Hertz increased its fleet of EV rental cars – then, profits exploded(thecooldown.com) |
Hertz increased its fleet of EV rental cars – then, profits exploded(thecooldown.com) |
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.
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.
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
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
Anyways, these are rentals, which are usually sold after around 1 year/30,000-40,000 miles. So it's irrelevant for a rental car company if batteries last longer than that.
Writing something down/off means that you're asserting the asset has less/no economic value left, and you can basically treat the delta between its book value and the written down value as an expense for taxation purposes. But if you e.g. write off a car from its real value of $10k to $0, it'll reduce your corporate taxes by $3k, and means you can't rent the car or sell it. So why write it off, rather than sell it for $10k? $10k > $3k.
Edit: Just realized, the correct term is depreciation... That's what you get after a long day, and word by word translating from German to English...
Leaks start showing up in old age and the involved parts don't typically wear out unless you ignore leaks and habitually run some subsystem low on its requisite fluid or run it dry. There are some exceptions for piss poor engineering but generally the prior sentence holds.
Is this based on your intuition or is there more to it? The DoT tracks automobile issues and it looks like the top ones are engine, engine cooling, other power train, air bags, and brakes. [1]
I will say that a rental fleet is a great "brutality test" for EVs, though. Rental cars age quickly.
and what if the conference center/tourist attraction you're going to doesn't have a charging station? What if they do, but they're broken/occupied? I agree it's not an insurmountable task, it's just something I don't want to have to worry about while I'm dealing with the other "much more complicated stuff".
According to Tesla, their battery packs typically exhibit less than 10% degradation after 150K miles.
Most people don't own and use cars for nearly long enough to fully wear out a battery pack on an EV that they've bought new.
The average car age in the US is over 12 years. I can see why it’s much less with the current EV owners as early adopters tend to…well, adopt the next technology earlier. But wouldn’t this also imply the environmental impacts are lessened by continual churn in manufacturing?
Minor clarification: Highway miles are actually gentler than city / town miles. Less wear and tear due to stop and go traffic, 90 degree turns, and fewer potholes.
But mostly the observation is that you'll likely get a lot more miles on the car in such a rental than a local rental. So a rental company that keeps a car in their fleet for 2-years or 20,000 miles is going to likely send most EVs out for age and more ICEs for milage (in my estimation, anyway), and so sure, ICEs will have oil changes in that interval, but they'll also have more of the every car needs maintenance sort of proportional to use (runtime and/or mileage), because they'll see more use.
The cost to replace an ICE engine often exceeds the value of the car. In which case, the car is typically junked/sold for parts/salvaged.
Most EV's don't even have a transmission. And any battery cooling fluids are often sealed up inside the battery pack.
Some EVs have air cooled battery packs, Nissan Leaf for example.
If anything, you must be thinking about hybrids.
Battery cooling I'm not sure though, it's still circulating right ? which would mean a pump of some sort.
Anyway things are not as vanilla as they used to be in the early days, I hope that trend doesn't keep up.
Only applicable at autobahn speeds --- which explains why Porsche is the only manufacturer thus far to see a need for this.
I seriously doubt this will become typical --- simply due to cost reasons.
Battery cooling I'm not sure though, it's still circulating right
No, natural thermal convention in most cases.
Radiator or other leaks.. pretty annoying.
The maintenance schedule is definitely more involved.
Edit: lostlogin, sure.. that's a, uhm, certain strategy. No doubt, Japanese cars can usually take an impressive amount of abuse. And yeah, a harsh way to treat a machine you rely on to keep you and your loved ones safe.
It’s a terrible way to treat cars, but they go fine.
Most people change their oil way, way too often. Places like Jiffy Lube will tell you every 3 months or 3000 miles because they make more money that way, but if you look at your manual it's more likely to say 6k miles with crude and have no time based recommendation. Synthetic oil you can go something like 10k IIRC.
Does it really matter?
Once the cost exceeds the replacement value of the car, only a fool would pay the money to do the work.
There’s a difference in the utility and investment value. Lots of people are in the position where they can’t afford a $50k EV repair to keep a car roadworthy or $35k for a new car. Many more can stomach a $5k ICE repair. It may be the difference between getting to work and not for someone who can’t afford a new car. They will still get much more utility out of it even if it’s not worth it on paper.
Not everyone is in a position where they can just decide to buy a new car because it’s the prudent financial decision.
Regardless of your position --- salvage the old car (puts some money in your pocket) and replace it (with a similar used one if necessary) for *less* than the cost of the repairs to the old one. Take your significant other to dinner with the money you just avoided wasting on your broken old heap.
Why would a reasonable person *ever* spend more on repairs than the money required to just replace the broken car with one that works? Irrational, sentimental reasons perhaps?
