risk the massive lawsuit from faking records and then using those records to convince people to buy cars?
Meanwhile, they risk damage to a car keeping them from renting it out while it's repaired. And the cost of standard maintenance is probably less than they make in the day or two it's out of service.
Resetting the maintenance reminder is a trivial operation (doesn't even require a scan tool, as it's designed to allow people to change their own oil). You should absolutely not trust this.
This article is basically stating the opposite of your intuition. Rideshare drivers are causing much more damage the car renters, so they are taking unexpected losses by using half the EV fleet for rideshare.
How can one fuck a rental car in a way it can be detected only days or weeks later?
Personally I tend to be 10X cautious with a rented car because I never pay for full assurance coverage, because I feel it like being robbed (the same way renting a child's seat makes you feel, I paid more for the seat that for the car itself)
I went to Mexico once, damaged the side of a brand new rental car (big huge dent in the side of the door from a close corner in an alley). Shockingly to me, the repairs (which they estimated and billed me for when I returned the car), were less than the insurance (that I didn't purchase).
Sometimes you can just suck dents out with a, you know, the thing a plumber use in the sink or toilette. Then you repaint the edges of the dent if they are visible.
Underbody damage? On an ice vehicle smashing up the oil pan for instance.
Anecdotally, the folks checking over the vehicle before taking it back also do quite a poor job and miss things. A friend of mine I was helping move put a solid dent in the box of a u-haul and they didn't even notice.
Yeah, it's usually a pretty cursory check. I've definitely had a number of scrapes over the years that weren't major but weren't totally trivial either and they've never been flagged. Right now I'm driving a rental that has some gouges in the paint up front that I had to make sure got added to my rental contract; presumably these were not identified after a prior rental.
It's probably more a cumulative thing. In the western US, for example, there are a lot of bad mountain/desert/etc. roads that are rough on a vehicle, especially basic street cars. I've never taken a rental on a road I wouldn't have taken my own car on but I'm sure I've caused more wear and tear than just driving a car down the highway.
> How can one fuck a rental car in a way it can be detected only days or weeks later?
I used to run 'rental cars' (aka cabs) into the ground on a regular basis just because you're not making any money sitting around waiting on a wrecker. Plus, the company generally didn't fix the cars unless they were towed in, can't even count how many times I'd swap out of a car after telling them what's wrong with it and see a message the next morning about needing a passenger rescue on that car because the mechanics just sent it back out without even looking at it beyond "well, it starts and drives around the yard".
The last cab company I worked for had an unofficial policy (on 'voucher' trips which were billed to insurance companies and whatnot) that if you got the passenger in the car you'd get paid for the trip so if you have a $100+ trip on your screen and the car can somehow limp to the pickup address then this what you do without worrying about what it'll do to the car...
I didn't intentionally tear up the cars but after a while I learned what a Prius could take. No AC in the Arizona summer, straight back to the yard. Car makes a big thumping noise taking off from every stop, probably be OK for a day or two before finding a better car to swap into.
Can't imagine rideshare drivers care any more about the cars than I ever did.
Don't the cars just dial back ignition timing when they detect knock? Unless your car has no ability to dial back, maybe with a custom high-octane tune, regular fuel should still be safe to run.
With modern cars incorrect octane will decrease available power, as the knock detector reduces the spark's advance, but it won't otherwise hurt the engine.
Low-octane gas will cause problems in older carbureted cars, but most cars sold in the last thirty-or-so years will not have this problem.
Certain sports cars with turbos or superchargers mandate 6 month service periods for their engines. And you need to abide to that if you don't wanna void your warranty.
The headline doesn't really match the point of the article, which is that they're using half the vehicles for rideshare, thus causing more wear and tear than a typical rental. Apparently they didn't factor this into their math and had to fess up during their earnings call.
The bigger problem is that their Teslas are so expensive to fix. I suspect a lack of replacement parts and/or qualified techs is to blame. Too bad, because if they had better repairability then Tesla would have a real claim to lowest cost-per-mile.
Interesting - I remember saturn tried very hard to have plastic panels that would be easy to replace, and was ahead of its time with employee relations. I guess it disappeared.
Yep, we rented a Tesla from Hertz during a recent vacation. Took a small pebble in the window causing a 1-inch spider crack on the lower part of it. Over $1200 repair bill sent to us for it, luckily we had insurance through our credit card.
That sounds like a typical price for a dealer-replaced window including sensor calibration. If you're willing to skip calibration, cost is about half that - some people say calibration is not strictly necessary, but it's a safety system, I wanted to make sure it's working.
This is based on getting my 2020 non-EV car's windshield replaced, the local glass shop said they can do calibrations for many cars, but didn't have the right procedures/equipment for my model.
Tesla-sized and shaped glass is not available from general glass shops. I had a large crack appear in mine. My insurance and multiple glass shops in the bay area told me it had to be fixed by Tesla. No one else would be able to.
Tesla did fix it for free though, because they weren't sure it wasn't an installation issue (no impact point, just a hairline crack running down the glass).
The model X’s windshield is massive and very hard to make. Only one OEM supplier in Peru was making it. Model 3s any Ys have more “mass minded” designs, not hard to make by third parties for aftermarket.
I've had some windshields replaced by a friend of mine who runs a business in this domain and the typical cost of the windshields is on the order of 100 to 200 bucks depending on make & model, and about $50 worth of materials to put it all in according to factory spec. He can do one in an hour and a bit and it's very good money if you have a steady stream of work. He also said that if he was better at sourcing he could probably increase his margins quite a bit still but they're already more than good enough. Dealers will be happy to rip you off on stuff like this, shopping around is always smart. Except when the company has a monopoly (such as in the case of Tesla).
Those aftermarket windshield replacements (Safe-Lite, etc.) in my experience (have had a few over the years) always end up leaking. Always. If I had insurance coverage that applied I'd insist on a dealer replacement with OEM seals and glass.
I've yet to have a problem with any of the ones that were replaced, and they're approved as part of the safety structure of the car if glued in place with the right kind of glue and process. Technically it can't really be the windshield that leaks, usually it is a sign of wrong glue or an inappropriate application of the glue or process. This as well as good prepwork are key to an optimal result.
Yes, I meant that the seal eventually leaks and I get rainwater coming in and running down the inside of the glass or at the corners of the windshield.
