What a genius plan…
Hertz and General Motors have proudly been heralding the dawn of a new era as the two companies have a new electric car agreement. If GM will build 175,000 EVs Hertz will buy them and provide them for rent. This is what progress looks like and everyone should be happy, as we’ve been told and why not?
Check out the classic Ford donated to a famous museum here.
It wasn’t that long ago that many in the auto industry looked at rental sales as something akin to a four-letter word, a cheap trick to pad the sales figures, something fit only for substandard brands to push cheap, paltry vehicles onto the public. If you’ve rented many cars, you know exactly what we mean.
Now, selling a bunch of electric cars to be used in rental fleets is a bold, brave, and progressive move which should be celebrated with much fanfare. What a time we live in.
If you’re thinking this deal is just for little Chevy Bolts, it’s not. Hertz will be buying not only electric cars but also trucks and SUVs from Chevy, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, and BrightDrop. The 175,000 units will be purchased “over the next five years” so it won’t be all at once. Still, this will require quite the transformation to Hertz locations.
On top of that, customers who aren’t familiar with EVs will need to get up to speed. That’s probably part of the point of this program. After all, to get more people onboard with swapping their gas-burner for an electric appliance, automakers need to get people to try them out.
On the other hand, when was the last time you drove a rental car and said “I should really get one of these”? Maybe that happens sometimes, but Nissan is a testament to how poorly that strategy has worked. Also, if that were the case, the Jeep Compass and Patriot would’ve been runaway hits.
Hertz certainly has been on an EV tear lately, using NFL quarterback legend Tom Brady to promote its new fleet of rental Tesla vehicles. In other words, it looks like the future of Hertz will be electric.
Photos via GM
