Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Hertz went from a comeback story to a mess all over again.
They got out of bankruptcy in 2021, tried to rebrand themselves as the cool electric future of rental cars, and then dropped almost three billion dollars in losses.
The plan was simple. Load up on Teslas and other EVs, save money on gas and repairs, and ride the hype.
The reality was brutal. Repairs were higher than expected, renters kept crashing the cars because they were way faster than the usual airport Corolla, and people on vacation did not want to sit around hunting for chargers.
Then the market turned on them. EV prices fell, Tesla cut prices, used EV values tanked, and Hertz was stuck with a massive fleet worth way less than they paid.
They started unloading cars by the tens of thousands, sometimes selling barely used models for half of what they cost.
The whole thing turned into a giant reminder that being early only works if the economics back you up, and for Hertz, none of it did.
In today’s EV obituary column, Elon Musk has dropped a bombshell. Two months after Telsa chargers became the industry standard (which promised to save the other car makers) his profits fell, and he’s fired the entire EV charging team overnight. Hertz, meanwhile, has realized that dumping 20,000 electric cars in January was not enough, and it has to offload another 10,000 electric cars, which now amounts to half its EV fleet.
Chronicling the collapse of the Big-Government-made EV bubble
In today’s EV obituary column, Elon Musk has dropped a bombshell. Two months after Telsa chargers became the industry standard (which promised to save the other car makers) his profits fell, and he’s fired the entire EV charging team overnight. Hertz, meanwhile, has realized that dumping 20,000 electric cars in January was not enough, and it has to offload another 10,000 electric cars, which now amounts to half its EV fleet. And then comes the news that there might be a secondhand “timebomb” coming at the eight year mark when most EV battery warranties run out and cars will become “impossible to sell”.
As if that’s not enough, this week the fire and rescue experts in NSW are warning in the politest possible way, that they might have to do a “tactical disengagement” of a car accident victim, which means leaving them to die in an EV fire if the battery looks likely to explode. They say that first responders need more training, as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is that they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognize when they have to abandon the rescue.
The NSW government’s Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Batteries Inquiry heard testimony from fire and rescue services, paramedics, the Motor Traders’ Association, and TAFE on Tuesday in its second public hearing.
In the most serious incidents, firefighters said crews could be forced to abandon rescues or crudely rescue passengers from vehicles, and were being left “flying blind” at battery fires.
VRA Rescue NSW Commissioner Brenton Charlton told the inquiry worse outcomes were also possible, including battery explosions in which a rescue operation would put emergency workers at risk.
“We need to prepare ourselves and our volunteers… for the point in time we have to do a tactical disengagement, meaning if someone’s trapped and it does high order (explode) you might not be able to do anything,” he said.
“That will be a tragic, horrible thing to take part in.”
Just like that, Elon Musk fired the whole Tesla EV charging team, throwing the industry into chaos because Tesla network is the best by far and the bedrock of the so called “transition”. Tesla had agreed to open its charging network to other EV makers only recently, and Joe Biden was delighted. Tesla is getting subsidies to expand it’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) system. But this move has shaken the whole industry.
In a single stroke, CEO Elon Musk called his company’s vaunted charging reliability into question when he laid off most or all of Tesla’s Supercharger team, the people who made Tesla the envy of the EV industry. The network they built is bigger, faster, smarter and more reliable than any other company’s — and has become the linchpin of the auto industry’s plan to persuade millions of Americans to buy EVs and turn the tide on climate change.
“It feels like the rug just got pulled out from under a lot of the industry alignment that has been built in the last 12 months,” said Matt Teske, an industry veteran and CEO of Chargeway, an EV-charging software platform. “And leaves us on shaky ground.”
In 2022, as traditional automakers finally started delivering a substantial number of EVs to the roadways, they ran into a problem. Their drivers couldn’t use Tesla’s chargers, because they were meant only for Teslas. And the public networks had an array of reliability problems.
Ford was the first automaker to hit on the solution. Last spring, it struck a deal with Tesla to use its 12,000 U.S. charging stations and committed to building Tesla’s charging technology called the North American Charging Standard, or NACS, into its future vehicles.
