Hertz is selling off a third of its electric vehicle fleet–mostly consisting of Teslas–citing high repair costs as the reason, Tech Crunch reports.
The company first announced plans to 100,000 EVs from Tesla back in 2022. Though the announcement helped Tesla surpass $1 trillion in value, Hertz only ended up purchasing 35,000 as of this past October. Its total fleet of EVs amounted to around 50,000 vehicles.
In addition, the company had also made plans to purchase up to 175,000 EVs from General Motors and 65,000 from Polestar but hasn’t said whether the decision to sell a third of its fleet will affect those plans.
Hertz began selling its EVs last month and will continue to sell them throughout 2024, with many of them being heavily discounted. Shortly before announcing the sale of its EVs, Hertz’s global CEO Stephen Scherr stated that high repair costs for them were becoming a problem for the company.
Indeed, while EVs don’t require as much maintenance, in the event of a repair, the costs typically outdo that of an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, as Autoblog reports. According to an assessment from Kelley Blue Book, while maintenance costs for EVs over five years will cost $337 less than an ICE vehicle, the same doesn’t hold for repair costs. For EVs, repairs average $1,712 compared to $1,695 for ICE vehicles.
“The frequency of repairs may go down, but the costs for repair will go up,” explained Bill Newman, head of auto at SAP North America.
