expiredserra | Staff posted Aug 17, 2023 05:10 PM
Item 1 of 3
Item 1 of 3
expiredserra | Staff posted Aug 17, 2023 05:10 PM
Hertz Electric Car Rentals: Reserve 2 or More Days,
(Participating Locations)Get 1 Day Free
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One tip - if you call the number on the back of any Visa credit card you have, they have pre-negotiated a flat rate of $80 for a tow up to 5 miles: https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/...enefit.pdf
The icing on the cake is how they still charged us for the entire rental period and they charged us for roadside assistance. Over $1,000 for 10 miles of driving. Plus the tow truck that ended up costing $200 out of pocket (which was a bargain)
All they offered us was a coupon for a free day on our next rental. Nothing else. Plus it was almost impossible to find an agent who would respond by voice.
* Your best bet is to blast them in tweets and they will finally get back to you and offer you, while nothing worth while unless you rent often.
However, charging at public chargers is about the same price as gas when you compare equivalent vehicles, i.e. F-150 Lightning to F-150 ecoboost. You're paying just as much and getting less convenience, and that's not an SD.
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EV acceleration is game changing.
Regen braking improves driving experience.
Several Superchargers close to my vacation destination, so never an issue.
The waiting was not a big deal, lots of tech to play with in the car.
AC kills range.
Hertz activated Speed Limiter - Chill Mode the second day. Not sure why.. I had to call and have them disable it (2 hours on phone). limits top speed and cuts acceleration. Lame.
I was told it is Hertz policy to disable AutoSteer also, so you only have adaptive cruise control.
Hertz (via connected Tesla app) can see everything you do... speed, acceleration, proximity to others, rear cam side cams, interior cam (put tape over it), there is also a microphone in the car, not sure if it can be monitored though. Camera footage is recorded in the car, so manually delete before returning. Cringe.
It's indisputable that the immediate cost of EVs is much lower than traditional petroleum-burning cars.
What gets lost in the debate are the long-term costs. What happens to the resale value of EVs in 15 years when batteries start to fail? Where do expended batteries go? Which counties possess the raw materials to produce batteries and what are the repercussions of the world being wholly reliant in them for the supply chain? What is the human cost of mining rare earth minerals to produce batteries? And so on.
As so many other debates, this one just devolves into "I'm right, you're wrong" which is too bad.
Here's some facts:
1) EV batteries, just like the steel/aluminum in ICE cars is 95% recyclable. Companies are doing it, now, and the raw materials are put back into new batteries (which are much more reliable than those built 10 years ago):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xrarU
2) If you are so concerned about the rare earths in EV batteries, I assume that you are REALLY concerned about cell phones then, right? Because EV batteries use far less rare earths than your iPhone/Android battery, which require far higher amounts of cobalt. It takes only about 100 iPhone batteries to get enough cobalt to produce a Tesla battery pack. So are you swearing off smart phones?
3) People that say "well, you have to burn coal or NG to charge from the grid" are glossing over the relative efficiencies of those. FACT is that NG and coal power plants are 60+% efficient in extracting energy from those sources and putting it into usable power (including transmission losses). Gasoline cars . . . horribly inefficient, with only 18% of the energy being used for motion. The rest is lost as heat.
So you could take the EXACT same petrol, burn it in an industrial-scale power plant and power EVs to go 3 times the mileage of a fleet of ICE autos. That's an easily googled fact. And the fact that 80% of new electrical generation deployed in the USA in the past 5 years is renewables, not Fossil. So that grid is always getting cleaner.
2) Never had to search for charging. It's all built right into the nav of the Tesla. I have to "search" for charging as much as you have to "search" for gas.
3) Congrats, you have a 30 gallon bladder, since you don't take "bio breaks".
Orlando has a ton of superchargers, then heading south from there if you're going to the coast first (say to hit Kennedy Space Center then down to Miami) you've got one like every 30ish miles along I-95 the entire way (some less than that near the major cities.
If you're taking the more inland route (Florida turnpike from Orlando to Port St Lucie and then down to Miami) the biggest "gap" between chargers is 60 miles- once, then 30-50 the whole rest of the trip- again all right along the major highways.
Further the "stop for an hour" garbage is like 2013-era FUD already debunked repeatedly in this very thread.
You get 150-200 miles of range added for a 10-15 minute supercharger stop- and have for years now.
While we are at it though--- Orlando to Miami is... only 234 miles.
