The EV fiasco has descended into farce. Just ask Hertz
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
You might not want to buy an electric car because they have such a high purchase price, but you wouldn’t mind renting one for a short trip, surely? Then you can enjoy the fabled lower fuel costs, the terrific acceleration and smooth running of an EV without the pain of what can often be high monthly repayments.
Alas, that is not how American customers of car rental giant Hertz appear to see it. The company in the US is disposing of the 20,000 EVs it bought with great fanfare in recent years, and is replacing them with petrol models. Some of the Teslas, which are no more than two years old, have been listed for sale at $14,000 – little more than a third of their $40,000 price tag when new. The company says it will take a loss of $245 million but it seems to have little choice given the lack of demand from customers and the vehicles’ higher repair costs.
What a difference from October 2021 when the company ordered 100,000 Teslas, sending the car company’s shares surging by 5 per cent. But it is indicative of a more widespread malaise in the fortunes of electric cars. Over the past year, figures from the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders revealed a steep fall in interest from private buyers. Now it seems that fleet buyers are having second thoughts, too.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Most virtue-signalling early adopters of a new technology suffer similarly. For Hertz and others, not sure how they will get properly into milk-floats. I can’t see the soon-to-be ubiquitous Chinese ones being up to life as a hire vehicle, let alone the charging issues that are still to be dealt with. The insurance problems might bite fleet operators in the seat of the pants too.
Second hand values will be the killer. It’s no surprise the prices second hand ICE cars are rising.
Largely an American issue as distances are much greater there & the outlying regional network under developed. But serves to highlight these potential issues wherever you live.
Essentially the ‘travelling salesman’ doesn’t need the extra hassle of charge/ range anxiety.
One of the best articles on EVs I have read for a while:
“……….. if the entire world goes 100% electric for cars. In that case global Co2 emissions fall a mere 3.5% in 2050 versus a baseline of 24% electric adoption by 2035. ”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/the_electric_car_con_explained.html
Paul Homewood, if you could find a previous version of Berkeley Earths “temperature region page” for New Zealand you would have a great post, maybe about 1-2 years ago you would find a totally different set of mean average temperatures especially for the period prior 1900, cooled down up to 2 C in the latest version.
Before this previous page stopped linking for me the mean average for 1893 was no different than 2020, working the error margins for both and either one could be warmer or colder than the other but now there is a 1 C difference and of course 2020 is warmer by that amount.
Right now in NZ our media (citing NIWA) is saying we have never been hotter “by degrees” when they would never mention the actual amount of difference before because (obviously) any changes then were in fractions of 1 C and fluctuating.
I hope you get to read this and can do some checking and I wish I had somehow saved the first version for prosperity as having the two together would be evidence of the corruption of data here in NZ (and onto the global set) but that would be nothing new, many reports and those famous ‘climate gate” emails cite NZ as one of the big players in the global temp record.
For some comparison using an honest NZ climate scientist who is deceased now but hated by a group of others backed by one of the worlds most corrupt state climate scientists Jim Salinger who famously lost all his work in a “computer glitch” so cannot back his reworking NZ’s record into a linear rise (still stands) when there never was one before.
Quote from C. R. de Freitas; Christopher Rhodes de Freitas was a New Zealand climate scientist. He was an associate professor in the School of Environment at the University of Auckland.
“New Zealand was one of the first countries in the Southern Hemisphere to establish an official nationwide system of weather records. These records provide a rare long time series for temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, informing the data sparse interpolations required for early temperature series. Extant 1868 archives record the national normal mean surface temperature at 13.1 °C (when converted from degrees Fahrenheit) being the average of 10+years read at six representative weather stations. On the face of it, New Zealand’s long-term mean temperature has remained relatively stable at 12.6 °C over the past 150 years
https://berkeleyearth.org/temperature-region/new-zealand
I looked at Berkeley Earth data for NZ several years ago, found it to be poor, probably because back then they were using GHCN for the source data, and NZ were/are very stingy in giving data to GHCN, only around 5 stations, some from remote islands with a purely maritime climate. Scroll to the end of the following:
Government interfering in a market, They have never been right or made an improvement.