Crappy operators tend so save on the quality of the adhesive they use, that saves a couple of bucks and looks just the same right after you leave their place of work but it comes back to haunt you in the long run. A 'proper' operator will use the exact same glue as the manufacturer originally used. Another common error is to not properly glean the surfaces the glue will have to bond to both mechanically and from various residue. This can cause the glue simply not to stick at all. The first is greed, the second is usually crappy instruction. The guy I know has worked for manufacturers on mass windshield replacements, so he has done thousands according to manufacturer spec and that makes a big difference in workmanship, but he says that there is no guarantee that a dealer will do a better job, there is the guarantee that if the dealer fucks up you usually get your next replacement for free and some of those window replacement businesses are 'fly by night', the worse the quality the bigger the chance that you will need them to honor their warranty, but also the bigger the chance that they will no longer exist. Insurance companies sometimes work with a bunch of preferred installers. Here in NL besides by friend I've also had reasonably good experiences with Carglass, not all without trouble but they want to stay in business. Over the course of now close to 40 years of driving I've lost a whole stack of windshields, especially near construction zones but the last couple of years have actually been pretty good. I probably shouldn't jinx it though :)
I have an auto glass place I've been using for 20+ years, on the "wrong" side of town. I don't think I've paid more than $200 for the entire job, and none of them have leaked, or are obviously misaligned or anything. And the glass is seemingly as good as the dealer glass when it comes to getting hammered with rocks/etc.
At those prices, I imaging the glass is as you would expect at wholesale not more than $50 or so if they can send me out the door for $140. But its not even really the price that keeps me returning every few years when invariably someone in my family gets a busted windshield, is the fact that I can call them to verify they have the windshield drive over and wait 15 mins in their waiting room and leave with a new windshield.
I have a 2018 Model 3 and the recalibration fee for a replaced windshield is complete BS. The tech that installed my replacement said they should self-recalibrate or I can just press the recalibration button in the service menu, which I did and the car had no issues adjusting.
Safelite wanted to charge ~$500 to press that button. I fortunately went with an OEM installer and although I paid a little more for the windshield, it was less than the cost of a non-oem with the recalibration fee.
Calibration is more than a button press, there's a calibrated target that needs to be set up (and at least some minimal skill in setting up the target correctly). Whether it's worth the $300+ that shops and dealers charge is open to debate, but it's not just a simple button press.
It was for me, and my autopilot functioned without issues after the recalibration period. My M3 windshield was replaced two months ago with a Tesla OEM one. The tech wasn't affiliated with Tesla, but had access to the OEM parts. The windshield was replaced from my garage with me observing the entire time.
To be clear, my experience is with my Model 3, not any other brand or make. I'm not saying other cars can be auto-fixed with a button press here.
Most of the time you can probably get by without any calibration at all, but since each windshield will have slightly different optical characteristics (and maybe it's possible to bump the camera housing and move it during uninstall/reinstall), if you want lane keeping and other safety features to work as well as possible, you need the calibration.
I suspect that if you were in an accident and tried to blame Tesla's autopilot or other automation for not working, they'll come back with "We have no record of recalibration when the windshield was replaced, we cannot be responsible for safety features with an uncalibrated camera system"
I don't think autopilot works if the cameras are not calibrated. I had to also drive a certain set of miles for it to operate again.
Your response corresponds to a lot of research I did on if I had to pay the recalibration fee or not (when I initially got a quote from Safelite) - the consensus online is mixed, but I'm speaking from my own personal experience here that I did not require recalibration tooling other than to press the recalibrate service button after my windshield was replaced and drove 20-30 miles before autopilot would be re-enabled again.
Although these are Model Y instructions, they pretty much reflect the experience I had:
The document does mention "Contact Tesla only if your Model Y has not completed the calibration process after driving 100 miles (160 km) in the described conditions.", which probably means you would need external hardware calibration tooling because it couldn't auto-calibrate.
This exact same thing happened to me in Hertz Las Vegas (except it was just under a $900 bill... I also had insurance though a credit card)
Whatever rock it was, it was large enough to make a loud noise. But I still was surprised at how much of a crack it made. My personal vehicle (BMW) which I've driven over 200x as much has never taken that level of windshield damage on similar roads with occasional rocks.
I looked carefully at the Tesla windshield afterwards and had the OEM mark on it, so it didn't appear to be a case where Hertz had already replaced the windshield with a cheaper aftermarket one (like I'd initially suspected).
Also, Hertz bought a fuckton of these things before Tesla did some fairly dramatic price drops. They basically doubled their depreciation hit right from that alone before you throw in the rideshare driver population /and/ price them low enough to make them attractive over a shitty econobox attracting... econobox driving behavior in a vehicle with expensive repairs and limited parts availability leading to the fleet being constantly downed for repair.
How is that possible? They make money on buying new cars in bulk and then selling them as used cars? I’m struggling to understand how flipping a depreciating asset is a profit center.
A technicality perhaps? Like if say they buy $40k cars, depreciate it to $30k but earn $20k from rentals. Technically they got most of their money from selling the car used but it still ultimately works only because they are able to rent it out for more than the depreciation cost.
Consider that normally rental car companies get steep discounts on their bulk buys. They didn’t with their Tesla order which further hurts them. But, here is the overly simplified normal math:
(Resale Price + Rental Income - Maintenance - Purchase Price) / 2 years
Trick is that they generally flip these vehicles after 2 years and upsell an auto warranty which a big profit center as well. Resale price tanks and there goes all their profit.
Normally, they do this with sweetheart backroom deals with the manufacturer for a fleet of cars.
It can be lucrative, I recall the manufacturers put terms in the contract that prevent them from selling cars with less than a certain number of miles, to prevent them from just selling the cars immediately at a profit.
However with Telsa I don't think they had a negotiated price.
Too bad, because EV rentals directly lead to sales.
Ask any EV owner, and they will probably have dozens of conversations with non-owners who think it is impractical and would not fit in their life. But put them into an EV and many of these roadblocks evaporate.
> Too bad, because EV rentals directly lead to sales.
Yea, no. Electric cars are the cheapest option in most rental fleets because demand is tiny, compared to ICE. The rental EV experience is terrible, primarily because, unlike owners, renters don't have a home/garage charger they can rely on. Instead you have to hope that the hotel you're at has a charger, that it works, that it's compatible, that it won't take too long, that there isn't someone else using it. And if you don't return the car 80-90% charged, you pay a fee that's more expensive than filling a typical tank with gasoline!
Electric "floating" rental cars work very nicely. In many European cities there are fleets of rental EVs which you unlock with a smartphone. The cost is per-minute, or you can prepay a longer time, like a day.
I typically use them for moving bulky stuff around the city and small day trips outside the city.
There's a 20 minute free credit for ending the trip at a slow charger which is usually easy to do and means the cars are usually close to fully charged.
(I still wouldn't want a surprise EV from a normal rental company.)
That article talks about an unexpected EV rental experience. I would agree with the author.
A person renting an EV to try it on for size would have a different mindset. Also if you rent an ev through hertz, they bombard you with FAQ emails before your rental.
The article also was a chevy bolt. I think renting a tesla is a different experience than ccs/chademo because the supercharger network is well thought out with lots of locations with many many stalls, and it is well integrated into the nav system.
> The article also was a chevy bolt. I think renting a tesla is a different experience
Did the OP say "Tesla rentals directly lead to sales."? No, he or she said "EV rentals directly lead to sales."
