The CEO of Hertz falls victim to electric cars

Wanting to do too well, and especially to do it faster than the competition on the path to electrifying fleets, the head of Hertz has been ousted.

Just two years after taking the helm of the rental company Hertz, Stephen Kerr has left. Appointed in February 2022, the CEO had made the massive electrification of the vehicle fleet his priority.

More than just the individual customer base, the aim was to conquer the ever-growing market of professional passenger transport. Hertz had ordered 100,000 electric cars from Tesla at the beginning of 2022, with 50,000 destined for Uber. Hertz and Uber subsequently signed an agreement to gradually make an additional 25,000 electric cars available to VTC drivers by 2025. The Tesla models chosen initially were joined by Polestar vehicles.

The rental company was then pleased to have reduced maintenance costs for its electric fleet by five times compared to its thermal fleet due to the reliability of its wonders on Watts. Fewer breakdowns, fewer revisions, fewer driving errors, particularly regarding the clutch and gearbox, pure joy!

And the repair bills soar

But the reality was quite different with repair costs, especially for bodywork, skyrocketing beyond expectations. Hertz then decided at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 to slow down the deployment of its electric vehicles, citing the drop in resale value of these models and the high cost of repairs. In the meantime, they even took the initiative to sell their fleet of Teslas at prices inevitably lower than those in the used market. As for Polestar, which had already delivered about 13,000 electric cars to Hertz, out of the 65,000 units agreed upon during the grand announcement of the deal in 2022, they were talking about a “pause,” while Hertz refrained from commenting. Some silences are golden.

Because Hertz reported its biggest quarterly financial loss since the Covid-19 pandemic in the last quarter of 2023. The fear of a bankruptcy similar to that of the post-Covid era hampered the ambitions of its CEO. The saddest part is that we might say in a few years that he was right before anyone else…