Posted on 12/23/2024 11:51:15 AM PST by nickcarraway
"Enjoying your rental? Take it home with Hertz Car Sales."
Hertz bought a bunch of Tesla Model 3s for its rental fleet and quickly realized that Tesla depreciation would be extra bad at scale. In an aggressive effort to sell off its remaining Tesla inventory, the rental company is sending extra cheap buyout options to rental customers. If you like your rental, Hertz will sell it to you for an extra cheap good deal. One Hertz customer took to Reddit to show off a screenshot of the deal he got directly from Hertz, a 2023 Tesla Model 3 with 30,000 miles on the odometer for $17,913.
I wouldn’t normally consider buying a used rental car from Hertz unless I was extra desperate, but the low miles and bargain basement pricing might be worth a rethink. A new Model 3, for example, will cost at least double that price. Heck, maybe it’s worth grabbing. For under $18,000 I can look past a lot of ills, including driving a Tesla. Maybe this is the $25,000 Tesla that Elon was promising?
Tesla has an 8-year, 100,000 mile warranty on its battery packs, and there’s still a good bit of that battery warranty remaining on this particular car, assuming Tesla will honor it on a used rental car. That might go a long way toward easing my anxiety over buying a rental Tesla. These batteries don’t seem to fail often, but people who aren’t familiar with EVs are renting them and doing god knows what to charge them up. Preconditioning? Limiting max charge to 80 percent? I doubt these are common rental car practices.
For what it’s worth, there are a ton of used Teslas on the Hertz Car Sales site, but anything priced this cheaply shows well over six digits on the odometer, and isn’t nearly as appealing. It’s unclear if this Redditor just got a particularly good deal, or if Hertz is just trying to sell everything not nailed down before the end of the calendar year.
I recently acquired a 04 Jetta TDI. Someone actually junked it. I had to replace all the vacuum lines and pump to get it running right but I am half a tank in and it’s got 300 miles on the trip odometer.
It’s only a 14.5 gallon tank.
Best 150 dollar bomber I’ve bought :)
I went to a Hertz car sale lot earlier this year after I read how they were “giving away” Teslas. A total joke, the actual prices they were asking were ridiculous - anything but a giveaway.
There are pics out there where thousands of these brand new EVs are parked in large lots with weeds, trees, dirt, bird crap etc. in China are just sitting there after several years. The local chicoms aren’t buying them either.
You are right. This is not about EV’s but normal sales movement after 2 years.
Mine’s a 2018 BMW...one of the last diesels BMW exported to North America. I absolutely love it. At a steady 65mph (most of my miles are on the Interstate) it’s absolutely sublime. But you can’t buy a new diesel sedan in the US. IIRC Jaguar was the last brand that sold them here...2019 models.
That’s a good one.
Who wants a Tardsla who doesn’t hang out at Starbucks?
Elon fanboys deeply saddened.
Nothing says ‘efficiency’ like building a car that will be practically worthless within six years.
But maybe ‘efficiency’ is better demonstrated by launching a CAR into outer space.
The aliens who eventually find it will say “No wonder they jettisoned it into space; no one in their right mind would buy or drive one.”
Big rental places went all in on EV’s at varying levels. Fools.
Who wants to spend vacation worrying if they have enough charge or not?
Are they including fire insurance when it goes up in flames?
No, the Teslas have already been sold.
Are these vehicles purchased by Hertz through a manufacturer program where the manufacturer buys them back at an agreed price (subject to wear and tear and damage limits), or did Hertz just assume the entire fleet would be worth more after a few years than it turned out?
It would be a cool Babylon Bee headline though.
Lol.
It’s unclear if we know anything but here’s an article anyway.
“Who wants to spend vacation worrying if they have enough charge or not?”
or worse, making it to that big out-of-town sales meeting on time where you’re the one making the critical multi-million dollar sales proposal ...
They don’t have a good track record with reliability. That’s why Hertz is going down the toilet bad decisions.
Yes and no. IMHO as an EV owner, it’s more liable to be practical financially with a long daily commute, not just in the city driving. Probably about 12K miles per year of home charged miles is when the gas and oil change savings is worth the extra costs of an EV. At least based on the costs of power vs gasoline in Alabama, and the cost differences between EV’s and gas cars 2 years ago when it was time to replace my wife’s gas crossover anyway. I can’t say about energy costs in other areas, nor about the drops in car prices the past couple of years (have EV prices dropped more or less than gas cars? I haven’t kept up.)
My wife and I drive our EV 16K miles per year on home charged miles. The gas and oil change savings is very real with those kind of miles. We rarely drive our gas pickup, but it’s good for pickup chores, if we need 2 cars to run separate errands, or if we drive a long trip with few fast charging options. Bonus points with our home solar providing 80% of the power our all-electric home needs (including charging the EV). My EV vs gas threshold was 8K miles/year for the EV to be worth it (with my situation having solar). So it very much works with our use case.
Hopefully that will change in the next 4 years.
For 150 beans and 309,000 miles the old vagon drives pretty good. No rattles or anything but the autotragic gearbox sucks.
I would love to see the numbers.
Could you please provide a source?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.