Hertz is selling 20,000 used EVs due to high repair costs

The rental car company will replace them with gasoline-powered vehicles.

See full article...

 

[Quisquis]

Limiting acceleration on EVs needs to be a federal law or safety standard. EVs don't move like other cars on the road expect them to and it's creating a dangerous situation as they push for higher and higher acceleration to appeal to buyers in an arms race

This doesn't have a snowballs chance in hell of happening tho

 

[Quisquis]

Did you see today's article on BMW using an LLM to help users understand how to use the various features in their cars. This kind of thing might really help people who rent cars and aren't familiar with a particular one.

The car rental thing is a real problem... I'm driving a car old enough to vote in my daily life, and a couple of weeks ago I was in a rental whose behavior was wildly unexpected.

 

[Quisquis]

In what way was it different?

The radio turned on when I started the car sometimes, despite the fact that I had it off when I turned the car off.

It would shut off when I started it in the morning to warm it up.

It would honk the horn and flash the hazards randomly if I put it in park while I was sitting in it.

And the lane assist was terrible... I've had a few rentals recently, and the Chevy Malibu was the worst; it would bounce between the lane lines like it was a bowling ball in a bumper lane, and that was when it was behaving well; it was bad enough that I reached out to Chevy and told them it was dangerous.

 

[Quisquis]

In my CR-V it'll do that if you have Lane Keep Assist off -- essentially it is just emergency lane departure pulling you back into the lane and sending you straight for the other side of the lane. With Lane Keep Assist turned on, it keeps the car centered exceptionally.

Yeah, it's not a universal thing; when I turned it on in a Kia I had recently, it worked great!

I don't think I was turning it to the off state unless the on state is the default when you start the car and does even less than the off state.

 

[Quisquis]

On has been the default state for lane assist on each of the four vehicles I’ve owned with the feature and, to my best recollection, every rental I’ve driven as well. The system shouldn’t be doing very much…assuming the driver is doing their job keeping the vehicle centered in the lane. I‘m usually unaware of it until I have need to “hug” one side of the lane.

Edit to add, Chevy’s Quick Start Guide and Owner‘s Manual for the Malibu (I chose 2022) don’t give any indication regarding the default state. The instruction is: “To turn on or off, press the /\ Lane Keep Assist button on the steering wheel.” There is also the warning, in both publications, that the system isn’t an “auto tracker” — you need to steer and control the vehicle. When the feature is on the Car between the lines symbol (that I did my best to recreate) will appear on the dash. There’s a bit more detail about how it works in the full manual, but use is pretty much “drive as you normally would.”

This all checks out with me using it right.