I got stranded in a rental moving truck because they gave it to me with a low tire that turned out to be damaged. I'm still not sure if I handled it right, but I ended up denying the charges for an extra day since it was 100% their fault (still waiting to see if my bank agrees...). Nice to see these people were refunded, but still they were put on the blacklist. Fuck these companies.
The woman agreed to operate a 2000lbs+ machine w/o doing her due diligence. I’m sure the paperwork she signed stated that she was capable of operating such a machine, which means she lied. Hertz may be a crappy company, but this woman is irresponsible.
You are fine with google tracking you every waking moment?
Yes, I am aware you can be tracked via other means e.g. triangulation and some such. Still, I turn off as much as I can. I try to get as little privacy invasion as possible.
A lot of people claim that this is a ‘feature’ and welcome google into their lives. Obviously some don’t know the full extent of it all, but remember there’s people who willingly broadcast their location to the world via snapchat. Scary stuff
Hertz shouldn’t have gone with Tesla for EV’s. People not driving EV’s and are renting want something as similar to their current car as possible. Both my leaf, and my current Kia Niro operate mostly like an ICE. The torque is different. The acceleration is different. But the biggest difference is the shifter and that is still simple enough that you could figure it out in about 30 seconds. Other than that it’s a normal car. Anyone can get in and drive it. They don’t need to worry about figuring out the touch screen crap or how to turn on windshield wipers like a lot of people need to figure out with Teslas. Tesla’s used to be the pinnacle of EV’s but now they’re cheaply made, over teched out garbage.
Technology Connections is a YouTube channel hosted by a guy who explains various electronic gadgets, new and old. He had a series on analog TVs, he’s talked about VCR’s both VHS and Beta, (fun fact, beta failed because it was objectively worse) he had an episode on auto turn signals, and even an ancient juke box. It’s worth checking out.
I’m probably at least average intelligence and rented a tesla recently because it was what was available. I’ve never driven one before and was so frustrated with the experience.
As a renter, you only have the key fob which has a really vague drawing of how to use it that only makes sense after you figure it out. I had no idea you had to press it against the door column to lock/unlock it. How is that intuitive? why wouldn’t it be against the handle?
Had to sit and watch YouTube videos in the car to figure out how to do everything. It was really unclear how to easily turn off the car and the only way I could figure it out was diving into the settings menu to find a shutdown button, only to accidentally turn it on again as I’m leaving.
The manual door release is designed to be discreet! THE MANUAL DOOR RELEASE IS DESIGNED TO BE DISCREET!
Like, I get it that a person who buys the Tesla will take the time to learn it, but it’s a terrible rental experience. Especially when a lot of the tutorials are catered toward people who have the car tied to their phone, which you can’t do as a renter.
I wouldn’t say the women in the article are blameless, but it’s definitely not “adjust the mirrors and you’re good to go” like every other rental I’ve had.
The more I learn about those cars, the more I’m convinced that no thought at all went into their design beyond “hey that’s cool” (if even that, it probably was more along the lines of “hey, that’s cheap”).
I still don't really see what's cool about it other than: it goes really fast when your battery is charged. I guess some people are blinded by the big screen, but the whole interior looks like a concept car that was never ment to be released that way. It's all cheap tricks an gimmicks
Plenty of rentals, Hertz included, go out on less than full. You are only required to fill it where you got it. E.g car goes out with half, you return it with half.
the best part about this is that the rental company will charge you for not filling up to make up the difference… but then not bother filling up the car and just send it out with half a tank.
More often than not I’ve found they don’t care and won’t charge you. I’ve had several times where I didn’t care told them to change me and they said I was good.
I’ve never gotten anything other than full-to-full from Avis. But yeah, I’ve gotten that with Hertz and Enterprise - usually along with other problems.
Is situations like this where it’s a last minute swap, normally they’ll either have you return it at or above the current level or simply tell you that fuel is on the house.
Hertz is a horrible company. If you have any other option, use it. If you have no other option, just walk into traffic. It’s less painful than dealing with their scams.
A video on “how to open a door” is more than ten minutes long. Oh, Youtubers. You’re no better than those recipes that come prepended with the author’s life story sometimes.
According to YouTube advice people, monetization works best for videos between 7 and 15 minutes. That's changed now though as they're focused on Shorts, their TikTok knock off. Probably even easier to advertise between a bunch of 30-60 sec videos.
