Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Doings this would deny the reality of the car rental customer. People don't rent cars to commute between their house and work, or to run errands around town. They are travelers. Either they are renting the vehicle to get from A to B during a vacation or such, or they are from out of town and need the vehicle to travel between the airport to the hotel/relative's house where they are staying. Neither of those groups will have ready access to chargers, nor do they want to drive all the way back to Hertz to charge the car.

Rental cars are just not a good match for EVs. The best are use cases involving repeated short trips to known locations such as mail/Amazon delivery, school busses and commuters. Suburbia is where EVs thrive, the land of owned private charging stations and routine short commutes. EVs are not suited for hurried tourists.

View on HN

Travelers are in a particularly poor position for charging. You're on a schedule, you don't have the accounts, you don't know where things are, you don't know how the car works, etc. But your latter group is a fine match for an EV. I'm not going to do 300 miles driving from the airport to the convention hotel and back. As long as you don't have to charge it before you bring it back, there's no problem.

I've done this before. Different country, car brand I've never seen, never even charged a car before. But my travel itinerary was less than the range, and it was fine. (I tried for fun to charge in a garage in Bruges; could not figure it out. Good thing I didn't need to.)

It's not appropriate for every rental, and there's some customer information and education requirements that are new because of that, but it's quite plausible to have a decent portion of a rental fleet be electric.

When I rent a car, it's rare that I use more than a tank of gas or full charge. The only time I need to refuel is when I'm returning it to the rental company.

It’s not as practical for the rental company to deal with the car as a gas one though

I think you’re overestimating what most car rentals are used for. Often it someone that just got into an accident and needs a car while the body shop fixes the issue or they shop for a new car. As such it is driving to work or doing errands is common and an EV owner may simply prefer an EV.

Even for vacations you don’t really need level 2 chargers at most locations. A normal outlet can take a model 3 from near zero to full over a long weekend let alone a fast charger. Many camping stops even have RV hookups which are much faster.

Maybe I just have a warped view of the market. I use rental cars about a dozen times a year. Inevitably, I am picking up the car at the airport, at midnight, and then driving 100 miles to the place I need to be. In a few weeks I am going with a team to the UK. They have us landing at Heathrow, picking up five rental cars, and then driving three hours north. (That was deemed cheaper than a more direct flight.) There is absolutely no way I would accept EVs for this trip as I have zero confidence that we would have access to chargers. We normally end up fighting just to get our cellphones working properly. Paying for parking with an out-of-country credit card is bad enough. I don't want to attempt getting a charging station working after midnight, in the rain, after already spending a dozen hours on planes.

Teslas don’t have issues with superchargers, they’re billed straight to Hertz and reflected on your final bill. They’re everywhere.

>> They’re everywhere.

Lol. Maybe in the UK or California. Google maps tells me the nearest Tesla charger to my apartment is 114 miles away, as the crow flies.

You only need high speed charging on a long trip at which point having one by your house is useless.

Pick somewhere 1000 miles away then see how long going several super chargers adds to the trip. They are along interstates, that’s ‘everywhere’ in the US when you actually need one.

> Then driving 100 miles to the place I need to be.

Driving 100 miles in an EV isn’t even close to needing a recharge. The UK is covered in chargers and 3 hours is again fine on a single charge for any decent EV. So what exactly is your concern here?

Three hours and the cars will be nearly dead. And the hotel will not have a charger, not for all of us. So we are going to be up all night at commercial chargers, reducing our sleep time before our first meetings from a few hours to zero. And that is if we can find working commercial chargers. The UK is notorious for needing various apps for parking/charging. The headaches are just not worth our time. Maybe if we were on vacation, but this os work.

UK national speed limit is 70, 75 MPH * 3h is only 220 miles so hardly nearly dead.

Not having a full charge or renting something with an anemic range might be an issue if the rental place isn’t handing you a fully charged long range car that’s on them not the technology.

