The cult members are out in force today! It is not you.
JimA
5 Likes
They may be keeping those EVs for even longer than they planned. That’s because, due to MSRP decreases, and due to much greater availability, the price of used EVs have dropped like a rock. If they can’t sell them for a reasonable price, they may choose to keep them a while longer.
Not anymore*. Salespeople have bosses just like everyone else does, and the boss tells them where to go and when to go. The boss spends a lot of time on the phone with potential customers, setting up meetings, often far in advance. Sometimes those meetings get shifted. In fact, they very often get shifted, because to the customer, meeting with a salesperson is among the lowest things on their priority list. If something important comes up, boom, they cancel the meeting and reschedule to next week/month. I met with salesmen constantly throughout my career, and I can’t even count how many times meetings with them had to be rescheduled. Even when they were flying out to meet me.
* Years ago, there was a type of “independent” salesperson, who chose where and when to go places, and as long as they brought customers money in, it was fine with their bosses. It doesn’t work that way anymore in B2B commerce. Maybe it still does for B2C to some extent? Do door-to-door salespeople still exist? I doubt it.
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I’m not sure who was talking about “door to door salesmen”, who so far as I can tell pretty much went out with Willie Loman.
I’m talking about business travel , which curiously enough for your proposition, is at or near its all time high, depending on the month. More travel than ever before. Ever.
Most of that, as the airlines will tell you, is business travel , not people going to Disneyland (although there’s that, too.) Sorry the data doesn’t comport with your theory, but facts is facts:
(Feel free to adjust the chart to see just how much travel is going on these days for people who need to rent a car at the other end. You might be surprised.)
My uncle was a mfr’s rep for 30+yrs. His territory was MN to MT, so the entire area from Lake Superior to the MT/ID border. Let’s just say he put a LOT of highway miles on the Oldsmobiles he bought new every few years. The dealer absolutely LOVED him. He was selling to the corporate offices, not individual stores. Think along the lines of Trustworthy and Ace Hardware chains, Fleet Farm, auto parts stores, and so on. When he retired, his accounts were converted by the various mfrs to “in house” accounts.
I am well aware of the salespeople who work for the company and usually have few tools to lever their position/products with buyers. However, that situation is created by the mfr, not the salesperson.
Consider a Tesla sales rep vs virtually any other sales person at other car companies.
That is a problem created by your company, not the salesperson. If clients do not want (or worry abouyour products, then they are not worried about the salesperson–because they are not worried about what is offered. Are you offering “me too” products sold by a variety of companies? If you have unique stuff, that is an incentive for the customer to see the saleperson. Choosing to not make time to see a supplier means your company needs to figure out how to become and important part of your customers’ future. Or maybe NOT???
Thanks for the break down. You didn’t explain why I need to charge the Tesla which started at 91% but fell to only 39% before I got to Allentown with no side trips and very slim chance of making it to my destination.
Have you ever been to central PA?
This is a distance of only 70 miles. Based on the balance of my one way trip, I had another 50 miles to get to my hotel and week’s stay.
Could I have made it all the way there without charging? Possibly. Would I have had any charge left for the week? Not likely IF I made it there in the first place.
Remember, my day starts really early, I don’t get lunch off campus and I would have to drive hilly back roads to get to the nearest charger (a distance of several miles and many minutes). At that location, I would have to spend at least once filling it all the way up to ensure I didn’t have to do it again. (this is the 52 minute round trip DURING the week).
In this scenario, but using an ICE vehicle, not only did I not have to think about range coming or going, I didn’t think about it at all. I just did this two weeks ago.
Conversely, I used up almost 45 minutes coming and going to perform an activity that is just simply not needed in an ICE car for the same travel plan.
I can completely see why you don’t see it from the other perspective. Luckily, you don’t have to.
For now, EVs need a crutch. Battery range and infrastructure. I’ll be along soon. As soon as these are fixed.
In the meantime I will have to tolerate charging more frequently than an ICE car and subverting my route to where I can find chargers (instead of a new, unknown road along the way). I’ll have to take more time from my busy week to stay on it.
I hope these challenges become more infrequent and less of an imposition, and soon.
3 Likes
In a major market they’re at more than 60 radio stations. For any given demographic there are probably more than 20. In the television sphere there are 10 broadcast stations. If you are selling advertising nationally there are 100 cable channels, again with 40 having some reasonable claim on any particular demographic.
If you are selling toys, there are around 500 manufacturers all vying for a slice of the toy aisle, which is dominated by 2 or 3. If you want to get into WalMart, Target, or even the Dollar Store, you go visit them, usually more than once.
I won’t even try to explain to you how the food industry works, but my brother used to do store set-up for several chains, and later transitioned into the business of planning whereby manufacturers angle for the best position (or even some) in stores of infinite configuration. There are thousands of suppliers - and it’s not as simple as you seem to think.
