Earning The Big Bucks

It didn't take being an Elon-hater like me to know why this was the dumbest fucking idea on the planet.

If Hertz went all-in on EVs, it could gain a yearslong advantage over Enterprise Holdings and Avis by positioning itself for exclusive deals with ride-hailing services and automakers. It’d be more profitable, too, because EVs were so much cheaper to operate, easier to maintain and safer, they figured. Meanwhile, O’Hara was touting the synergies with Certares’ network of travel agencies and its expertise in technology. He boasted of being able to solve the chronic software issues, and he even forecast the company would make an additional $150 million a year in profit, thanks to the rental business it’d get from his Amex GBT.

If Hertz could get the software engineering right, renting might actually be a pleasure rather than a necessary evil. When booking a Tesla, you’d get an app notification with a handy map showing where exactly to find it. The car would automatically unlock as you approached, recognize you by name, adjust the seats, mirrors and temperature to your preferred settings, upload your favorite playlist on, say, Spotify and display your destination as well as the expected battery consumption and charging options along the way. Returning the vehicle would be a similarly painless experience.

It's true that EVs can *in theory* be cheaper to maintian, but rental cars get beat up a lot and body work on Teslas is notoriously absurdly expensive. As for the rest of it, these rich tech guys have such weird ideas about what people want.