If you require a video on how to open doors at all there is a problem with the car, let alone a 10 minute video that includes explanations about how the manual release can damage the car.
A video isn’t necessary at all. The manual release is in a normal spot on both the driver and passenger front doors. New passengers try to open my Model 3 doors by pulling that lever all the time instead of using the normal button.
A few months ago I made a reservation to rent a car with hertz. When I showed up, the only available car was a mostly dead EV. I’m glad I did a little research before agreeing to it because I would have had to go way out of my way to charge it, and the charging process would have taken HOURS to achieve the charge I needed for my trip.
I’m pro-EV in general but rental companies shouldn’t be offering them in their current state imo
A charged battery should be expected from a rental EV, totally. It’s not difficult for Hertz to install a fast charger at their locations to handle that for their vehicles and just cycle through the to keep their inventory charged.
Now 100% may not be realistic. Just like your phone getting from say 80% to a full charge can take as long or longer than from 0% to 80%. But a full charge isn’t necessary most of the time, and there are a lot of public chargers, even without the adapter to use 3rd party chargers on a Tesla for instance.
and the charging process would have taken HOURS to achieve the charge I needed for my trip.
I see people post this, and honestly it’s usually just not true. It is entirely a lack of understanding and/or education and just assuming you need to treat it like your gas vehicle. Which isn’t unexpected of course, it’s just that fully charging is not necessary in an EV and will just waste your time. Now I’m not saying that the car battery would not take hours to fully charge, that is true… It does take a very long time to take a car battery from 0 to 100%… but you just don’t need to fully charge most of the time. Especially if you’re driving a longer distance.
Fully charging Lithium-Ion batteries actually damages the battery a LOT more than partial charges do, just like on your phone. And charging at a low state of charge is a lot faster than when the battery is nearly full. They’re both using Li-Ion batteries after all. It is actually quite fast to charge from say 20% to 60% on a DC fast charger or Tesla Supercharger. You don’t need to fully charge every time you plug in, on a trip you only need to charge enough to make the next leg of the journey.
In most EVs, you just enter your destination in the navigation and it will take into account your charge level and automatically include needed charging stops along the way. I can tell you from personal experience that in a Tesla, most of my stops during longer trips are no more than 15 minutes long because of how the fast chargers are spaced out. That 15 minutes usually will shove about 50% charge into the battery via a Supercharger. It will have you arrive at the charger with as little charge as possible on purpose because a lower state of charge means power can be sent to the battery faster (within reason, it tries to leave about 20% as a safety buffer). Unless you’re driving to a very remote location, you’re probably pretty close to a charger at any given time.
A screenshot of Tesla’s current US charging map for an example](i.imgur.com/xMrkhMT.png)/. You can check their website if you want to look at your area to see. Destination chargers are located at places like malls, hotels, etc. and are usually an amenity for guests to help charge slowly overnight or while shopping. Superchargers on the other hand will shove power into the pack to charge as fast as possible and get you on the way.
You don’t need to, you can ignore all that. The car will tell you where the closest charger is. You just have to tap the button and it will take you there. You can treat it like a regular gas car, you just may be wasting time by doing so and charging to 100% all the time.
I think that actually reinforces my point about rentals though- I’m a relatively tech savvy individual and I didn’t know much of that, and would have been unlikely to be able to easy learn that information in an environment/situation such as “need a rental car now”.
I don’t own an EV, so I don’t know how all this works. But I find this behaviour very weird. The amount of energy needed to move a car is gigantic compared to, well, everything else inside the car. Even without power to move the vehicle, there should be enough charge to open the doors, operate the computer and so on.
When my phone shuts down from lack of power, if I immediately put it in the charge, it will light up the screen to show the battery symbol. So, even if there’s not enough juice to power all the components of the phone, there’s still some charge to turn the screen on to show the battery status. Only if I don’t charge it for a long time is that the screen will take time to start showing me the battery symbol.
Phones do not show you the real battery state. The % of real charge left when your battery shows 0% will differ depending on OS and version, but no smartphone will allow you to continue running it when approaching empty.
This is because the closer you get to a really empty battery, the more risk of wear there is on components. Suddenly undervolting components because your battery physically cannot supply enough power is not good.
None of these batteries completely discharges. None.
Ignoring that, there is zero reason the vehicle needs to shutdown all powered accessories. It is more than capable of leaving enough charge to operate the door.
Thinking about this, how do the emergency lights work? Dead in the side of the road with not indicators available should be illegal.
