As John Adams said:

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Now, if Stephen Scherr had taken Adams’s observation into consideration, he might still have a job. (However, no sympathy from me; he’ll be employed in no time at all, making more bad decisions that inevitably cost me money, in one way or another.) From a report at the New York Post this afternoon:

Hertz, one of the four largest car rental companies in the world, is replacing its CEO after the company reversed its bet on electric vehicle rentals over increasing costs.

Stephen Scherr will step down as Hertz Global Holdings Inc.’s chief executive officer and member of the company’s Board of Directors effective March 31, the company announced Friday.

…

Scherr’s resignation comes as the car rental company struggles with the higher repair costs and low demand for EV rentals.

I’ve previously written on Hertz’s battery-powered car flops—first in November, when Hertz had to admit it wasn’t even close to meeting its goal of an expansive E.V. fleet because the cars were way too expensive with too many liabilities; then in January of this year, when the company announced it was reneging on its promise altogether, and selling off around half(?) of the E.V.s the company still had.

To bring this back to Adams’s wisdom, the stubborn facts of E.V.s remain—and the idea that a car rental company would transition a major portion of its fleet to E.V.s… is one of the dumbest and most asinine corporate decisions I’ve ever heard.

As an online commenter noted:

What happens when you hire a former Goldman Sachs elitist eco-nut-case with a global-communist agenda and degrees from Princeton and Harvard? Presto! Your stock goes from $20 to $8 dollars a share in less than a year.

Meanwhile, in that same period mr scherr took home a cool 182 MILLION, almost exactly 75% of what Hertz’s 245 Million dollar loss on his stooopid EV gamble was, over the same period.

Genius!

With news of Scherr’s departure, Hertz has decided to hire Gil West, the guy “who previously worked as the chief operating officer for General Motors’ Co.’s Cruise robotaxi section[.]” For context, the Cruise robotaxi division collapsed in scandal when a self-driving car “dragged a pedestrian” through the streets of San Francisco; Bloomberg reported this a little over a month ago:

General Motors Co. blamed poor leadership for mishandling its Cruise robotaxi crisis, an admission the company is hoping will help get its cars back on the roads.

…

For GM and Cruise, making the report public is a crucial step to getting its robotaxis back on the road. It’s particularly important that the companies repair relations with the state of California, which suspended Cruise’s license to operate driverless vehicles after company officials misrepresented details of the October collision in San Francisco. Within weeks, Chief Executive Officer Kyle Vogt resigned, and Cruise fired nine executives and cut almost a quarter of its workforce.

One of those “nine executives” fired was… yep, you guessed it, Gil West.

So, they’re replacing an idiot… with another idiot—if all else fails, both have a bright future in the politics of D.C., as well as its bureaucracy.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.