This was almost exactly my last UK rental car experience - something like 4 hours north (380 miles). For some reason I booked an electric car first, and then saw sense and changed my mind.

People claim that the UK is covered in chargers - but all the big ones seemed to be at least about 20 mins off of the motorway, then waiting to charge, then driving back to the motorway (burning up the charge to get there and back). On my holiday too, there's a long list of things I'd rather be doing.

I was there last week too (not driving) and I saw so many 'chargers' in public car parks that were just either covered up or needed some specific app to work - no way to use a credit card.

The whole thing is improving and if you had a house in which you could fit a proper charger then owning an electric car wouldn't be too bad, but actually renting one and driving it on a long trip - no way. It's not specifically the UK either, I'd say the same for most places I've been in and had a need to rent a car.

Surely cars are rented far, far more often for travel reasons than car repair reasons.

I think I've only ever rented a car for car repair [mechanical or body] reasons once, at that was a mechanical breakdown while I was about 350 miles from home, so I had to leave it at a shop and rent a car to continue the trip. Meanwhile, I've rented cars almost once a month for business or personal travel reasons.

There’s 6.1 million police reported vehicle accidents in the US each year with most involving more than 1 vehicles. Average to say 1 car for 1.5 weeks for 6 million accidents which then cluster around snowstorms etc and you easily need 200,000+ rental cars just for that purpose.

But let’s take your use case, how many of those involved driving more than 300 miles per day? Or even total?

US passenger embarkations are around 800 million per year. For business travelers, that's likely a car rental per 4 flights maximum (most of mine are one rental per two flights). For leisure travel, it might be one per 10 flights (families probably rent only one car and might be more willing to take connecting flights to save money). I think these are orders of magnitude more common in use case than car repair related rentals.

> But let’s take your use case, how many of those involved driving more than 300 miles per day? Or even total?

Less than 10% of them. We would sometimes fly into one city and drive around a country or into Fort Lauderdale, rent a car, drive to Key West, and make our way back over the following week. But even if I don't drive more than an EV's range, I would still need to be certain that the EV left Hertz fully charged and that Hertz was OK with me bringing it back empty. The former sure doesn't seem to be happening based on discussions in this page and if they allow the latter, the former becomes harder to ensure.

(I daily drive an EV, have for almost a decade, and love it. Even I don't want to rent an EV when I travel.)

Hertz completely fucked up renting an EV. There’s zero question about that, but pick one up at 80+% bring it back at 5% should definitely be the plan to pull it off successfully. If you can’t guarantee the car is mostly charged I’m not going to rent an EV.

> per 4 flights

> it might be one per 10 flights.

Both of those seem like massive overestimates to me. I’ve flown for business and pleasure and never rented a car after flying. My sister probably does 100 flights a year and rents a car once or twice when traveling with her husband. I know plenty of people who’ve completely given up on renting a car on vacation.

Uber or public transit is just far less of a hassle, and when visiting family why have a car? Run the numbers for 1.5 hour long Uber ride vs 4 day car rental and you might as well just relax.

Further most travelers aren’t going to rent for as long. Few business travelers are going to use a car for a full week but repairs or finding a new car takes a while.

PS: In support of my point compare the relatively tiny space for rentals at airports with the vast number of people parking their cars, going through loading or unloading from public transport, cabs, or people picking them up / dropping them off.

In your model there should be what 1/2 the people at an airport taking a rental at their destination and the other half being at home. When instead it’s closer to 1/50th, which granted is still lots of people just far less.

> I think you’re overestimating what most car rentals are used for.

The fact that most large international airports, worldwide, have absolutely huge car rental operations on site, along with partnerships with airlines, hotels and such, to me suggests something different.

The vast major of rental locations are far from airports and there’s vastly more people leaving using public transportation/Uber/someone picking them up at every airport I’ve been to.

So sure many people use rentals at airports, but the overall business model looks very different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com