[jakewins]

I’m 100% in the EV train, but this article is weird.

It says they ordered a ton of EVs, and that EVs have lower cost of maintenance, awesome - but it provides no evidence that EV maintenance costs actually contributed to the improvements here?

The statements they have from Hertz say “we made $$$$ from demand coming back to rent cars” and “we spent that $$$$ on buying EVs”.

The quotes and facts in the article are not aligned with the point made in the title

[alexfromapex]

I think a large majority of these EV analyses suffer from short-term biases as well. It will be interesting to see if the cost of maintenance remains super low when these vehicles need battery replacements.

[jakewins]

Yeah good point.

I always imagined it as similar to transmission replacement - ie. If they can make the battery pack last as long as a median transmission, then it’ll be after the overall vehicles useful life before it comes time to replace.

We will see. We just swapped the battery on ours, price if it hadn’t been done on warranty was $50K, on a car we paid $35K for.. but then again, cost to us was zero.

[jqpabc123]

It will be interesting to see if the cost of maintenance remains super low when these vehicles need battery replacements.

Just like what happens to the cost of maintenance when fossil fuel vehicles need engine and transmission replacements.

Anything is possible but there is no indication that a battery replacement will be a typical or expected repair during the normal lifetime of an EV. An 8 year, 100,000 mile warranty on the battery pack is quickly becoming the norm.

[bumby]

Isn’t the real difference the relative cost of repair? The post above yours at the time of this comment cites that battery replacement costs more than that of a new vehicle. It would be hard to find that in an ICE car (assuming it’s not an exotic or rare model).

[jqpabc123]

It would be hard to find that in an ICE car (assuming it’s not an exotic or rare model).

The cost to replace an ICE engine often exceeds the value of the car. In which case, the car is typically junked/sold for parts/salvaged.

[bumby]

Possibly the value of the car at the time of replacement, but not the value of the car when new. The other comment indicating it was 1.3x the cost of their EV when new.

[jqpabc123]

Possibly the value of the car at the time of replacement, but not the value of the car when new.

Does it really matter?

Once the cost exceeds the replacement value of the car, only a fool would pay the money to do the work.

[hef19898]

Those are rentals, so they run quite a few more charging cycles than private owned cars. On the other hand, rental companies write there cars off, and sell them early enough to maintain an up tondate fleet. So maybe batteries don't need replacement during the rental live, and companies don't care that much about resell value since the car is written off the books anyway.

[jsnell]

That is not how write-offs work. It is strictly better for the company to sell the vehicles for their fair market value than to write them down to below market value and sell them at that lower value. (You would not write them off entirely - that would be absurd.)

Writing something down/off means that you're asserting the asset has less/no economic value left, and you can basically treat the delta between its book value and the written down value as an expense for taxation purposes. But if you e.g. write off a car from its real value of $10k to $0, it'll reduce your corporate taxes by $3k, and means you can't rent the car or sell it. So why write it off, rather than sell it for $10k? $10k > $3k.

[hef19898]

There is a difference between book value of an asset, which is a symbolic 1 $ after it is completely written off, and the price you get for said asset on sale to the open market. Nobody forces you to sell, e.g., a 20 year old CNC machine for one dollar...

Edit: Just realized, the correct term is depreciation... That's what you get after a long day, and word by word translating from German to English...

[wintogreen74]

It's unlikely a company like Hertz would ever own the vehicle that long. They're selling these cars way before a battery replacement, unless it's still in the warranty range. I don't know the resale on an EV from a rental fleet. Do we have any data on this yet?

[greatpatton]

We already know the battery lifetime as many many electrical vehicles have reached hundreds of thousand of km... Anyway I don't think that Hertz really care as they are not going to keep the cars for that long.