You should reread the comment you replied to. They never said phone batteries completely discharge. They said users don't see the real "percentage of charge" when a phone "dies". They actually said that the reported 0% isn't actually 0%.
Further, they were accurate about undervolting components. I'll add that the damage would of course happen sooner to the battery than the components, but the point stands. No use throwing shade here.
I’m more familiar with desktop components than mobile devices, so that was my frame of reference there with undervolting. Didn’t know about the battery damage, thanks for the interesting tidbit.
Not sure about other phones, but Apple made their devices purposefully shut off before they're totally dead, so that they have enough power to be located for 1-2 days if lost.
It’s even weirder than that, there is an entirely separate 12v battery that powers the doors, screen, accessories, and everything else except the motors. The big high voltage battery literally only powers the motors and charges the 12v one. If the HV battery dies, the rest of the car works as normal just without being able to drive. So I don’t understand how this happened
Rental companies should try putting some stickers inside the vehicle which indicate where the manual door release is. It wouldn’t cost much and would at least save people unfamiliar with Teslas from getting trapped like this.
The driver and passenger manual door releases are literally in the most intuitive spot (in a Model 3 and Y at least, I haven’t been in an S or X to compare myself). So much so that I have issues with most new passengers trying to use that instead of the actual button that’s out in the open and very conspicuous on the top of the door arm rest, to open the door on my 3.
Even if someone is oblivious enough or has never opened a variety of car doors in their life to think of where a manual lever might possibly be located, and not find it on the door, it’s not that hard for someone to just Google it with the magic box we all carry now in our pocket/purse.
Even then though, how does someone run out of charge completely without noticing? The damned vehicle works just like an ICE, it tells you when it’s low. If you’re navigating somewhere it will even tell you whether you need to charge on the way, or if you need to slow down because you don’t have enough charge at a higher speed to make it. For fuck’s sake, it will even navigate you straight to the closest charger, you just have to tap okay on the screen. The article says they ran out of charge while searching for a charger. 80 miles of range when they picked it up… And they used it all searching for a charger… The car has a button on screen to show all nearby Tesla chargers. Any Hertz location renting EVs will be for sure within 90 miles of a Supercharger. This is 100% on the driver, sorry.
So many articles regarding EVs just give stupid people a free pass for having no common sense, instead shifting blame to the vehicle or a company instead of just calling a person out for being an idiot.
Even if we ignore EVERYTHING in the vehicle itself that will help you charge the car… How hard it it to pull out your phone and search for “electric vehicle charger”. I’m sure the first result is going to be Google or Apple Maps telling you how to get to a charger.
Even if we ignore that and just talk about not being able to get out because the battery is completely dead… The manual door release is in a normal spot where many other non-Tesla vehicles put their door latches. It’s not hard to find, nearly every first time passenger in my Model 3 tries to open the door with that instead of the normal button to pop it open automatically so it clearly is an intuitive location.
I’m sorry, apparently expecting a person to be able to type “car charger” into a search box, or either taping on the charger icon on the display or tapping on the navigate search bar and then “charging” to show nearby chargers is apparently too much to expect of someone with a driver’s license.
They couldn’t use a normal charger because they didn’t have an adapter. Apparently no one told them that they needed to find a Tesla charger. And did Tesla run out of color when they created that door knob? I wouldn’t even try to pull on that part of the button cluster.
They couldn’t use a normal charger because they didn’t have an adapter.
There really isn’t a “normal” charger since there are several different standards that have been used both in the US and worldwide. If you really want to go there and try to get pedantic about it though, the “Tesla” charger is now the North American Charging Standard. The standard that everyone is switching to, where other manufacturers are going to be providing adapters to their existing customers with old CCS plugs since new models will use the same Tesla connector and those old chargers won’t work on the new models going forward anyway.
Apparently no one told them that they needed to find a Tesla charger.
They also apparently didn’t think of looking for anything on the screen inside the vehicle itself that will literally navigate you to the closest charger either. Or look anything up on Google on their phone about it either. They just let the battery completely drain while driving around without trying to do anything to find a charger it seems.
Okay, I know this is going to personally offend you, but stupid people are allowed to have a life and do things in public. People with cognitive or executive disabilities are also allowed to rent a car. People with ASDs, people that come from an anti-tech religious family, people who have difficulty transferring knowledge from a familiar domain to an unfamiliar one even though it seems like it’s trivial to you – all sorts of people are allowed to use commercial services and expect reasonable accommodation. Honestly, I don’t even understand half the shit you just said, and I wouldn’t expect someone who’s never been exposed to an EV and is stupid etc to be able to deal with it on the fly while other stressful shit that happens when you travel is also going on.