Other automakers followed suit in short order. By February, Tesla’s NACS had become the industry standard, with virtually every automaker planning to redesign their charging systems to meet Tesla’s specifications.
Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations
And the crowd is baffled. People are mostly aghast…
The Hertz debacle truly might become an obituary
Originally Hertz was going to buy 100,000 wonder-cars which would be cheap to fix and popular with punters. But the future fleet only reached 60,000 cars and is now reversing back to 30,000 cars which tourists apparently don’t want to rent much, and which cost twice as much to repair.
Not surprisingly, it’s a financial ruin. Hertz shares have lost three quarters of their value since 2022.
The company was an $11 billion dollar company in 2021 when it announced the mass EV purchases — it is now a $1.4 billion dollar company.
RENTAL car giant Hertz, has announced that it is selling off 10,000 more EVs than it planned in January when it set out to stem the tide of massive depreciation that hit its fleet of 60,000 EVs.
Rental car companies need to be able to sell off their ex-rentals for a reasonable sum, but just as Hertz realized it couldn’t afford to repair these cars, it also realized it couldn’t sell them either:
…the program came under stress when Tesla began discounting its cars last year.
This set off a tsunami of depreciation for existing Tesla owners; including Hertz, which had the biggest exposure of anyone. In turn, other EV makers followed suit with discounts and retained values for all EVs became a race to the bottom.
And as word spreads, possibly no one else will be able to sell them either. What is an 8 year old EV with no battery warranty worth? It’s pot luck whether it will keep going or suddenly need a £15,000 repair…
The used electric car timebomb – EVs could become impossible to sell on because battery guarantees won’t last – find out if you are affected
By TOBY WALNE, This is Money
Money Mail can today reveal a timebomb looming in the second-hand market for electric vehicles (EVs).
Our investigation found that many EVs could become almost impossible to resell because of their limited battery life.
Experts said that the average EV battery guarantee lasts just eight years. After this time, the battery may lose power more quickly and so reduce mileage between charges.
In some cases, the cost of a replacement battery is as much as £40,000. For certain EVs, the cost of replacing the battery could be ten times the value of the vehicle itself on the second-hand market.
Yet geniuses in government still want to push us all into EV’s.
With uncanny timing the Australian Albanese government is about to launch emissions standards we don’t need to force people to buy a product they don’t want, in the hope, so they say, of stopping some storms.
US rental giant Hertz is selling off thousands of Teslas as weak demand forces it to replace 20,000 electric cars with petrol-powered vehicles.
US rental giant Hertz is selling off thousands of Teslas as weak demand forces it to replace 20,000 electric cars with petrol-powered vehicles.
Hertz said it would sell the vehicles over the next year and expected to take a $245m (£193m) hit as it reversed plans to massively expand its electric car fleet. The Telegraph has the story.
The company is selling off a range of makes and models but is expected to offload thousands of Teslas. More than 600 are already listed for sale on its used car website.
Drivers also still want petrol or diesel-powered cars. Hertz said it would “reinvest a portion of the proceeds from the sale of EVs into the purchase of internal combustion engine vehicles to meet customer demand”.
The sell-off, which applies only in the US but amounts to around a third of the company’s global electric vehicle fleet, comes after years of Hertz positioning itself as a “first mover” in electric car rentals.
As well as agreeing to buy 100,000 Teslas, it committed to buying 65,000 vehicles from Polestar, Volvo’s electric subsidiary, and last year it said a quarter of its fleet would be electric by the end of 2024.
However, deliveries to date have been well below those headline numbers.
The company said the decision to sell off thousands of cars was being taken “to better balance supply against expected demand of EVs” and that “this will position the company to eliminate a disproportionate number of lower margin rentals and reduce damage expenses associated with EVs”.
With the western world hurtling into new cars that are more costly, inconvenient, slower to refuel, and prone to burning down carparks and cargo ships, it was only a matter of time before the cracks in the socialist car market started to show.
With the western world hurtling into new cars that are more costly, inconvenient, slower to refuel, and prone to burning down carparks and cargo ships, it was only a matter of time before the cracks in the socialist car market started to show.
