Combustion engines are supposed to replace them
Hertz sells a third of its electric cars
January 12, 2024, 11:58 a.m
The mobility transition is taking a break at the car rental company Hertz for the time being. The US company has not put nearly as many Tesla electric cars into service as originally announced. Now 20,000 more of them are to be sold. They still want to stick to the electric car strategy.
The US car rental company Hertz wants to sell around a third of its global electric car fleet due to a lack of demand and buy more combustion engines instead. This will bring supply and expected demand into better balance, said the company from Estero, Florida. The maintenance costs for electric cars are also relatively high. Nevertheless, Hertz basically wants to stick to its e-strategy.
The car rental company announced an order for 100,000 cars from Tesla in October 2021. The electric cars should be delivered and integrated into the fleet by the end of 2022. To date, however, there have only been 60,000, of which 20,000 have now been sold.
It was also once announced that 175,000 electric cars would be ordered from General Motors and 65,000 from Polestar. But last year the car rental company became disillusioned and wanted to expand the proportion of electric cars more slowly.
Hertz pointed out, among other things, that repeated price cuts by Tesla had also reduced the resale value of fleet vehicles. On the other hand, repairs to damage to electric cars are about twice as expensive as to combustion engines, it was said at the time. Hertz boss Stephen Scherr also told the financial service Bloomberg that it has proven more difficult than expected to reduce the higher costs associated with operating electric cars. In the future, Hertz will closely monitor demand before deciding to buy more electric vehicles.
Sluggish US market
In its 2022 annual report, published last February, Hertz set the goal of having a quarter of its entire fleet consist of electric cars by the end of 2024. At the end of 2022, the total fleet worldwide consisted of 550,000 cars.
Especially in the USA, where Hertz does a large part of its business, the spread of electric cars has recently developed much more slowly than expected. One reason for this is fuel prices, which have fallen in recent months. There is also a lack of charging stations and the vehicles are relatively expensive to purchase.