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After filing for bankruptcy in 2020 and resuming operations in 2021, one of the world’s best-known car rental companies has begun aggressively increasing the proportion of electric vehicles (EVs) in its fleet. Now this process seems to be stalled due to the high cost of service, but the story may not only be about that, but also about the company’s unfortunate strategic decisions.
As the article on Ars Technica reminds us, Hertz’s goal was to make a fifth of all its cars electric by 2022, and to achieve this it ordered 100,000 Tesla Model 3s and 65,000 Polestar 2s. Instead of twenty percent, they are currently at eleven, also because Tesla could not fulfill the orders. But that is not the cause of their problems, on the contrary: in addition to the price reductions of electric vehicles, therefore lower sales prices for them
They struggle with the fact that these vehicles are more expensive to repair than their combustion engine counterparts.
In December, we reported on Rakéta that American Consumer Reports, which studies the reliability of consumer products, examined 300,000 cars to see whether electric or gasoline models had more problems. One of the study’s most interesting findings was that while pure electric vehicles are easier to operate, they require on average 79 percent more repairs than their traditional counterparts. It would be easy to assume that Hertz’s problems are due to this as well, but as Ars Technica also pointed out, electric vehicles simply suffer more damage from rental companies and are involved in more accidents.
TechCrunch analyzes the situation in detail, which gives the picture a lot of nuances: according to their information, most of the electric vehicles went to Uber drivers who used them as taxis. This coincided with the interests of both companies, as the car-sharing company is trying to convert its drivers to electric models, while Hertz bought many such vehicles. The problems began with the fact that some Uber drivers are inexperienced or drive poorly. To make matters worse, Teslas are not cheap to repair since they are less common even in the United States and mechanics have less experience with them. For this reason, it would have been better if the landlord’s regular customers had rented the electric cars, but they would have been less interested in these models. In other words, while at first glance it may seem that Hertz’s problems are related to manufacturer announcements that keep reducing budget figures, the description of almost a quarter of a billion dollars could actually be the result of a flawed business strategy.
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