They also didn't say "expected rentals only", and I can speak from experience that Hertz is not notifying renters that reserved ICE cars are oversold and upon arrival, your options are either EV or walking.
That article is moot if you rent a Tesla. I've done a 2000 km (1200 mi) roadtrip with a rented Tesla, and never actually charged at any hotel. You just navigate to your destination, and every now and then, the navigation tells you to stop at a supercharger.
However, the point of the article may still stand if you do not drive a Tesla.
And how long were each of these stops? How frequently did you stop? Were they never occupied? It's one thing to take a leisurely road trip with lots of time for sightseeing, no rush to get anywhere. It's a whole different experience, for example, when you land in some city to go to someone's wedding or a national park and you're stuck at a charger for an hour or more and end up late to your destination, or maybe you make it initially but don't have the range to get back. There are a million potential problems and just because YOU once did a long chill road trip where you weren't watching the clock or had to be somewhere at a specific time, hardly makes the problem "moot."
And when the rental car springs a surprise EV on you, you don't get to pick the brand.
One thing I've noticed about Tesla's driving around southern california... a significant number of them look damaged. I can't tell if this is because they aren't easily repaired or if people who drive them are worse at driving.
They seen to have highly optimized manufacturing over repair. Since tesla sells auto insurance for their cars, I wonder how that compares and handles repairability. I've had a few problems with my tesla that were fortunately not hard to repair. Someone clipped the front of mine in a parking lot and partly ripped off the right edge. I had to wait a month before the repair place got the parts but it was driveable. I had a few other minor things that were just typical drop offs.
On the glass repair someone complains about $1200, glass is just expensive for front windshield. I have a non-tesla that got hit by multiple rocks and cost $2400. $2400! It was an electric pickup truck. Insurance paid for almost all. Then on my tesla, last year a huge rock hit the windshield, that cost about $1200 too.
I paid $300 to get my last windshield replaced. But I have an older car and no bullshit sensors that justify jacking up the price.
I _hate_ newer vehicles. So much fluff and I can't disable 3/4 of it.
I drove a newer Ford Escape that had a broken sensor somewhere. It has a feature called "adaptive cruise control" where it detects the distance between the driver and the car in front of them, and adjusts the spacing accordingly. It uses a sensor of some sort to accomplish this feat.
A related sensor stopped working so, naturally it reverted to the regular kind of cruise control right? Wrong! Because the feature for the adaptive cruise control stopped working, it disabled ALL cruise control functionality.
And don't even get me started on the fucking spyware built into that vehicle (and other newer ones).
Absolutely! Newer cars are a tech nightmare. I'm much happier keeping older vehicles on the road than even considering the issues on newer ones. The problem for me now is that if I don't do all the work myself, it is getting harder and harder to schedule a mechanic to do it. Everyone is booked up and I keep getting the impression they generally don't charge enough to feel like they are making good money even at crazy high rates. It's a west coast thing with the incredibly high cost of living.
> Because the feature for the adaptive cruise control stopped working, it disabled ALL cruise control functionality.
Better be thankful that you could still drive :-)
Failure modes seem to have gotten so much worse during softwareization. I suppose it's something about software culture and the expectation of "that can't happen" and expecting fixes to be simple ("if this happened they'd just have to re-install").
One example that comes to my mind often since I learned about it is the Subaru module that would drain cars' batteries because it got stuck in a re-connect loop, costing many millions in repairs, brand damage and "inconvenience" (it literally bricked the car). It could all have been avoided by thinking about failure modes for a few seconds, yet the software team (likely one tired guy in the middle of the night) didn't.
This is an excellent point. Rivian didn't have a "basic cruise control" without the following feature that adjusted speed, but they later added the basic/dumb cruise mode.
Failure modes are definitely an afterthought for new gen cars with the fancy sensors - I think it's a problem with gas and electric cars.
My parent’s waited 12+ months for a replacement bumper for their Tesla. They eventually decided to just trade it in for a new SUV. My dad is the kind of man who takes excellent care of things, and keeps vehicles in perfect condition.
If Tesla was able to provide the replacement parts I imagine they would have kept the car, but the waiting and poor communication from Tesla was the deciding factor to go back to a SUV.
I thought Tesla's strategy was getting autopilot to the point that their cars would be utilized more hours in the day, essentially like these Hertz Teslas have been used. But apparently they can't stand up to that amount of use?
> Uber drivers also tend to drive their vehicles into the ground. This higher rate of utilization can lead to a lot of damage
It's not just the "utilization rate", Ubers have to go everywhere. Imagine what your own car would look like if you spent a month driving to random addresses. The Uber heatmap of a city probably covers its worst-maintained roads, on days with the worst weather.
> But Uber drivers also tend to drive their vehicles into the ground. This higher rate of utilization can lead to a lot of damage — certainly more than Hertz was anticipating.
I'm mainly curious how Hertz got this so wrong.
They must have gathered some kinds of stats on Tesla repair rates per mile driven -- why did the math turn out to be wrong? Does driving an EV 10,000 miles over the course of a month damage it far more than driving 10,000 miles over the course of a year?
Or if they knew there were big unknowns, I'm surprised Hertz didn't or wasn't able to offset a lot of the risk of higher damage rates to Tesla as part of a fixed-fee maintenance contract or something.
There's always the possibility that a low-level analyst just messed up their spreadsheet, but it's hard to believe that passed executive review. When a team pitches their proposal to the execs, it's precisely the execs' job to look at the slides and challenge each and every number and say "hey wait a minute, these numbers for wear-and-tear seem in line with historical, but two slides ago you said 50% of the fleet will be for rideshare." If they missed it, that would be a gigantic failure of management.
Hertz is the original meme stock, meming its way out of bankruptcy.
Its not about being wrong, its about doing things that get investors to pump money into your company. Tesla is meme-adjacent and Hertz knew that making headlines with Tesla would attract investors.
Now that Hertz lost money, its not their problem. Its their investor's problem. Or perhaps more accurately: its not the Board of Directors or CEO's problem that Hertz lost money per se, they did what they set out to do (ie: sell Hertz stock during a difficult time and raise money). All the Hertz shareholders who have lost real value are... well... that's the shareholder's problem now.
It’s possible the driving habits in a rental Tesla are unique as well. There’s already the general principle, “Don’t be gentle on a rental”, but perhaps the novelty of an electric car with a unique pedal system (compared to a gas vehicle) leads to more aggressive driving?
> Does driving an EV 10,000 miles over the course of a month damage it far more than driving 10,000 miles over the course of a year?
Assuming 10,000 miles over a 30 day month, driving every day that's over 300 miles per day. That's pushing the limit of the range if not more, so they are fully cycling the battery every day. That's not good for battery life.
> They must have gathered some kinds of stats on Tesla repair rates per mile driven
I mean - would they?
Tesla is famously secretive about defects, not putting anything in writing to customers and asking them to sign NDAs - so I doubt Tesla is handing out honest numbers to potential partners.