Around the world tonight headlines are sharing the news that Hertz is selling off 20,000 EVs, one third of their fleet, in order to buy some more fossil fuel cars. That can’t be inspiring news for customers thinking of giving up their gas guzzlers.
It was the perfect storm in a bad way. Apparently the customers didn’t want to rent them, and when they did and they scratched them, they cost too much to fix. (Repair costs were twice as high). Then the bottom fell out of the second-hand market, and to recover the depreciation losses, Hertz would have to raise the prices on a product customers already didn’t want. There was no way this was going to work.
“..expenses related to collision and damage, primarily associated with EVs, remained high in the quarter”
“The Company expects to reinvest a portion of the proceeds from the sale of EVs into the purchase of internal combustion engine (“ICE”) vehicles to meet customer demand.”
Back in October 2021 it was all champagne and fireworks
Hertz put in an order for 100,000 EVs which was so exciting it pushed Tesla shares up 9% briefly to “a trillion dollar valuation”. (Two years later Tesla is worth 30% less.) At the time, Hertz expected to get the 100,000 cars by the end of 2022. Luckily for them, this didn’t happen. Instead they only got 50,000 by the end of 2022. This worked out to be about 11% of Tesla Hertz’s total fleet. So these EV’s are not even very old. No one can say “the new models are better, because these are new models.
Some of the cars are already on the market. Two year old Telsa Model 3 EV’s are going for $22,000 US.
With uncanny timing the Australian Albanese government is about to launch emissions standards we don’t need to coerce people to buy a product they don’t want, in the hope, they say, of changing the weather.
Hertz was aiming to make 25% of its fleet electric by 2024, but is finding 11% is too much. Given there are whole nations pushing for 100% EV by 2035 there seems to be a message here…
Hertz was aiming to make 25% of its fleet electric by 2024, but is finding 11% is too much. Given there are whole nations pushing for 100% EV by 2035 there seems to be a message here…
Let’s thank Hertz for doing that experiment for us. It turns out EV’s didn’t work well in the high mileage Uber-type system because the drivers “drove them into the ground” and repair costs were much higher than expected. So Hertz moved some EV’s to the leisure hire department, but then the revenue per day in the leisure sector fell. Presumably people didn’t want to hire them.
It’s not that this is Bad News week for EVs — it’s quarterly reporting week, so companies have to tell investors things they’d rather not.
Great nations don’t force citizens to buy heavier cars with shorter ranges and bigger repair bills in order to stop bad weather one hundred years from now.
Rental car company Hertz once envisioned itself as the ultimate EV broker, doling out battery-powered vehicles to business travelers, ridehail drivers, and tech newbies in an ambitious plan to grease the wheels for the EV revolution. The company inked agreements with Tesla and Polestar to buy nearly 200,000 EVs. Tesla’s valuation topped $1 trillion on the news.
Part of the problem is linked to Hertz’s plans to rent EVs to ridehail drivers. Of the 100,000 Tesla acquired by Hertz, half were to be allocated to Uber drivers as part of a deal with the ridehail company. And drivers said they loved the Teslas! But Uber drivers also tend to drive their vehicles into the ground. This higher rate of utilization can lead to a lot of damage — certainly more than Hertz was anticipating.
Musk frequently says that electric cars require less maintenance than counterparts with internal combustion engines (including plug-in hybrid electrics). …
But electric vehicle owners can face unique maintenance needs, as well. Nikhil Naikal, CEO of Kinetic, a startup that is not affiliated with Hertz or Tesla but provides repairs for electric and autonomous vehicles, told CNBC on Thursday:
“The reality of electric vehicles is that they can be 1,000 pounds heavier or more than gas vehicles, and they move faster, with higher torque. Since they’re extremely zippy and heavier, it’s just physics — the ability to overcome inertia so quickly is going to effect their suspension systems, the brakes and steering columns. It’s counter-intuitive, but even with fewer moving parts they are susceptible to requiring more maintenance. They especially require tire-swapping, because the tires wear out more quickly from that high torque and weight.
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