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National Review
National Review
20 Jun 2023
Andrew Stuttaford


NextImg:The Corner: Electric Vehicles: Hertz Will Put You in the Driver’s Seat

I don’t drive a car very often (living in Manhattan and all that), but when I do, it tends to involve driving for very long distances in the emptier parts of the southwest, mainly New Mexico, for fun. That means that the “range anxiety” associated with electric vehicles (EVs) is something I can understand. And for a little while now (in my darker moments), I have imagined arriving at the car-rental building at Albuquerque’s airport only to be told that, although I had ordered my usual, uh, frugal (conventional) sub-compact or compact, I had been “upgraded” to an electric vehicle (EV), and, no, there was nothing else. I know that sort of thing can happen (back in the ’80s I was once given a no-choice “upgrade” to a Lincoln Town Car — more ocean liner than auto — with power-steering so sensitive that a sneeze could have meant catastrophe), so this piece in The Atlantic by Saahil Desai was the stuff of my nightmares.

Here’s an extract:

Three days earlier, I had booked Hertz’s cheapest option — in this case, the “Manager’s Special” — assuming I’d end up with a forgettable sedan. What I did not consider was an electric car. “Sorry, it’s all we have,” the man at the Hertz counter in downtown Brooklyn said as he handed over the keys. With no forewarning, no experience driving an EV, and virtually no guidance, what was supposed to be a restful trip upstate was anything but. Just a few hours of highway driving would sap the battery, leaving me and my friends scrounging for public chargers in desolate parking lots, the top floors of garages, and hotels with plugs marked for guests only. It was a crash course in EVs for four people who had never heard of CCS versus CHAdemo, the 80/20 rule, and Level 3 chargers.

Maybe the same thing will happen to you, if it hasn’t already. After my disastrous weekend, I talked to three rental-car experts: All of them were familiar with the phenomenon of the surprise EV, a result of how much the industry is leaning into electric cars. Only 4 percent of Americans own an EV, but Hertz plans for a quarter of its fleet to be electric by the end of next year.

What (if I had to guess) is going on? Well, in our new command green economy, auto manufacturers have effectively been told they have to sell a certain percentage of EVs by certain dates. Americans are not (yet?) as excited by EVs as the central planners have decreed. Some car-rental companies may thus sense a chance to get ahold of some discount metal.

Desai, however, was given a different explanation by the president of the American Car Rental Association. EVs, he said, appeal to car-rental companies because they are far easier to maintain (fewer moveable parts) and “seem to hold their value.” The first is true, although EVs appear to be more expensive and time-consuming to repair, something that may change as more of them enter circulation and an improved repair infrastructure evolves. I was, however, surprised to read that EVs hold their value better. With a product moving up sharp innovation curve, that seems counterintuitive, and, indeed, the picture appears to be somewhat mixed.

To be clear, Desai supports EVs in principle (“great, potentially planet-saving machines”), but the surprise EV rental experience “made me want to wage a slash-and-burn campaign against all of them.”

EVs, argues Desai,

may work great for the business traveler who is taking their Tesla from the airport to the hotel and to a client meeting across town, but things are way more complicated for road-trippers. What makes an EV rental such a struggle is that it is a rental: The overwhelming majority of EV owners charge their cars at home, waking up to a full charge every morning. Unless you luck out and have a place to charge overnight at your hotel or Airbnb, you’re stuck with America’s Wild West of public EV chargers.

A couple of highlights from his article:

When my Chevy Bolt was just about running on empty in the Finger Lakes, the closest charger I could find was blocked by a blue Tesla loitering after a fill-up. The next best option was so slow that after four hours of charging, the car had added a measly 70 miles to its range — roughly what a gas pump could do for a similarly sized car in well under 30 seconds. . . .

Because of the quirks of lithium-ion batteries, you might save time charging your EV in bursts, as opposed to doing it all in one go; with this in mind, drivers learn to compulsively check EV charging apps — Plugshare, Chargehub, Chargeway — for nearby stations. Compared with filling up on gas, “it’s just a completely different experience,” says Ellen Kennedy, an expert on carbon-free transportation at the think tank RMI.

“A completely different experience.” That’s one way of putting it.

I clicked on RMI’s website, and then on to “about,” and then on “history“:

In 1982, Rocky Mountain Institute was founded as a 501(c)3 nonprofit aiming to radically improve America’s energy practices. RMI’s data-led focus on efficiency, whole systems analysis, and levering business to drive change has since extended our influence globally, transforming businesses, revolutionizing energy systems, and improving national economies along the way.

In recent years, the rise of the climate crisis and the need to transition global energy systems away from fossil fuels has amplified the need for and impact of our mission, to help usher the world toward a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future for all.

Ah.

By the side of that text is a photograph of someone (RMI’s founder?) shaking hands with Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office.

Desai’s “different experience” was in part the result of the way that the mass introduction of EVs is being driven by government, and being rushed through, rather than being allowed to develop organically. The result is that bits of the puzzle needed to make EVs “work,” such as an adequate charging system, are, for now, still missing — although it will be interesting to see whether the recent deals under which, in certain cases, drivers of Ford and GM will get access to Tesla’s (better) network is a signal of speedier progress ahead.

Desai’s unwanted EV had come to him via Hertz.

That’s not surprising:

At this point, Hertz has one of the biggest EV fleets in the entire world, an army of tens of thousands of Teslas, Polestars, and GMs, with an order of magnitude more on the way. Perhaps Hertz is “over-fleeted” with electric cars, Jonthan Weinberg, the CEO of the rental-car site AutoSlash, told me. That means that if the car you wanted isn’t available, the one you get instead is more likely to be an EV. Perusing Hertz’s website suggests that EVs may indeed be overstocked across the country. The three cheapest rental-car options I could find for this weekend at New York’s JFK airport are all EVs. At LAX, the cheapest EV will run you $40 a day, compared with $88 for the Manager’s Special. And at Midway in Chicago, the only available cars are all EVs.

I’ll be avoiding Hertz for now.