And even if they ran a small-scale trial before making a big purchase, there's a lot of ways a small trial can accidentally be unrepresentative.
Well that's what I'm saying -- if they couldn't, they should have negotiated a fixed-price maintenance contract.
That's what companies do when one can't trust the other -- they hold the manufacturer responsible for the cost of repairs/replacements rather than doing it themselves. And if a manufacturer refuses to agree at a reasonable rate, you don't do the deal because that's a huge red flag the numbers are dishonest.
That's very cute of you to blame "a low-level analyst." The Tesla deal was executive hubris -- an activist CEO (INTERIM CEO at that) of a ruined global company in bankruptcy trying to make a name for himself by swinging for the fences.
Employees could have produced piles of documentation and analytics predicting massive losses, low demand, high repair costs, whatever, none of that would have changed his mind. Because of that, it's more than likely there was no analysis whatsoever. This was not an analytically-driven decision, it was an impulse buy.
Electric vehicles are now mainstream, and we've only just begun to see rising global demand and interest," Hertz interim CEO Mark Fields said in a statement.
> The Tesla deal was executive hubris -- an activist CEO (INTERIM CEO at that) of a ruined global company in bankruptcy trying to make a name for himself by swinging for the fences.
I was with you all the way until you revealed that it was Mark Fields. The guy that saved Mazda, turned around Aston Martin, Land Rover, and then Ford; responsible for making sure the Mustang Mach-E was produced, and then retired after decades in the auto industry.
They dragged him out of a very rich retirement, and he certainly made the mistake that Teslas are cheap/easy to operate at scale. But trying to make a name for himself - definitely not.
During Fields’ tenure as Ford CEO from 2014-17, Ford’s stock declined by about 40 percent
During his tenure at Ford, he refused to relocate his family from South Florida to the region. Instead, he initially used Ford’s corporate jet to be with them every weekend. The disclosure sparked a furor, given that Ford was ailing at the time
Fields was forced out in 2017 in the wake of Ford’s more than five percent decline in car sales.
Sounds like a guy whose reputation had been tarnished, now taking advantage of a new, unexpected opportunity as CEO to re-establish it by making big, headline moves in a short time with someone else's money.
But whatever your opinion of him, an experienced, longtime executive tasked with making big turnaround moves strengthens the hypothesis that the Tesla decision was a CEO mandate without any analysis or discussion or opposition voices tolerated.
Seems obvious that taxis are used heavily through the day. As rentals probably have more down time either by not being rented out or just sitting in parking lots when people renting them are doing something else. And long distance travel is less wear.
It probably varies a lot. As others are noting, there's a meme that people are rough on rentals. On the other hand, as you say, it's also pretty common to get a rental because distances are far/you need enough local transport that an Uber isn't really practical but in practice the car sits at the resort/conference hotel most of the week. That's been my situation this week.
I have a lot of friends, particularly women and men with lower incomes that rent cars for any longer distance travel. I think because the true cost and risk factor is much lower. If your beater breaks down 200 miles from home you're in a real pickle if you can't just throw money around to make the problem go away. And women in particular don't want to be stuck on the side of the road somewhere strange.
I bring it up because I see complaints from people with money that EV's don't fill their use cases 100%. No offense it's a privileged position. Where you spend an extra $10-20k for a car that does everything you might want just to ditch the inconvenience of renting something for that last 5% use case.
I don't know how common it is but I got rid of a (second) car a few years back that I wouldn't have trusted for a several hundred mile road trip into the mountains--and I could, if push came to shove, have paid for a long transport from the side of the road. But it could have been a real pain.
As it was I just drove it locally but I wasn't doing that enough to justify the cost given lack of commute even before pandemic.
I don’t understand why they had to go with Tesla and Polestar. It’s not really the issue with EV ambition but because Teslas are expensive to fix. Plenty of other EVs out there.
I rented an EV at hertz in Nashville recently. I ended up with a Model Y, but they had hyundai, Kias, Polestars, some Chevy Bolts all available for renting.
Recently was at Baltimore Washington Airport and rented a Tesla Model Y from Hertz.
The ordeals began long before we arrived at BWI.
I forget the reason now, but I didn't trust Hertz with the reservation for the Y. Even though the site said yes we have them and your Y reservation is GUARANTEED! It was weird because the Y was cheaper than renting a 3. And something just didn't seem right. So I was determined to call. I didn't know their number so I went to their website.
Hertz's website was full of problems, like, no way to find out the phone number for customer service. If you clicked on the Contact Us page, it led to some customer-avoidance links like most companies nowadays have, where, here, talk to our useless bot, or here, peruse our Knowledge Base, or here, read our FAQ, but no phone number. And when you finally found a link to a phone number and clicked it, you wound up at a 404 Not Found page. (I finally got the number from Google.)
When I talked to a human at Hertz I asked to double-check on the Y reservation. They said oh yes, all is good, you're all set, yadda yadda.
Day we arrive, big long line at the Hertz counter. One employee behind the counter (this counter is like a football field's width wide, with workstations every few feet, so they could easily fit 25 employees each taking a customer. But no. One.) We eventually get to the employee. I give my name, tell them I'm here to pick up the Y.
Sorry sir, there's no reservation here for a Y. Let me check something. She then walks away. A minute goes by. Two minutes. Five. Ten. Suddenly some dude in a Hertz uniform comes out. Obviously the bearer of bad news.
Sorry sir, we have no Model Ys. Well we have 25 of them but none of them are available, they're all at the Tesla shop and we don't know when they will be available.
But, you guys said yesterday on the phone that yes my Y was guaranteed, reservation is all set, all is good, etc.
Sorry sir, no Ys. We have plenty of 3s though.
Crap, I didn't want a 3, but we decided to take the 3. That took the employee 15 more minutes to process at the computer. HUGE LINE now backed up behind us, while this guy takes his sweet old time finishing what should have been a 30-second task. Finally we're told where to go in the epically vast parking garage for the car. It's in spot number 325 or something. We look on the ground . . . we're at like spot number 1, 2, 3 . . . we keep walking, we cannot find the car.
I ask a Hertz employee, where would spot 325 be? He looks at me like I'm an idiot, and responds in a tone he reserves for people he thinks are idiots: it's next to 324, right over there, and I'm looking and I only see spots in the 200s. Employee mutters "what an idiot" or something and walks away.
We eventually find the 3, among many 3s, at the extreme far end of this garage that is easily the size of an airport hangar that could fit a dozen 747s.
We get in, and it's the first time I've driven a 3... even though I'd driven an S for ten years. Tiny car in comparison, everything on this little toy screen (compared to the mighty S's) and in a different place.
We thought, we've had a Tesla for ten years, and we're not quite sure where all the settings are. What about brand-new customers who've never driven a Tesla or even an EV before?
The entire customer experience at Hertz was F-A-I-L. Just terrible. It's like the workers hate the cars. And I can imagine Tesla's service is a total nightmare for Hertz as a fleet owner.
