Hertz will sell electric cars after being burned by Tesla's price cuts
Hertz will be selling about one-third of the electric vehicles in its fleet after they lost value more quickly than expected, the company said Thursday. The drop in value is a blow to the company's efforts to replace gasoline vehicles with cars that do not produce tailpipe emissions.
The electric vehicles the company owned were also more likely to be involved in collisions, Hertz said, and they proved costly to repair. The company said it planned to buy more gasoline-powered vehicles to replace the 20,000 battery-powered cars it was selling.
«Certain of these EVs became uneconomical for us,» Stephen Scherr, Hertz's chief executive, said in an interview on Thursday.
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The company's decision to sell 20,000 vehicles, which Scherr blamed partly on «unprecedented» price cuts by Tesla that undercut the cars' resale value, provided fuel for opponents of Biden administration policies to promote the technology as a tool to address climate change and air pollution.
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., seized on the announcement during a hearing on Thursday on the climate policies.
Hertz's decision showed that electric vehicles are costly and unpopular, Barrasso told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. «The demand for electric cars is stagnating,» he said, adding, «so much for the Biden economy.»
Scherr implicitly put much of the blame on Tesla, which makes about half of all electric vehicles sold in the United States, for the rental car company's decision to sell its electric vehicles.
Tesla vehicles, which make up the largest share of Hertz's electric fleet, plunged in value after the carmaker, which Elon Musk runs, cut