It looks increasingly a lot like Net Zero is falling apart. It seems the leaders are falling, Chris Stark, Skidmore, plus the German ones. Hip Hip Hooray.
Sadly, no, GB. They’ve done their ‘time’ in Govt and are now ‘qualified’ to go after the big bucks/no stress greenie jobs. It’s the system! So back to the dunghill with you and get on with your little job😊 Nothing to see here……..
Paul… where’s the page gone? It seems to have just disappeared!
>
Sorry, I had to delete it and repost it, as it had corrupted some links
I saw a youtube video with a plausible explanation for why ALL car insurance is getting more expensive: EV repair costs are being “shared” by everyone.
Well yes. The more EVs there are, the higher the chances I hit an EV. So if EVs have higher repair bills, my insurance goes up.
Hardly surprising as people are unsure where and if they can recharge EVs when they rent them and returning them 80% charged (as most require) is hit and miss. Who wants to be waiting 40 minutes for a charger tgen 30 minutes whilst it charges when you have a flight to catch? It’s just impractical.
Wondering . . . do you have to return it charged?
The company in the US is disposing of the 20,000 EVs it bought with great fanfare in recent years
Hertz will still have quite a lot of Teslas…
‘According to Hertz’s last annual financial report, the company owned about 43,000 Teslas back in December 2022.’
https://uk.pcmag.com/cars-auto/150459/hertz-to-sell-20000-of-its-electric-vehicles-offers-discounts-on-teslas
“and the vehicles’ higher repair costs”
Interesting.
Driving a Tesla is different. Which makes them unsuitable for renting. Cirrusly, you get in it at the airport and spend half-an-hour trying to figure it out.
Used ones are a crap shoot, as you have no way of knowing how their batteries were treated when rented. Drained down to near 0%? How many times?
Maybe a bit more to this. My understanding is that car rental companies are de facto second hand car dealers. They buy new in quantity to get good discounts, then sell off vehicles every 12 to 24 months and make the return on investment in large part from the residual value when sold. The rental income covers maintenance and operational costs and part contributes to return on investment. Good accounting, cost write-offs against tax does the rest.
When buying a BEV, you are actually buying a battery with a car attached, for a huge premium. Without the battery, the car would cost nearly half. That battery quickly loses efficiency and has a short lifespan – the car itself will long outlast the battery.
Given that the batteries in BEVs are expensive to replace, hold less charge the more recharge cycles they go through – high number for rental cars – the lack of interest in BEVs by the market, then the second hand value for BEVs is likely to be very low as buyers will be factoring in the cost of replacing the battery soon, and the market quickly will be glutted.
As the price new for BEVs is high, low residual values will not yield sufficient return on investment to justify that investment.
It also will be an issue for lease rental, particularly commercial vehicle fleets. Investors won’t see the return they expect unless lease prices are much higher. Lease rental is now a large part of the motor vehicle market place.
In the UK, car sales are largely dependent on company car fleets, and big transport operators tend to lease rather than buy.
It’s going to be interesting if the money to fund leasing dries up.
You may be right, this could be a normal sell-off of inventory.
A friend in the boat rental business told me two years is the optimum time to keep a boat. Buy it, rent it, sell it after two years.
Hertz might even wish to sell more off, as standard practice, but the market isn’t there.
News story said they were replacing them with petrol vehicles. That might be journalistic flair.
The stupidity of all this is that the use of electricity, presumably supplied by renewables, can never replace all the energy provided by fossil fuels. Net Zero is therefore impossible unless we abandon our prosperity and go back to living in caves! Why don’t our leaders realize this? Are they stupid? Or do they just think that WE are stupid!