So the idea you have to "keep stopping every 150 miles" on a trip that is only 234 miles total and you tell us you stopped overnight twice anyway is.... nonsensical....even if there weren't tons of options for those nights where you could've plugged in while you slept, which is increasingly common at hotels and airbnbs (and relatives houses if it's that kind of trip)..... so after the first 150 miles you could've stopped once for 10 total minutes and arrived in Miami with ~75 miles of range still available- and Miami itself has a ton of superchargers in it.
EDIT- I will say for folks who have never, ever, used an EV before there is ONE "You need to understand how this is not a gas car" thing that DOES impact supercharging times....
In gas cars you're used to "filling it up" each time you stop. Don't do that in an EV.
Just like a laptop or cell phone, the very top of the battery takes FAR longer to charge than the majority of the battery.
Hence if you for example had a long-range Model 3 with ~350 miles of max range on a trip-- you can add ~350 more miles of total range added by stopping twice for ~10 minutes each time, taking it from say 10% charge to 80% charge, than you add instead stopping once for 45-60 minutes going from 10% to 100% because it gets much slower at the top of the battery.
So the "had to stop for an hour" claim might be credible if someone hadn't done any research on how to use an EV efficiently and didn't understand you not only don't "have to" do that, you'd save a ton of time if you didn't.... except for all the other problems with the story mentioned like chargers being plentiful along the route described and the fact the whole trip is less than 250 miles end to end.
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With that being said, I actually think an EV is better suited as a rental (if rate is competitive).
With that being said, I actually think an EV is better suited as a rental (if rate is competitive).
- driving experience is so much better in a Model 3 than a Camry for most people. Instant acceleration being the big one that everyone comments on.
- 95% of the time leaving home with a "full tank" and not having to spend time going to fill up. There is a pretty substantial IRS tax break for installing your own Level 2 charger at home as well.
And I will point out that just 4 years ago, there was no "break even" between ICE and EV. The price of EVs is dropping nicely at the cost of production drops. This pendulum will probably swing the other direction in the next 2 years.
Where can I get a new Camry or Accord for $16,000-$20,000?
Because with just federal credits you can get a base Model 3 from inventory for about 30k, and as low as 26-27k with state incentives in some states.
MSRP on the base model accord is... about 29k....Camry is a bit over 26k.... both can easily option up 10k or more higher (and need to to take the comparison at all seriously- because there's also the fact they're not really "comparable" unless your definition is just "sedan that seats 5"--- features and performance-wise my Model 3 was much more comparable to stuff like my Lexus IS350 it replaced or a BMW 340, Audi S4, Infinity Q50, etc...or if you ignore the performance part at least requires optioning up the Honda/Toyota a decent bit-- thus making up front cost actually higher after tax credits... on top of higher to fuel and maintain over the life of the vehicle. All to still get much inferior performance.
OUCH. No insurance from your credit card?
After almost 2 hours of waiting we finally got to the counter and got our car. Expecting to be told which spot our car was in or to just go pick any car in a particular aisle, but instead was told to go to another waiting area in the garage. Once there, about 15 people waiting for their car. Some Hertz guy would show up every now and then and take our reservation ticket and sit it on an old wood table in some sort of crude manual system. We waited and waited. Every 10 minutes or so, a car would drive up and some lucky person would get their car, usually those who rented a car, not an SUV. We were told all their cars were being washed and they couldn't control which kind of cars came out. So, after another 1.5 hours of waiting in the hot, humid garage, an SUV that was WAY BIGGER than we rented drove up. It was ours. At this point, I'd have taken a horse and carriage, but it wasn't pleasant driving this large SUV around Oahu (just 2 of us, the SUV seats 8).
Once we got back after our trip, I tried contacting the main Hertz customer service, but wound up only getting the Honolulu manager who basically didn't care. While we were there, I tried renting from AVIS nextdoor, and when I told him out terrible and crowded the Hertz office was, he said it's like that every day. Keep in mind they have at least 10 counters and at most, 3 were in use (some agents finally came back from lunch).
I don't know what happened to Hertz -- they used to care. Now, they're just cheap and don't care.
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EV acceleration is game changing.
Regen braking improves driving experience.
Several Superchargers close to my vacation destination, so never an issue.
The waiting was not a big deal, lots of tech to play with in the car.
AC kills range.
Hertz activated Speed Limiter - Chill Mode the second day. Not sure why.. I had to call and have them disable it (2 hours on phone). limits top speed and cuts acceleration. Lame.
I was told it is Hertz policy to disable AutoSteer also, so you only have adaptive cruise control.
Hertz (via connected Tesla app) can see everything you do... speed, acceleration, proximity to others, rear cam side cams, interior cam (put tape over it), there is also a microphone in the car, not sure if it can be monitored though. Camera footage is recorded in the car, so manually delete before returning. Cringe.
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