Tesla doesn't get customer experience either. Hertz has become so awful (at least the BWI Hertz) we can't imagine renting from them again.
I think there's blame all around.
Do better Enterprise, Budget, Avis, etc. Somebody, do better.
> That took the employee 15 more minutes to process at the computer.
I've always wondered what kind of software they're running on those terminals. It's like the employee is trying to hack into the mainframe, and manually execute some SQL queries.
Have you tried Turo? I’ve rented several Teslas on there in different cities and I’ve never had any issues. With remote unlock you don’t need to sync up with a person, they just leave it at the airport. People culture feels like early AirBNB still. Way better than normal rental companies. (Kind of expensive though)
Interesting. I called my insurance company before using Turo for the first time and my understanding was that they said it was covered. Wonder if something has changed, or I misunderstood, or it may vary a lot between insurance providers.
The other problem is they stocked on on Teslas on near-peak pricing and now the cars are depreciating extra fast due to price drops and used market softening due to rates. I believe they've taken some paper losses marking their inventory to their resale value.
Teslas are fairly low maintenance but still above average repair cost for sure.
Related issue is parts & service backlog means above average time a Tesla rental may be out of service. There are notorious stories in Tesla forums of many many month waits for repairs after seemingly non catastrophic accidents.
Oof since everyone is giving their Tesla experiences I'll share mine.
I got my P3D in Oct 2018 and it got bumper damage a couple months later because of a distracted driver. My car was in the shop for almost 1.5 months and the total cost was around 5.7k USD.
Thankfully insurance covered all of it and I didn't pay anything out of pocket. However, it just shows these cars are very tech-heavy and the cost of sensors and supply chain issues add up.
For me as a individual it wasn't a big deal that my car was in the shop waiting for parts shipments - I had a second car. For a business that invested in these cars having fixed assets collecting dust waiting for parts sounds like a nightmare scenario! Sure they have other cars too, but it is different scenario for them.
I still think the Tesla was a fine car especially with all the tech. Maybe not the nicest car interior and issues wise (panel gaps galore), but fun to just kick the accelerator in and SCREAM! In 2018/2019 it felt really special. Now, I feel like every 3rd car is a Tesla (I live in California) so it isn't as special anymore but that's a good thing! I sold mine a couple years ago, and looking forward to what new innovation we get in the EV space next.
This brings up an interesting insurance debate. On one hand, you should have the right to drive around whatever expensive-to-fix car you want and be entitled to not getting hit, or at least reimbursed if you do. On the other, this doesn't set up good incentives. You have less skin in the game when it comes to repairs, so that's not a factor you look for when buying a car. The at-fault party's insurance should only be responsible for the repair cost of a median car with similar damage?
That makes no sense to me either. Shitty cars could look for accidents to get above-average payouts and thrn, while this sucks, people tend to be more careful around more expensive things. Your way has everyone treating a $150,000 sports car like a 'median sedan' when it comes to caution.
Not such case. It's expensive to repair, but it's paid by insurance. So people are okay to buy good but expensive to repair car. It's not great for society.
That's funny, growing up in a family that drove beaters the expensive cars are the one you can bully a little because you have so much less to lose than they do. My insurance policy covers up to 500k so it's all the same to me, but that limited edition bmw hot pepper amg s-class is your baby and so what are you gonna do, hit me?
It's the OG version of bully the self-driving car because they'll flinch long before you do.
> are the one you can bully a little because you have so much less to lose than they do
I too grew up in a family with beaters. But I have a more richer friend who has some road rage in his nicer car. I've heard him "wish they would hit me" when angry because they have full coverage and no worries of a replacement car - those with a beater and worse insurance have to be extra careful since they don't easily have a replacement.
I also independently landed on the notion that damages liability should be capped to a median car with similar damage. Beyond that the costs are on you / your insurer.
Though generally in tort you take your victim like you find them... and there are good reasons for that.
A counter would i can go intentionally smash up some other rich guys fancy car and only be on the hook for the cost to fix up a median car. If I've a vindictive rich guy myself, then perhaps that's a good deal. A balancing fix would be median liability unless you can show the damage was intentional and malicious, but then that's inviting everyone to endlessly litigate about intent.
There are lots of other compromises possible, e.g. only liable for x% of the amount past the median, which I think would still be strictly better than the current situation.
In Germany all car models are classified based on current accident and insurance payout statistics for the last three years, and that classification is one of the factors determining how much you need to pay for your insurance. So if you drive a model of car that is expensive to fix and/or frequently involved in accidents, you need to pay more.
All of this - all of this - is because Telsa has failed so far at service and repair.
They have optimized their factories for assembly, but service, spare parts, and repair parts are overwhelmed. They have also been hesitant to develop 3rd party repair options, so the situation is similar to apple phone/computer 3rd party repair.
I got a Tesla at hertz and it cost me more in charging costs then it would have cost me in gas ... and they gave me a Tesla when I asked for the smallest gas car.... still happy they did because it has great acceleration, but thats the only reason I like Teslas... but fuck charging if you cant charge at home
I ordered the smallest ICE possible at Boston Logan a couple of weeks ago from Hertz. There wasn't anything but electrics (in this case, a Volt) so I took it because I was eager to go visit my uncle in CT.
Huge mistake. Like my last electric rental, in Northern California, over half the chargers I tried to charge at were out of order for some reason. All the charging station apps suck, and there's like one super charging station on I-95 in between CT and Boston. The drive back took three hours because I was super careful to keep the charge in green. Just as I entered the Boston tunnel, the car went into "limited propulsion mode."
Next time, I'm just going to uber everywhere and cancel long drive plans if I have to get an electric.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadThere’s a thousand ways you can incrementally damage a car that cannot be detected until some time in the future.
I guess with rentals some maintenance tasks can at least be handled. I know someone who leased for three years and never got the oil changed until the day before returning it.
This is pretty easily detectable with modern ECUs.
„Don’t be gentle it’s a rental“
Everybody drives their car as if they stole them.
However I do feel the need to point out that there are currently more slaves in the world than at any other time in history. I don't mean in the idomatic sense of wage slavery or anything. I'm talking about literal slavery - forced labor and ownership of people.
Much of the stuff you buy today probably had a slave involved in its production at some point. Corporations say they can't ban slave labour from their supply chain because it's impossible for them to tell what resources had slaves involved in its production. The slave produced supply and legitimate supply of goods is too mixed to adequately track
Some reading to get started
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
Also genocide was very prevalent in the 20th century probably more than at any other time
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_house_(historical_build...
Hertz works by flipping cars every few years (2-3, depending on mileage) and post rental inspections for obvious damage. It's not too complicated.
Your daily communte is not heavy use, unless it is through Sahara or something...
- repeated short distance driving
- extended periods of idling or low peed operation
- more than 50% driving in heavy city traffic during hot weather above 90F
If you've got a commute in heavy traffic in a Southern US state or just a really short commute of only a few miles where you're not really getting things well up to temp, its pretty easy to hit these "severe" situations.
