Right but the part of the argument I quoted had nothing to do with repair costs: they were making the point that changes in FMV due to EV prices going down in general were forcing them to recognize bigger losses in salvage situations, since they have to re-value the car post-salvage based on current market prices.

So in this case they are basically writing off more value “for free”, because the loss is coming from a genuine loss in value of the asset, but since the asset is a car that may still provide the same amount of value back to Hertz and still last the same amount of time, it’s sort of a weird corner case where you could argue they haven’t really lost anything.

Of course that loss is offset by lower depreciation losses in the future, so it’s not like it’s coming out of nowhere.

Hertz self-insures.