In a blow to President Joe Biden’s green energy agenda, rental car company Hertz is selling off tens of thousands of electric vehicles (EVs), due to a lack of demand, to buy gas-powered cars.
Hertz executives announced on Thursday that they will be selling 20,000 EVs from their fleet, which accounts for about 33 percent of the company’s total number of EVs.
In return, Hertz will use the money from the EV sales to guy gas-powered cars, which executives said are in much higher demand than EVs, Bloomberg reported:
Hertz Global Holdings Inc. plans to sell a third of its US electric vehicle fleet and reinvest in gas-powered cars due to weak demand and high repair costs for its battery-powered options. [Emphasis added]
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The dramatic about-face, after Hertz announced plans in 2021 to buy 100,000 Tesla Inc. vehicles, underscores the waning demand for all-electric cars in the US. EV sales growth slowed sharply over the course of 2023, rising just 1.3% in the final quarter as consumers were put off by high costs and interest rates. [Emphasis added]
“The elevated costs associated with EVs persisted,” Hertz Chief Executive Officer Stephen Scherr said in an interview. “Efforts to wrestle it down proved to be more challenging.” [Emphasis added]
Due to a lack of demand, Hertz executives said their plans to buy 175,000 EVs from General Motors (GM) and 65,000 EVs from Polestar may be delayed.
The news comes as American auto dealers have warned that consumers are far less likely to buy EVs over traditional gas-powered cars despite all efforts from the Biden administration to get Americans into EVs.
“The reality, however, is that electric vehicle demand today is not keeping up with the large influx of [EVs] arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations. [EVs] are stacking up on our lots,” American car dealers warned Biden in a letter last year.
The Biden administration’s massive taxpayer-funded investments into EVs have yet to come to fruition. For instance, the $7.5 billion allocated to build electric chargers across the U.S. has yet to produce a single charger.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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