I've considered it might be overall cheaper ditching the car and renting (or ubering, which I do sometimes) when I need one, but I value having the car ready to go at an unplanned moment's notice. And I just prefer having my own car that I'm familiar and comfortable with.
But absolutely could not live where I do without my own car.
Edit: long perioda of a car not driven has the effect of not all gearbox and enhine parts being lubricated, that has a negative effect on oil as all that corrusion is ending up in the oil. That so has nothing to do with yearly millage, pulling a car out of storage every 11 months to drive 50,000 miles in one go has the same issues, and a lot more on top.
Yes, is recommended to change oil each 12 months at least
Meanwhile, all preventative maintenance (oil, etc.) is trivial to ensure happens on time and problems can be solved earlier because no one has an incentive to ignore the warnings (because a repair would be inconvenient or expensive). And they must get a great deal on replacement parts and mechanic services are no where near retail.
So is there a way for the prospective buyer to query this log?
And can't it be marked as done without doing the work?
Meanwhile, they risk damage to a car keeping them from renting it out while it's repaired. And the cost of standard maintenance is probably less than they make in the day or two it's out of service.
Fake the maintenance documentation, not so much?
Personally I tend to be 10X cautious with a rented car because I never pay for full assurance coverage, because I feel it like being robbed (the same way renting a child's seat makes you feel, I paid more for the seat that for the car itself)
Anecdotally, the folks checking over the vehicle before taking it back also do quite a poor job and miss things. A friend of mine I was helping move put a solid dent in the box of a u-haul and they didn't even notice.
I used to run 'rental cars' (aka cabs) into the ground on a regular basis just because you're not making any money sitting around waiting on a wrecker. Plus, the company generally didn't fix the cars unless they were towed in, can't even count how many times I'd swap out of a car after telling them what's wrong with it and see a message the next morning about needing a passenger rescue on that car because the mechanics just sent it back out without even looking at it beyond "well, it starts and drives around the yard".
The last cab company I worked for had an unofficial policy (on 'voucher' trips which were billed to insurance companies and whatnot) that if you got the passenger in the car you'd get paid for the trip so if you have a $100+ trip on your screen and the car can somehow limp to the pickup address then this what you do without worrying about what it'll do to the car...
I didn't intentionally tear up the cars but after a while I learned what a Prius could take. No AC in the Arizona summer, straight back to the yard. Car makes a big thumping noise taking off from every stop, probably be OK for a day or two before finding a better car to swap into.
Can't imagine rideshare drivers care any more about the cars than I ever did.
Low-octane gas will cause problems in older carbureted cars, but most cars sold in the last thirty-or-so years will not have this problem.
Usually yes.
Certain sports cars with turbos or superchargers mandate 6 month service periods for their engines. And you need to abide to that if you don't wanna void your warranty.
This is a scam by the auto industry.
If they hadn't set prices to account for that risk, the rental companies would have all gone bankrupt decades ago.
https://github.com/teslamotors/fleet-telemetry/blob/main/pro...
The bigger problem is that their Teslas are so expensive to fix. I suspect a lack of replacement parts and/or qualified techs is to blame. Too bad, because if they had better repairability then Tesla would have a real claim to lowest cost-per-mile.
Tesla has a first mover advantage, but the “sensor integrated parts” has been tested and failed already.
This is based on getting my 2020 non-EV car's windshield replaced, the local glass shop said they can do calibrations for many cars, but didn't have the right procedures/equipment for my model.
Tesla did fix it for free though, because they weren't sure it wasn't an installation issue (no impact point, just a hairline crack running down the glass).
At those prices, I imaging the glass is as you would expect at wholesale not more than $50 or so if they can send me out the door for $140. But its not even really the price that keeps me returning every few years when invariably someone in my family gets a busted windshield, is the fact that I can call them to verify they have the windshield drive over and wait 15 mins in their waiting room and leave with a new windshield.
Safelite wanted to charge ~$500 to press that button. I fortunately went with an OEM installer and although I paid a little more for the windshield, it was less than the cost of a non-oem with the recalibration fee.
To be clear, my experience is with my Model 3, not any other brand or make. I'm not saying other cars can be auto-fixed with a button press here.
I suspect that if you were in an accident and tried to blame Tesla's autopilot or other automation for not working, they'll come back with "We have no record of recalibration when the windshield was replaced, we cannot be responsible for safety features with an uncalibrated camera system"
Your response corresponds to a lot of research I did on if I had to pay the recalibration fee or not (when I initially got a quote from Safelite) - the consensus online is mixed, but I'm speaking from my own personal experience here that I did not require recalibration tooling other than to press the recalibrate service button after my windshield was replaced and drove 20-30 miles before autopilot would be re-enabled again.
Although these are Model Y instructions, they pretty much reflect the experience I had:
https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/diy/modely/en_us/GUID-...
The document does mention "Contact Tesla only if your Model Y has not completed the calibration process after driving 100 miles (160 km) in the described conditions.", which probably means you would need external hardware calibration tooling because it couldn't auto-calibrate.
Whatever rock it was, it was large enough to make a loud noise. But I still was surprised at how much of a crack it made. My personal vehicle (BMW) which I've driven over 200x as much has never taken that level of windshield damage on similar roads with occasional rocks.
I looked carefully at the Tesla windshield afterwards and had the OEM mark on it, so it didn't appear to be a case where Hertz had already replaced the windshield with a cheaper aftermarket one (like I'd initially suspected).
Rental car companies make their money on re-sales. That is their margin. If the new equivalent drops in price, the margin is gone.
2. Rent the depreciating asset to cover the cost of depreciation.
3. Insurance/financialization
(Resale Price + Rental Income - Maintenance - Purchase Price) / 2 years
Trick is that they generally flip these vehicles after 2 years and upsell an auto warranty which a big profit center as well. Resale price tanks and there goes all their profit.
This would also link into their "extra damage" problem.
It’s kind of disappointing if they are getting noticeably beat up after a year.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/business-lifestyle-travel-car-ren... [2] https://electrek.co/2023/02/08/hertz-half-massive-tesla-orde...
It can be lucrative, I recall the manufacturers put terms in the contract that prevent them from selling cars with less than a certain number of miles, to prevent them from just selling the cars immediately at a profit.
However with Telsa I don't think they had a negotiated price.
Too bad, because EV rentals directly lead to sales.
Ask any EV owner, and they will probably have dozens of conversations with non-owners who think it is impractical and would not fit in their life. But put them into an EV and many of these roadblocks evaporate.
Yea, no. Electric cars are the cheapest option in most rental fleets because demand is tiny, compared to ICE. The rental EV experience is terrible, primarily because, unlike owners, renters don't have a home/garage charger they can rely on. Instead you have to hope that the hotel you're at has a charger, that it works, that it's compatible, that it won't take too long, that there isn't someone else using it. And if you don't return the car 80-90% charged, you pay a fee that's more expensive than filling a typical tank with gasoline!
