The cars are to be delivered within the next 14 months.
(Photo: dpa)
Dusseldorf For the electric offensive, Hertz got a real superstar to help: In a commercial that the car rental company presented on Monday, star quarterback Tom Brady comes to a rental station – and then gets into an electric car. It is a Model 3 from Tesla in which the famous football player takes a seat. “Hertz is changing the rules of the game in terms of future mobility,” says Brady.
Brady is supposed to make the electric car palatable to the Americans as a rental car. The rental company plans to add a total of 100,000 Tesla vehicles to its fleet by 2022, primarily in the USA and Europe.
The car rental company from Florida is thus placing much more emphasis on electric mobility: With the new major order, the proportion of electric cars in the fleet is to grow to 20 percent. In addition, Hertz wants to install thousands of charging stations in its branches. “Electric cars have arrived in everyday life,” said Hertz boss Mark Fields, who once led the automaker Ford.
For Tesla, the major order is the breakthrough in the fleet business. So far, most companies have tended to avoid Tesla due to the poor service and lack of discounts. In Germany, according to the Dataforce 2020 specialist service, only 5,400 Teslas were sold as company cars – but the market has a volume of 820,000 vehicles.
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The Tesla share reacted correspondingly positively with a plus of up to ten percent on Wall Street. In the course of trading, the company temporarily jumped the much-noticed market capitalization threshold of a trillion dollar market capitalization and even overtook the Internet platform Facebook.
Another message should have spurred the share on Monday: According to sales figures from market researcher Jato Dynamics, the Model 3 was the best-selling car in Europe in September. No electric car had ever succeeded in doing this.
Good news from Panasonic
In addition, Tesla supplier Panasonic announced that the new 4680 battery format was ready for series production – Tesla boss Elon Musk presented the revised battery cell in autumn 2020, but the introduction has been delayed again and again since then.
In terms of the purchase price, the Hertz order for Tesla is worth $ 4.4 billion. In this case, however, Tesla is likely to have granted a price discount as an exception, given the size of the order. Hertz also has to manage its money, the company went bankrupt in the course of the corona pandemic in May 2020 due to its high debts. Hertz has been back from bankruptcy proceedings for a few months – with less debt and new ambitions.
Hertz could be the key to a lucrative market for Tesla. Because other car rental companies and company car customers could follow suit. In Europe alone, company car sales amount to a whopping 300 billion euros. Every fourth car that is newly registered in Germany is a company car. Car rental companies account for around ten percent of car sales.