The whole plan, it must be said, had the best of intentions. American rental car giant Hertz saw the way the car market was going and decided to invest in building the largest electric vehicle rental fleet in North America back in 2021. That meant hundreds of thousands of EVs from Tesla, General Motors, Kia, Polestar, Volvo and more. It even got Tom Brady involved in the whole thing.
But thanks in large part to huge depreciation costs—almost a third of which it blames on EVs—Hertz's adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization still amounted to $567 million in quarterly losses. In other words, ouch. Hertz's EV woes have often been depicted as a sign of trouble for the electric segment, or that vast swaths of mainstream consumers aren't 'ready' to move away from gasoline entirely.