Are rental car agencies ready for EVs? Last January, Hertz delivered the equivalent of a public slap to Tesla, announcing that it would sell thousands of the Teslas it had bought two years previously. Comments from customers and employees indicated that the mutual PR nightmare was the result of poor planning on Hertz’s part—a particularly embarrassing failure, considering that the rental giant has been experimenting with EVs since 2011.

Hertz is not the only company that has suffered by blundering blindly into electrification. In 2023, competitor Sixt announced that it would phase out Teslas from its lineup, for the same reason that Hertz cited: poor resale values (an issue that any EV owner could have warned them about).

Like every fleet operator, however, the company has no choice but to forge ahead with electrification, and it appears to have grasped the importance of securing expert help with its charging infrastructure.

Sixt turned to electric fleet management specialist Guided Energy, which has described some of the challenges it was able to address for the rental agency.

“Given different charging speeds, battery capacities, pickup times and available power, it became impossible to know which vehicle needed to be plugged in where and when,” Guided Energy  writes in a blog post. “Getting this wrong keeps the EV in the parking lot for longer and delivers a bad customer experience.”

“With multiple charging hardware providers and external CPOs, charging data [was recorded] in siloes across different systems in very different formats, making it hard to track charging costs.”

Guided Energy implemented an all-in-one platform that consolidates data from EVs, chargers and external CPOs in one place, allowing Sixt to automate reporting on charging costs. Automated charge schedules ensure that each EV has enough power at the right time, using real-time data from EVs, chargers and the company’s reservations system.

“Guided Energy has significantly streamlined our recharging processes, saving us substantial time and effort in managing electric vehicles,” said Marc Aubrée, Managing Director Sixt France. “The platform consolidates all our EV-related operations, including costs, supervision and fleet management. Our systems, vehicles and chargers are seamlessly interconnected. This integration simplifies EV management for operators, making it as straightforward as handling combustion vehicles.”

Source: Guided Energy