Hertz rental selling EVs to buy gas powered instead

quonset writes: Hertz rental has announced they are selling off one third of their 20,000 electric vehicle fleet and replacing them with gas powered vehicles. The reason? It's costing them too much to repair damaged EVs and their deprecitation is hurting the bottom line.

“[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle,” Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call.

Hertz expects to take a loss of about $245 million due to depreciation on the EVs, an average of about $12,250, per vehicle the company said in an SEC filing.

While Hertz isn’t directly pointing a finger, it appears that Tesla has been largely to blame.

Tesla makes up about 80% of Hertz’s EV fleet, and, altogether, EVs make up about 11% of Hertz’s total rental fleet. Tesla has been aggressively cutting its vehicle prices leading other automakers to do the same for their electric vehicles. When automakers reduce the prices of new vehicles, that pushes down the value of those models in the used car market, causing rapid depreciation.