Anyone who thinks even minor changes to a common user control system are easy should watch the average user when given a phone with a new OS for the first time and told to change a setting (lifetime iOS user -> android or vis versa).
I love my Tesla… but it isn’t clear to new drivers where they can and can’t charge, without some research. I can easily see someone assuming it works like a gas station and that they are all interchangeable.
How can you claim it’s not clear where to charge?This may have been true years ago with older interface versions, but not in the current interface. At least not on the Model 3/Y with horizontal screens. Not sure how the S/X with the vertical screens and separate dash cluster change the interface. But the vehicle in the article is a Model 3.
Even if you ignore the dedicated supercharger button on the right of the map, which can be hidden, the screen literally shows the navigation search box ALL the time on top of the map. When you tap on it one of the top suggested options is for charging, even without having to type anything in, and shows you all the nearby superchargers.
Things that are intuitive for you are obviously not intuitive for people who have to watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials to understand how the car works.
I think it’s probably the case of it being intutive for them now that they’ve used it. Once one gets used to a process or device it becomes intitutive for them. So it can look strange when people who aren’t familar with said device are struggling. e.g. riding a bike is easy once you know how. At least that’s what it looks like to me.
Even if you are completely right about everything being as simple as you say, nobody wakes up and says “gee, I’m going to be stupid/self-destructive/neurodivergent today and cause myself a lot of pain.”
The answer is to use it as a case study to improve the design or perhaps provide a leaflet, QR code to a PDF, or a laminated card to assist renters with controls that are safety critical or unique to the vehicle
That’s honestly not an issue 99% of the time unless you WAY outside civilization. That still leaves he entire Tesla supercharger network to use, which is and mapped directly into the car’s navigation interface and automatically used by the vehicle to let you know when and where to charge.
If you’re using the in-car navigation it will automatically include stops at Superchargers as needed to reach your destination. It even notifies you if you’re navigating to an area outside outside the range of the supercharger network based on your current charge level.
Even if we assume they totally ignored the in-car navigation on the big screen smack dab in the middle of the damned dashboard… Google maps includes EV charging info now for all the major charging networks.
Tesla’s software does A LOT to help prevent you from running out of charge. The only way it happens is if you ignore it all, or there’s a hardware issue with the vehicle, which doesn’t seem was the case here.
You’re right. That’s exactly why the manual release in an intuitive place where many other vehicles have their handles. It’s not hidden or behind some sort of panel or anything. It’s right there.
I’d like to say “oh, I see, thanks!" But that isn’t where any vehicle I know of has a handle. Every other car I’ve ever seen has them horizontally on the door, not where the power window controls are.
These are the most common things people shit on. If you don’t like Tesla I totally get it. Some of the quality issues and design issues are obnoxious. The CEO is very publicly an asshole manchild. There’s plenty to hate. Yet somehow it’s always the same 3 talking points of:
Doors are hard.
EVs can run out of power
EVs can catch fire
Each of these is immediately revealed as silly when you use one or even just Google people talking about their experiences outside of all the headlines complaining about doors. The vast majority of people need less than a few seconds to figure out the manual release, most do it by accident and the car tells them to stop. The car actively tries to get you to charge it with increasingly dire warnings and mitigations as you get closer to zero. EVs catch fire less often than gas cars.
Or maybe the damn door release should work regardless of power? I shouldn’t need special training to get out of a car in an emergency. Making an interior “manual release” that is hidden just seems like dangerously negligent design.
I have trouble believing any engineer was part of that decision. The default is always human safety. Hotel doors electronic locks will disengage during a blackout, elevators will stop in place rather than introduce a new risk by moving the humans further, your seatbelt is still uncomfortable and will always be and keep you alive, if an industrial machine senses danger the solution is too cut power to anything that moves.
Electricity is less reliable than a human, and if the human is dead it won’t matter how the door is opened.
Then why single out this specific company? I get that their public leader is being controversial and doing stupid/terrible things, but it’s more helpful and honest to talk about actual problems with their vehicles, such as the data privacy issues that have been uncovered over the past ~year. This artificially decreases their standing when compared to their competitors, and those guys really don’t deserve this benefit.
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