The rental car company Hertz will be selling about one-third of the electric vehicles in its fleet after they lost value more quickly than expected, the company said on Thursday. The drop in value is a blow to the company’s efforts to replace gasoline vehicles with cars that do not produce tailpipe emissions.
The electric vehicles the company owned were also more likely to be involved in collisions, Hertz said, and they proved costly to repair. The company said it planned to buy more gasoline-powered vehicles to replace the 20,000 battery-powered cars it was selling.
“Certain of these E.V.s became uneconomical for us,” Stephen Scherr, Hertz’s chief executive, said in an interview on Thursday.
The company’s decision to sell 20,000 vehicles, which Mr. Scherr blamed partly on “unprecedented” price cuts by Tesla that undercut the cars’ resale value, provided fuel for opponents of Biden administration policies to promote the technology as a tool to address climate change and air pollution.
