If you’re looking to pick up a used electric car bargain, then your luck may be in as Hertz is about to offload thousands of electric vehicles from its fleet. The rental giant will sell an additional 10,000 EVs that it initially promised as a result of “substantial depreciation” seen by its EVs.
Hertz initially announced plans to sell some of its electric vehicles last year, after it initially pledged to purchase 100,000 Teslas to clean up car rentals after the pandemic. Now, however, it’s found out the hard way that EVs aren’t the solid investments it first thought, so is offloading them at an alarming pace to try and cut its losses, according to Autoweek. As the site explains:
Nominally, Hertz aims to make money on selling its used rental cars after they accumulate a certain mileage. At least, it has generally made money in the past via this business model with internal-combustion vehicles. But the same has not been true for used EVs.
The culprits, once again, have been high maintenance costs and depreciation of EVs it has purchased for its fleets, while on the consumer side the EV charging experience has seen its own issues.
The result has been a loss of $392 million in the first quarter, despite a 2% growth in revenues over the same period in 2023 amid overall revenues of $2.1 billion.
Hertz initially planned to sell 20,000 electric models from its fleet, however an additional $195 million charge last quarter as a result of depreciation across its fleet left it with no choice but to sell even more electric cars.
The 30,000 Hertz is now selling are the latest black spot in its experiment with EVs, which some reports estimate have cost the American rental giant as much as $440 million.
A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik’s Morning Shift daily roundup.