This author nails it: https://archive.ph/yFwEo
I typically use them for moving bulky stuff around the city and small day trips outside the city.
There's a 20 minute free credit for ending the trip at a slow charger which is usually easy to do and means the cars are usually close to fully charged.
(I still wouldn't want a surprise EV from a normal rental company.)
A person renting an EV to try it on for size would have a different mindset. Also if you rent an ev through hertz, they bombard you with FAQ emails before your rental.
The article also was a chevy bolt. I think renting a tesla is a different experience than ccs/chademo because the supercharger network is well thought out with lots of locations with many many stalls, and it is well integrated into the nav system.
Did the OP say "Tesla rentals directly lead to sales."? No, he or she said "EV rentals directly lead to sales."
They also didn't say "expected rentals only", and I can speak from experience that Hertz is not notifying renters that reserved ICE cars are oversold and upon arrival, your options are either EV or walking.
However, the point of the article may still stand if you do not drive a Tesla.
And when the rental car springs a surprise EV on you, you don't get to pick the brand.
Probably don't want to shoot their premiums considering how expensive the insurance for them already is.
On the glass repair someone complains about $1200, glass is just expensive for front windshield. I have a non-tesla that got hit by multiple rocks and cost $2400. $2400! It was an electric pickup truck. Insurance paid for almost all. Then on my tesla, last year a huge rock hit the windshield, that cost about $1200 too.
I _hate_ newer vehicles. So much fluff and I can't disable 3/4 of it.
I drove a newer Ford Escape that had a broken sensor somewhere. It has a feature called "adaptive cruise control" where it detects the distance between the driver and the car in front of them, and adjusts the spacing accordingly. It uses a sensor of some sort to accomplish this feat.
A related sensor stopped working so, naturally it reverted to the regular kind of cruise control right? Wrong! Because the feature for the adaptive cruise control stopped working, it disabled ALL cruise control functionality.
And don't even get me started on the fucking spyware built into that vehicle (and other newer ones).
Better be thankful that you could still drive :-)
Failure modes seem to have gotten so much worse during softwareization. I suppose it's something about software culture and the expectation of "that can't happen" and expecting fixes to be simple ("if this happened they'd just have to re-install").
One example that comes to my mind often since I learned about it is the Subaru module that would drain cars' batteries because it got stuck in a re-connect loop, costing many millions in repairs, brand damage and "inconvenience" (it literally bricked the car). It could all have been avoided by thinking about failure modes for a few seconds, yet the software team (likely one tired guy in the middle of the night) didn't.
Failure modes are definitely an afterthought for new gen cars with the fancy sensors - I think it's a problem with gas and electric cars.
/oblig :-D
If Tesla was able to provide the replacement parts I imagine they would have kept the car, but the waiting and poor communication from Tesla was the deciding factor to go back to a SUV.
It's not just the "utilization rate", Ubers have to go everywhere. Imagine what your own car would look like if you spent a month driving to random addresses. The Uber heatmap of a city probably covers its worst-maintained roads, on days with the worst weather.
*yes I'm sure there are some HN types who will claim they do.
:)
I'm mainly curious how Hertz got this so wrong.
They must have gathered some kinds of stats on Tesla repair rates per mile driven -- why did the math turn out to be wrong? Does driving an EV 10,000 miles over the course of a month damage it far more than driving 10,000 miles over the course of a year?
Or if they knew there were big unknowns, I'm surprised Hertz didn't or wasn't able to offset a lot of the risk of higher damage rates to Tesla as part of a fixed-fee maintenance contract or something.
There's always the possibility that a low-level analyst just messed up their spreadsheet, but it's hard to believe that passed executive review. When a team pitches their proposal to the execs, it's precisely the execs' job to look at the slides and challenge each and every number and say "hey wait a minute, these numbers for wear-and-tear seem in line with historical, but two slides ago you said 50% of the fleet will be for rideshare." If they missed it, that would be a gigantic failure of management.
Its not about being wrong, its about doing things that get investors to pump money into your company. Tesla is meme-adjacent and Hertz knew that making headlines with Tesla would attract investors.
Now that Hertz lost money, its not their problem. Its their investor's problem. Or perhaps more accurately: its not the Board of Directors or CEO's problem that Hertz lost money per se, they did what they set out to do (ie: sell Hertz stock during a difficult time and raise money). All the Hertz shareholders who have lost real value are... well... that's the shareholder's problem now.
Let's see them meme their way out of that one now.
It’s possible the driving habits in a rental Tesla are unique as well. There’s already the general principle, “Don’t be gentle on a rental”, but perhaps the novelty of an electric car with a unique pedal system (compared to a gas vehicle) leads to more aggressive driving?
What's the fastest car in the world?
A rental
Assuming 10,000 miles over a 30 day month, driving every day that's over 300 miles per day. That's pushing the limit of the range if not more, so they are fully cycling the battery every day. That's not good for battery life.
I mean - would they?
Tesla is famously secretive about defects, not putting anything in writing to customers and asking them to sign NDAs - so I doubt Tesla is handing out honest numbers to potential partners.
And even if they ran a small-scale trial before making a big purchase, there's a lot of ways a small trial can accidentally be unrepresentative.
That's what companies do when one can't trust the other -- they hold the manufacturer responsible for the cost of repairs/replacements rather than doing it themselves. And if a manufacturer refuses to agree at a reasonable rate, you don't do the deal because that's a huge red flag the numbers are dishonest.
Employees could have produced piles of documentation and analytics predicting massive losses, low demand, high repair costs, whatever, none of that would have changed his mind. Because of that, it's more than likely there was no analysis whatsoever. This was not an analytically-driven decision, it was an impulse buy.
Electric vehicles are now mainstream, and we've only just begun to see rising global demand and interest," Hertz interim CEO Mark Fields said in a statement.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1048953565/hertz-will-buy-100...
I was with you all the way until you revealed that it was Mark Fields. The guy that saved Mazda, turned around Aston Martin, Land Rover, and then Ford; responsible for making sure the Mustang Mach-E was produced, and then retired after decades in the auto industry.
They dragged him out of a very rich retirement, and he certainly made the mistake that Teslas are cheap/easy to operate at scale. But trying to make a name for himself - definitely not.
During Fields’ tenure as Ford CEO from 2014-17, Ford’s stock declined by about 40 percent
During his tenure at Ford, he refused to relocate his family from South Florida to the region. Instead, he initially used Ford’s corporate jet to be with them every weekend. The disclosure sparked a furor, given that Ford was ailing at the time
Fields was forced out in 2017 in the wake of Ford’s more than five percent decline in car sales.
https://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/29110/starkman_form...
Sounds like a guy whose reputation had been tarnished, now taking advantage of a new, unexpected opportunity as CEO to re-establish it by making big, headline moves in a short time with someone else's money.
