I did notice that Hertz charges a flat $35 fee if you return an EV with less than 70% charge, with an additional $25 fee if the battery is below 10% [0]. I wonder if this is a big contributor to the profit margin: people rushing to return an EV rental car may not have time to recharge it to avoid the surcharge, whereas people returning ICE cars have time to refuel them. Also, the surcharge for returning an ICE car without a full tank is much lower; usually around $0.50 per missing gallon.
[0] https://www.hertz.com/blog/electric-vehicles/tesla/model-3/f...
The perk should be able to return it on empty, as they can plug them right in at arrival. If Hertz wants to be able to turn the vehicles faster, they can install fast DC chargers at their facilities.
It's not because they then go to a gas station to refill it. They just rent the car to the next customer with only 3/4 of a tank and hope that second customer returns it full.
It says they ordered a ton of EVs, and that EVs have lower cost of maintenance, awesome - but it provides no evidence that EV maintenance costs actually contributed to the improvements here?
The statements they have from Hertz say “we made $$$$ from demand coming back to rent cars” and “we spent that $$$$ on buying EVs”.
The quotes and facts in the article are not aligned with the point made in the title
I always imagined it as similar to transmission replacement - ie. If they can make the battery pack last as long as a median transmission, then it’ll be after the overall vehicles useful life before it comes time to replace.
We will see. We just swapped the battery on ours, price if it hadn’t been done on warranty was $50K, on a car we paid $35K for.. but then again, cost to us was zero.
Just like what happens to the cost of maintenance when fossil fuel vehicles need engine and transmission replacements.
Anything is possible but there is no indication that a battery replacement will be a typical or expected repair during the normal lifetime of an EV. An 8 year, 100,000 mile warranty on the battery pack is quickly becoming the norm.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HTZ/hertz-global-h...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CAR/avis-budget/eb...
I don’t doubt the claims but this feels like greenwashing PR.
That's where most of the problems come from.
A lot of mechanics are probably not ready to deal with the issues EVs face, though.
Alternatively, how are rental companies charging returned EVs? The time spent sitting at a charger should be considered as lost revenue when an EV comes back empty.
That's a huge difference. It means that the cost of using an ICE vehicle over time is 2x greater.
If the figure is anywhere near accurate, ICE vehicles are toast.
What we know now is that they 50-60% cheaper to maintain during the first couple of years.
Let's hope that they are also 50-60% cheaper to maintain over their whole lifetime, but this might not be as assured as one might think due to batteries which are a huge cost.
By the time the battery needs to be replaced batteries will be 90% cheaper.
Then they sell them off after accumulating 10,000-25,000 miles, before any real maintenance is required.
20,000 miles is what, 4-6 oil changes?
Interestingly JD Power claim that EVs have more problems https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/28/jd-power-evs-and-and-plug-... .. but mostly in the infotainment system? Maybe that matters less to rental drivers. Maybe that depends on brand.
Most new cars have a 10,000 mile factory oil change interval. PHEVs usually go for 20,000.
Rental cars sometimes have a hard service life, but I'd put that range at maybe 1-2 changes. Which isn't much at all.
More likely there's a usage difference; if you're puttering around from the airport to the hotel and back, you might pick an EV, but if you're renting a car to drive a longer distance one-way trip, it's mostly going to be an ICE, and you're gonna put some miles on it at high speed, etc.
And on top of that the average EV probably has low(er) rolling resistance tires (to get a few more miles of range) which get replaced every 40k instead of whatever sticky tires the OEM slapped that only last 30k so you're doing that routine less too.
Let's wait, my dad traded his 20 years old car for a new model a few years ago, he paid 8k euros for a brand new ICE car, he does under 10k km per year now. The cheapest EV I can find is 22k euros here, and it's a piece of shit that barely does highway speed, which he could not afford anyways.
Companies will make public charger more and more expensive until it reaches the price of filling a gas car, it's just matter of time, mechanics will do the same. In the meantime it's all tricks and snares, enjoy it while it lasts
I'd love to get an EV rental but I'm not willing to pay extra for it and luck hasn't smiled my way yet. I also don't use Hertz, mostly Avis, and I'm guessing they don't have nearly as many EVs.
Later in a car’s lifecycle you’ll start seeing things like tires, brakes (better with regenerative!), and trim start needing replacement, along with the battery. My older ICE’s most expensive maintenance issues in the last 2 years were the window regulators all failed- that has nothing to do with the power train.
Which is all to say EVs are cheaper to run overall, but they are suited to save even more money for rental companies than individual consumers.
I had a car a number of years back where the window controls failed. Fixing it would have been so expensive (more than I could afford at the time) that I drove the entire NY winter with some plastic material taped over the top half of the window (as far up as it was when it failed).
Turns out it was about 45 minutes for me to do it myself. Not only did I save money (about $500 for all of them), but I saved time- going to a mechanic always ended up being about 2h
How about the mining of battery materials and the effect of that? Or the disposal of batteries. This article is pretty biased in that it fails to address the externalities of the entire EV lifecycle.
There are better arguments, FWIW, about "EVs as personal transportation" that point out that battery production is going to be constrained as the industry evolves and that the comparatively few batteries we have should be prioritizing transit and grid storage vs. more Model S's. And I think there's a reasonable argument there (though the response will be that high margin luxury products are a much more effective way to grow that market than boring stuff).
But no, there's no one serious out there claiming that batteries are a bad environmental tradeoff.
Do you have an example of a full - ”cradle-to-grave” - life cycle analysis that shows EVs to have higher total emissions over their life span?
For example, this recent study University of Michigan study [1] shows BEVs producing fewer carbon emissions over their lifetime, accounting for battery production, though it takes a few years to offset the greater initial carbon footprint of BEV production. (I'm not sure that this includes battery disposal specifically. Though I wouldn't expect that to be a decisive factor on its own.)
This is a complicated topic, and I'm sure it's very challenging to accurately estimate the carbon footprint of each step in the manufacturing production and value chain (for both BEVs and ICE vehicles). So I'm sure we'll continue to get a better picture as research continues. But it's incorrect to insinuate that these issues have not been accounted for.
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac7cfc