Back to broadcast: there are music consultants who fly in for a day, people who design news sets, jingle companies hawking their wares, syndicators trying to sell shows, and lots more. I’m afraid to say you don’t seem to have a handle on how much of business works.
As I noted, revenue airline miles are at or near an all time high. There’s a lot of travel going on and presumably a lot of car rentals as well. Perhaps there is a macroeconomic angle to this (looking at airlines & rental company earnings), in the meantime, sales still requires “salesmanship”, at least to some degree. It isn’t all handled by computers in the dark like Google and Facebook bidding in tenths of a cent, nor is it easily reduced to “are you selling a me too product”. Sometimes you don’t have a choice but to join the scrum.
“My uncle was a mfr’s rep for 30+yrs. His territory was MN to MT, so the entire area from Lake Superior to the MT/ID border”
I drove that stretch on a visit to Glacier NP, the Minnesota Lake Superior shoreline and the Montana mountains were awesome. The areas in-between not so much ( but still cool, it was so different than the forests and lakes that I’m used to ). Driving thru North Dakota during the winter time must have led to some scary times for your uncle. I don’t think he would have wanted an EV even if they had existed, adding range anxiety to the weather anxiety he must have dealt with would be tough to handle. Wide open spaces.
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No idea. My best guess at this point is that you’re not reporting the numbers accurately (or the car wasn’t). Philly airport to Allentown is at most 68 miles, so you using up 52% of the range means that the car’s range is (roughly) 131 miles. That’s about half the actual range of Hertz’s Model 3 (260 miles).
Meanwhile, even if those bizarre numbers were correct, you just let the navigation system take you to the superchargers at Hamburg and charge up until you are comfortable with it. It’s right on your way (Hamburg, PA | Tesla). Then you have plenty of charge for the week and you can pick up more at Allentown or Hamburg on your way back to the airport if you like.
Sure. But not for many years now.
This is strictly equivalent to “If I ignored the gas station and drove twenty miles down the road, then I would have needed to forty mile round trip to fill up later.” The only proper response is “So don’t do that.” Problem solved.
Only in your imagination.
-IGU-
2 Likes
Looks like Hertz has had a change of heart.
Hertz Global is slowing down the pace by which it adds battery electric vehicles to its fleet, executives said on a third-quarter earnings call on Thursday.The rental car company cited Tesla’s price cuts negatively impacting the resale value of its EVs, and higher than expected repair costs for EVs as a reason to slow its pace of electrification.
Hertz now has 35,000 Tesla vehicles and around 50,000 electric vehicles in its fleet – far shy of the 100,000 Teslas that Hertz originally said it was ordering and expected by the end of 2022.
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Interesting. What I found most surprising was the comment discussing possible causes for higher maintenance (not repair) costs associated with EV’s:
“The reality of electric vehicles is that they can be 1,000 pounds heavier or more than gas vehicles, and they move faster, with higher torque. Since they’re extremely zippy and heavier, it’s just physics — the ability to overcome inertia so quickly is going to effect their suspension systems, the brakes and steering columns. It’s counter-intuitive, but even with fewer moving parts they are susceptible to requiring more maintenance. They especially require tire-swapping, because the tires wear out more quickly from that high torque and weight.”
I knew that EV’s were hard on tires, because of their weight - but it never occurred that the higher torque and acceleration that electric motors provide might contribued to that as well. Or to wear and tear on other systems. Though I wonder if that might be an artifact of people being a little harder on their rental cars than their own vehicles…
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Some of that will very likely be the case. It is fair to assume that vast majority of people driving a rental Tesla have tested the 0-60 time - something owners might do once but rentals are experiencing it almost daily.
Hawkwin
Tested his EV rental at least once.
Probably true of rental ICE vehicles as well, which Hertz has lots of experience with.
DB2
I doubt it is to the same extent. I don’t recall ever testing the 0-60 time of a normal boring ICE rental. Who wants to hard drive a Camry?
A 25 year old kid that is working for a company that sends him all around the country. LOL
Andy
2 Likes
Maybe in theory. In reality, your acceleration rate is governed by the vehicle in front of you. Aunt Blabby is not likely to want to make max G hole shots at every stop light.
Steve
And that is in addition to higher repair costs.
The rental car company reported lower than expected margins in the third quarter of this year, citing EV repairs as one of the challenges. “Collision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle,” said Mr Scherr.
DB2
2 Likes
Don’t they have insurance? I mean, everytime I rent a car I have to initial 6 places to accept or decline the insurance…don’t they set the rates for that?
Mike
1 Like
Hertz, like most rental companies and many corporate entities, is self insured. If their actuary numbers were off, they charged (or offered) the incorrect daily fee for insurance, likely leading to a shortfall on this line item for the period.
This is easily fixed, but one time charges could be significant depending upon how far off actuals tracked against plan.