Economy @lemmy.world Amoxtli @thelemmy.club 2 days ago

Hertz Is So Desperate To Unload Tesla Inventory It's Asking Customers If They Just Want To Keep Their Rentals

jalopnik.com Hertz Is So Desperate To Unload Tesla Inventory It's Asking Customers If They Just Want To Keep Their Rentals

"Enjoying your rental? Take it home with Hertz Car Sales."

35 comments

EVs work when you are home where you are guaranteed to have a parking spot with a charger so it charges overnight without any hassle.

People rent cars when they are away from home. Nobody wants to have to worry about finding a working charging station in an unfamiliar city and have to spend hours there waiting for it to trickle charge because the fast charging is unavailable or broken.
- I just went through this last week. It was very polarizing in my feelings on EVs. I've never had a more stressful rental experience
- I got crucified in the electric vehicles instance for pointing this out, but 100% this.
  
  See your first mistake was going to an enthusiast community and criticizing the thing in any way.
  
  There's a specific enchantment you have to do before you can criticize the thing in any community. It varies from one place to another, and if you don't utter it before you criticize the thing, you obviously are a troll and must be expunged.
  
  For example, if I go to a Table Top gaming community to bitch about 40k players, the legion will show up in force to show me exactly why I'm the worst example of a gamer. But if I first show admiration to the dedication these players show to painting these figures, I can then bitch about how the dumb space jocks take over the shop I like for weeks at a time.
  
  If I go to a Linux community, so like, most of Lemmy, I cannot criticize Linux before first casting a curse on Windows. Even though Linux has a shitty user interface and everyone knows it.
- Tangential but why are all of the fast charging stations broken? Traveling fucking sucks with an electric car. It wasn’t this way a year ago
  
  Because the American public can't be trusted to treat anything well..The shit I saw working retail just working the checkout stand was fucking astonishing. Nobody reads prompts or listens to anything and end up breaking things due to ignorance.
  
  Because America can't run anything as a service, fast charging infrastructure is expensive to maintain and make a profit off of but there was lots of grant money available to build them (and VW had to build a ton of them as part of a legal settlement) but there's no public funds to maintain them, so they aren't.
  
  I have learned that in order to be able to transfer that much power without overheating, the charging cable would have to be impractically thick. The way to get around this is to have a cooling system integrated into a thinner cable. This makes it prone to breakages. If the cooling system doesn't work the station defaults to slow charge.
  
  I’ve never seen a fast charging station broken in my area. All the slow chargers are constantly out of service though.
- Not to mention the majority of people, at least in the US, have never charged an electric.
  
  It would take a 4th grader 30 seconds to figure it out. Let's not pretend this is rocket science.
- Yeah — exactly. I travelled to Hawaii last year and the cheapest rentals were all Teslas. My initial instinct was — no I don’t want to worry about charging it, or spending my limited vacation time driving around looking for a charger that would charge it in a reasonable amount of time. I went with a gas car. However, these rental companies never have the vehicle I actually want — a hybrid.
  
  What benefit does a hybrid bring to the dealer? They didn't care about how many mpg you get and it is just added cost.
Anybody else notice that this is about what some rando posted on Reddit?
- Name a more reliable source! You can't!
  
  Tittyfucker69 is the source of all truth. Mark.
  
  Reddit content fed through Google “AI”. What’s not to trust about that?
  
  My neighbor's dog. Sam's a cool dude and his dog tells me some pretty neat things.
At this point the Tesla brand itself is toxic to me, it’s not the sticker price stopping me. Putting that aside, what was Hertz smoking when they purchased a bunch of EVs for rentals? Either you’re driving a lot or you’re in unfamiliar territory, either way that sounds like a horrible fit for the use case.
- EVs are a hot request for rentals. Source: I worked for a national car rental company.
  
  I can see that. I actually would love to have an EV rental, payed for by someone else which is often the case with rentals, so I can try one out. I’d love a small electric truck… well if they made one.
And then turns around and calls the cops on them for grand theft auto.

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