Why spend $6K on repairs if you can buy a similar working car for only $5K? Why make your net "position" $1K worse with flawed logic?
What part of this sounds "tone deaf" to you?
But it is backed by the data. Check out my other responses.
If you’re either “realistic” or pessimistic, what about the data and trends we already have doesn’t convince you of a giant cost reduction over the decade to produce batteries?
I am looking forward to third parties hopefully releasing their own packs. How would you warranty and insure them though? Also forget about third party packs for Tesla. They have so much integration that I doubt you'll see anything other than replacement packs from Tesla.
Cost of charging an EV is bounded by the ability to add solar panels to your house (currently solar installations “pay for themselves” in 7 years in Seattle - not so sunny - high cost of labor location). The grid and “free market” have to be able to compete with that for cost.
Batteries like solar panels are very cheap to transport. They are flat, they can easily stack, there is no expiration period, and no temperature regulation needed to transport them. Batteries will be produced globally if the local markets start gouging.
Solar panels are already a great example of this cost reduction curve. So I’d say your outlook is very pessimistic and not backed by the data.
A lot of people don't own/live in a house in Europe, let alone a house with enough land for a proper solar installation
If it was that easy every single house would already be self sufficient in electricity, if you can half charge a 60kw EV battery every day you could easily run everything in your house
I'm 100% pro solar but I think people just don't understand the numbers here, with my _yearly_ electricity consumption I can only charge a 75kwh tesla battery 25 times, that's once every 2 weeks.
> So I’d say your outlook is very pessimistic and not backed by the data.
Filling am EV at a public charger in Paris already costs more than filling your gas tank. https://www.frandroid.com/produits-android/automobile/voitur...
I'm telling, people who want to make money won't change overnight. Of course that's different than trickle charging your EV in your garage but a lot of people 1 don't own a garage, 2 won't have the proper installation for a quick charge and won't have that any time soon.
I know lots of people here are 100$k+ tech worker living in fancy and sunny places but the reality is that the vast majority of people can't even afford an EV right now, let alone a 20$K+ solar instal for the house they don't even have yet.
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/management/e...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
If you’re familiar with Moores Law, that is an example of an experience curve.
Yes. In some cases, the battery pack also serves as a structural component.
https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...
Your narrative is counter to the industry’s expectations of itself. Your narrative is counter to the research and science already showcased in labs.
So I just want to understand your perspective better. What sources are you using to justify “unlikely”, or are you using intuition?
Keep in mind exponential curves are very hard for humans to grasp and even harder for humans to believe, but the super majority of the time those curves hold for many decades.
Ok fair enough, I shouldn't have said "on your house".
The point of my comment was the decentralization of energy production and storage. i.e. "Cost of charging an EV is bounded by the ability to add solar panels to [someone's] house [, relatively nearby]". e.g. please look into https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/community-solar-basics
For as many people in the city that cannot add solar panels, there is land owned by someone who is very happy to install solar (with your money - as an "investor"), generate an excess, and sell it to the grid. It seems very unlikely that "the invisible hand of the free market" will result in higher cost of electricity for individuals.
Additionally, from 2019: "Under the 25-year contract with developer 8minute Solar Energy, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power would pay less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour — a number city officials and independent experts say would be the lowest price ever paid for solar power in the United States, and cheaper than the cost of electricity from a typical natural gas-fired power plant."
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-08-27/los-ang...
I mean, sure, if that's an option. But there's always risk in swapping out one used car for another. If I can only swing $2.5k, I'd rather put it in the vehicle that I've had for 10 years and know the maintenance background on that roll the dice with, as you say, another "old heap."
It's not about being sentimental or irrational. If you're in the situation where you have to weigh these decisions, you tend to have limited options. It's not likely one of them is "trade in my old heap for something great and reliable." In these situations, taking money that could go to your car and instead go out to dinner would be the irrational choice.
>Why spend $6K on repairs if you can buy a similar working car for only $5K? Why make your net "position" $1K worse with flawed logic?
I don't think it's flawed. I can reduce the uncertainty on my utility a lot more with $6k on my own vehicle than I can on a $5k random car. When you get to that low of a price, most cars are going to have maintenance issues. There's nothing guaranteeing that I spend $5k on something else to only have drivetrain (or other major) issues six months down the road.
But a 6k repair to get a new engine/transmission is almost a new car (utility wise) - you know that for the next 100k miles you're probably set w.r.t. drivetrain.
It makes sense to me?
And you certainly can't buy a whole new drivetrain and get it installed for $6k. The only people who attempt this are those who can do the work themselves.
There are plenty of engines that go back 30+ years that can still be bought brand new. You're probably right about the "whole new drivetrain" not being able to be installed for under $6k though (depending on what you define as a whole drivetrain). But even a rebuilt engine can fairly easily last another 100k miles, depending on the vehicle and the quality of the rebuild.