Hertz Is So Desperate To Unload Tesla Inventory It's Asking Customers If They Just Want To Keep Their Rentals [UPDATE]

Hertz bought a bunch of Tesla Model 3s for its rental fleet and quickly realized that Tesla depreciation would be extra bad at scale. In an aggressive effort to sell off its remaining Tesla inventory, the rental company is sending extra cheap buyout options to rental customers. If you like your rental, Hertz will sell it to you for an extra cheap good deal. One Hertz customer took to Reddit to show off a screenshot of the deal he got directly from Hertz, a 2023 Tesla Model 3 with 30,000 miles on the odometer for $17,913.

Updated Thursday, December 26, 2014 at 11:55 a.m. Hertz sent Jalopnik the following statement from a Hertz spokesperson:

“It is inaccurate to characterize connecting rental customers with cars available for purchase as anything other than expanding customer choice. Because Hertz not only rents cars but sells them online and in over 40 locations nationwide, we can often offer customers the unique ability to purchase the car they are renting or browse our diverse inventory of luxury sedans, SUVs, and EVs online.

I wouldn’t normally consider buying a used rental car from Hertz unless I was extra desperate, but the low miles and bargain basement pricing might be worth a rethink. A new Model 3, for example, will cost at least double that price. Heck, maybe it’s worth grabbing. For under $18,000 I can look past a lot of ills, including driving a Tesla. Maybe this is the $25,000 Tesla that Elon was promising?

Tesla has an 8-year, 100,000 mile warranty on its battery packs, and there’s still a good bit of that battery warranty remaining on this particular car, assuming Tesla will honor it on a used rental car. That might go a long way toward easing my anxiety over buying a rental Tesla. These batteries don’t seem to fail often, but people who aren’t familiar with EVs are renting them and doing god knows what to charge them up. Preconditioning? Limiting max charge to 80 percent? I doubt these are common rental car practices.

For what it’s worth, there are a ton of used Teslas on the Hertz Car Sales site, but anything priced this cheaply shows well over six digits on the odometer, and isn’t nearly as appealing. It’s unclear if this Redditor just got a particularly good deal, or if Hertz is just trying to sell everything not nailed down before the end of the calendar year.