But whatever your opinion of him, an experienced, longtime executive tasked with making big turnaround moves strengthens the hypothesis that the Tesla decision was a CEO mandate without any analysis or discussion or opposition voices tolerated.
I bring it up because I see complaints from people with money that EV's don't fill their use cases 100%. No offense it's a privileged position. Where you spend an extra $10-20k for a car that does everything you might want just to ditch the inconvenience of renting something for that last 5% use case.
But then I realized that if everyone has EV’s and they all use this rental strategy, burst rental prices will be insane.
As it was I just drove it locally but I wasn't doing that enough to justify the cost given lack of commute even before pandemic.
The ordeals began long before we arrived at BWI.
I forget the reason now, but I didn't trust Hertz with the reservation for the Y. Even though the site said yes we have them and your Y reservation is GUARANTEED! It was weird because the Y was cheaper than renting a 3. And something just didn't seem right. So I was determined to call. I didn't know their number so I went to their website.
Hertz's website was full of problems, like, no way to find out the phone number for customer service. If you clicked on the Contact Us page, it led to some customer-avoidance links like most companies nowadays have, where, here, talk to our useless bot, or here, peruse our Knowledge Base, or here, read our FAQ, but no phone number. And when you finally found a link to a phone number and clicked it, you wound up at a 404 Not Found page. (I finally got the number from Google.)
When I talked to a human at Hertz I asked to double-check on the Y reservation. They said oh yes, all is good, you're all set, yadda yadda.
Day we arrive, big long line at the Hertz counter. One employee behind the counter (this counter is like a football field's width wide, with workstations every few feet, so they could easily fit 25 employees each taking a customer. But no. One.) We eventually get to the employee. I give my name, tell them I'm here to pick up the Y.
Sorry sir, there's no reservation here for a Y. Let me check something. She then walks away. A minute goes by. Two minutes. Five. Ten. Suddenly some dude in a Hertz uniform comes out. Obviously the bearer of bad news.
Sorry sir, we have no Model Ys. Well we have 25 of them but none of them are available, they're all at the Tesla shop and we don't know when they will be available.
But, you guys said yesterday on the phone that yes my Y was guaranteed, reservation is all set, all is good, etc.
Sorry sir, no Ys. We have plenty of 3s though.
Crap, I didn't want a 3, but we decided to take the 3. That took the employee 15 more minutes to process at the computer. HUGE LINE now backed up behind us, while this guy takes his sweet old time finishing what should have been a 30-second task. Finally we're told where to go in the epically vast parking garage for the car. It's in spot number 325 or something. We look on the ground . . . we're at like spot number 1, 2, 3 . . . we keep walking, we cannot find the car.
I ask a Hertz employee, where would spot 325 be? He looks at me like I'm an idiot, and responds in a tone he reserves for people he thinks are idiots: it's next to 324, right over there, and I'm looking and I only see spots in the 200s. Employee mutters "what an idiot" or something and walks away.
We eventually find the 3, among many 3s, at the extreme far end of this garage that is easily the size of an airport hangar that could fit a dozen 747s.
We get in, and it's the first time I've driven a 3... even though I'd driven an S for ten years. Tiny car in comparison, everything on this little toy screen (compared to the mighty S's) and in a different place.
We thought, we've had a Tesla for ten years, and we're not quite sure where all the settings are. What about brand-new customers who've never driven a Tesla or even an EV before?
The entire customer experience at Hertz was F-A-I-L. Just terrible. It's like the workers hate the cars. And I can imagine Tesla's service is a total nightmare for Hertz as a fleet owner.
Tesla doesn't get customer experience either. Hertz has become so awful (at least the BWI Hertz) we can't imagine renting from them again.
I think there's blame all around.
Do better Enterprise, Budget, Avis, etc. Somebody, do better.
I've always wondered what kind of software they're running on those terminals. It's like the employee is trying to hack into the mainframe, and manually execute some SQL queries.
I haven't used them in a while, but Avis always kicked Hertz's ass all over the map on customer service.
Hertz only had the advantage that they were bigger. Nothing else.
https://abc7.com/turo-car-destroyed-monterey-park-rental/139...
Teslas are fairly low maintenance but still above average repair cost for sure. Related issue is parts & service backlog means above average time a Tesla rental may be out of service. There are notorious stories in Tesla forums of many many month waits for repairs after seemingly non catastrophic accidents.
I got my P3D in Oct 2018 and it got bumper damage a couple months later because of a distracted driver. My car was in the shop for almost 1.5 months and the total cost was around 5.7k USD.
Thankfully insurance covered all of it and I didn't pay anything out of pocket. However, it just shows these cars are very tech-heavy and the cost of sensors and supply chain issues add up.
For me as a individual it wasn't a big deal that my car was in the shop waiting for parts shipments - I had a second car. For a business that invested in these cars having fixed assets collecting dust waiting for parts sounds like a nightmare scenario! Sure they have other cars too, but it is different scenario for them.
I still think the Tesla was a fine car especially with all the tech. Maybe not the nicest car interior and issues wise (panel gaps galore), but fun to just kick the accelerator in and SCREAM! In 2018/2019 it felt really special. Now, I feel like every 3rd car is a Tesla (I live in California) so it isn't as special anymore but that's a good thing! I sold mine a couple years ago, and looking forward to what new innovation we get in the EV space next.
Tesla's fragility and high repair costs are presumably increasing insurance prices for everyone.
It's the OG version of bully the self-driving car because they'll flinch long before you do.
I too grew up in a family with beaters. But I have a more richer friend who has some road rage in his nicer car. I've heard him "wish they would hit me" when angry because they have full coverage and no worries of a replacement car - those with a beater and worse insurance have to be extra careful since they don't easily have a replacement.
It means that you'd drive around a car which is more expensive than median at your own peril.
Though generally in tort you take your victim like you find them... and there are good reasons for that.
A counter would i can go intentionally smash up some other rich guys fancy car and only be on the hook for the cost to fix up a median car. If I've a vindictive rich guy myself, then perhaps that's a good deal. A balancing fix would be median liability unless you can show the damage was intentional and malicious, but then that's inviting everyone to endlessly litigate about intent.
There are lots of other compromises possible, e.g. only liable for x% of the amount past the median, which I think would still be strictly better than the current situation.
They have optimized their factories for assembly, but service, spare parts, and repair parts are overwhelmed. They have also been hesitant to develop 3rd party repair options, so the situation is similar to apple phone/computer 3rd party repair.
Give it 10 years, and a little willpower.
Huge mistake. Like my last electric rental, in Northern California, over half the chargers I tried to charge at were out of order for some reason. All the charging station apps suck, and there's like one super charging station on I-95 in between CT and Boston. The drive back took three hours because I was super careful to keep the charge in green. Just as I entered the Boston tunnel, the car went into "limited propulsion mode."
Next time, I'm just going to uber everywhere and cancel long drive plans if I have to get an electric.