Hertz backpedals… again… and announces plan to sell off EV fleet and purchase gas vehicles

Is this schadenfreude or a palate cleanse? Perhaps a little of both?

In 2021, Hertz had publicized plans to have electric vehicles comprise 25% of its fleet by 2024, and announced it would be ordering 100,000 Teslas by the end of 2022. By the end of 2023, it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen; per Hertz Global CEO Stephen Scherr, “our in-fleeting of EVs will be slower than our prior expectations.” (Scherr cited price cuts as Tesla, in conjunction with repair costs which were “twice” as much as a normal gas-powered vehicle.)

In November, I wrote a blog on the car rental company’s decision to renege on previous commitments to the “green” agenda, but it seems I was a bit premature, because the story wasn’t finished; from an article at Detroit Free Press published yesterday:

Rental car company giant Hertz, which made big news in 2022 when it announced it planned to buy 175,000 electric vehicles from General Motors to diversify its fleet, now says it plans to sell about a third of its global EVs this year and use the proceeds to buy gasoline-powered cars instead.

In a government filing Thursday, Hertz Global Holdings Inc. said it started selling about 20,000 EVs from its U.S. fleet last month. It said it will continue the sale throughout the year, citing higher expenses on EVs related to collision and damage, as well as lower than anticipated demand for EVs, which erodes resale values, as reasons for the shift.

Now, as of October 2023, a CNBC journalist reported that Hertz only had around 50,000 E.V.s total, so if that number stayed consistent for two months, or until December 2023 (and nothing indicates that it didn’t) when the company began to liquidate the battery-powered cars, “20,000 EVs” is quite a significant chunk (40%).

And what does this mean for the rest of the E.V. industry? Well, used E.V.s already command low prices in the resale market; dumping the Hertz fleet will only depress prices, which will, in turn, depress new sales, and lease rates will certainly rise. As Bloomberg noted today:

Want to buy a Tesla for less than $18,000?

Bargain hunters can find Model 3 sedans that cheap following the decision by rental-car giant Hertz to unload a third of its electric-vehicle fleet onto the used-car market in a reversal of its strategy to buy up EVs and rent them out to travelers.

This is good news for shoppers wanting an affordable EV and bad news for virtually everyone else.

Although I love to see the E.V. movement crash and burn because it’s just so asinine and destructive, it’s bittersweet—how many billions of our dollars have been poured in to keep this industry afloat? Yet, it’s a glorious thing when the market is still free enough to force the de-woking of corporations.

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