NYT reporter blames Hertz for his own ignorance of EV range and charging
We’ve all read so-called “range anxiety” stories — and most EV owners know they amount to a hill of beans when it comes to the lived experience of electric cars. And yet, there seems to be a narrative in mainstream media that range anxiety is the key issue when it comes to EV adoption, one that they’re rather keen on pushing whenever the opportunity arises.
The New York Times published an article this week in which one of its climate reporters — one who claims to have had experience driving and charging Teslas in the past — describes an incident that ended with his depleted rental Volvo C40 Recharge being towed away by Hertz in rural Minnesota.
The blame, according to that Times reporter, lies at the feet of Hertz for not informing him of the few charging stations where he was headed (how would they know?), the C40 Recharge’s “slow” recharge speed (it supports 149kW DC), and the general state of US charging infrastructure (read: the one charger he found was too slow).
The reporter also briefly blames himself for choosing an EV for a trip into rural farming country without checking on the availability of charging stations, but this seems rather beside the overall story he’s attempting to drive home here: EVs and EV infrastructure aren’t “ready” for regular Americans. From the article:
But for now, if electric vehicles can’t get me from Minneapolis to the South Dakota border and back, they’re almost certainly not ready for the great American road trip.
The facts of the story are as follows.
- The reporter rents a C40 Recharge from Hertz in Minneapolis.
- He says the vehicle has 200 miles of indicated range (read: it probably wasn’t fully charged — the C40 offers 226 miles of EPA range), but knows that he has planned a 308-mile round-trip journey with deadlines.
- He finds a single (6kW) charger while en route and stops to use it, but it’s Very Slow (“2%” added in 30 minutes).
- He decides to go on anyway, hoping there will be more charging stations ahead (he does not appear to research this at all). There aren’t any.
- He arrives at a farm near the South Dakota border with 20% charge remaining (45 miles) and charges the car on an AC wall outlet for 15 hours, adding 20 miles of range (so, 65 miles, presumably — this will become important later).
- He decided that because there are no chargers within 50 miles of the farm, he has to call Hertz and have them tow the car, which they do, and he gets a ride with a friend back to Minneapolis.
- Hertz charges him a $700 tow fee, and he works with Hertz PR to get this refunded because he believes the fee is unjust.
A few things come to mind.
First, I can’t even begin to understand how any of this is Hertz’s problem. This person used a rental vehicle in a way that was likely to leave it stranded and is blaming the rental company for this? Is this any different than renting a Ford Mustang and then blaming Hertz when it gets stuck on a washed-out dirt road in the backcountry? Did he even tell Hertz what his route was? Did he truly expect them to say something like, “Hey, this is probably going to mean planning your charging carefully”? His justification here is borderline ridiculous.
But Hertz deserves some blame too. The company rented me a car that was slow to charge, and did nothing to warn me about the dearth of charging stations outside of Minneapolis. Surprising me with a huge fee poured salt on the wound.
Second, his assertion that this was a “slow charging” car. Now, this is just flatly wrong — the C40 Recharge supports 149kW DC fast charging. While you’ll be lucky to find something like that out in the Minnesota sticks (barring Tesla Superchargers), a 50kW charger plugged in for an hour would likely have avoided this whole debacle.
Third, the whole chain of events here is a comedy of errors. I bothered to actually do some Google Maps sleuthing, and everything about this outcome was utterly avoidable. The reporter claims that a 6kW Blink charger was the “only” option on his way back to Minneapolis, but that was only after he’d passed a 50kW ChargePoint about 60 miles into his journey, presumably with around 140 miles of indicated range remaining on the C40. Had he stopped there and charged near to full, he’d have been able to hit the same station on the way back for a brief second charge before returning the car the next day.
All this is to say: The person who ended up in this situation was a victim of their own ignorance. Nothing more, nothing less. In choosing to use a vehicle with an understood set of capabilities and limitations, he chose not to inform himself and instead ended up in a debacle whose summary analysis should have started and ended at “well, that was stupid of me.”
As icing on the cake, his claim about the car being unable to reach another charging station after adding 20 miles of range at the farmhouse overnight seems dubious. A ZEF 50kW station in Marshall, Minnesota, is at most 65 miles from wherever this person was headed, and likely a bit closer (I picked a town that would have actually made for a round trip longer than the 308 miles the reporter claimed).
The article says that the car showed no chargers “within 50 miles” of the farm, so presumably that means anything beyond that radius just… didn’t exist?
I get it: When traveling for work, considering the peculiarities and planning necessary for your means of conveyance is probably not the first thing on your mind. But when you’re taking a 300-plus-mile road trip in rural Minnesota in an electric car, you should probably be thinking about this stuff.
And as for Hertz refunding that $700 tow fee, while I’m not going to say I love anything about Hertz as a company, it sure seems like they did it to avoid the ire of The New York Times more than any belief this person had a valid grievance.
EVs aren’t complicated. This person’s trip was entirely feasible — with five minutes of planning. They chose not to put in that five minutes and ended up stranded. I don’t think electric cars or their infrastructure are to blame.
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Autonomous taxi company Waymo faced scrutiny last month when a car was caught on video illegally passing a stopped school bus that was letting children off in Atlanta. Now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking into it.
Georgia State Representative Clint Crowe seemed stunned after being presented with video of a Waymo driverless car illegally passing a stopped school bus on Briarcliff Road in Atlanta last month. “I’m a big fan of new technologies and emerging technologies and I think that driverless cars are going to become more prevalent,” he told local NBC news affiliate WBIR. “But we got [sic] to think about how they’re going to comply with the law.”
WBIR | Waymo illegally passes school bus
Crowe co-sponsored Addy’s Law in 2024. The legislation was named after 8-year-old Addy Pierce, who was killed in Henry County after being struck while crossing the street to get to her bus. The law stiffened penalties for illegally passing a stopped school bus, carrying penalties of up to $1,000 in fines and even jail time.
According to Crowe, those rules still apply to autonomous vehicles. “The majority of our traffic laws, the penalty is usually a fine and or driver’s license suspension. These cars don’t have a driver, so they don’t have a driver’s license and so we’re really going to have to rethink who’s the responsible party, who’s going to be responsible for being in control of that vehicle and who’s going to be the operator of that vehicle,” he said.
Crowe believes manufacturers should face stronger consequences when their vehicles break the law, saying the $1,000 fine doesn’t go far enough.
Now, thanks to pressure from social media and politicians like Crowe and Geoirgia State Senator Rick Williams, who helped co-author Addy’s Law, it seems like NHTSA is getting involved.
Prompted by media reports, the US Department of Transportation issued an investigation regarding Waymo’s AV, which states that, “the AV initially stopped, but then drove around the front of the bus by briefly turning right to avoid running into the bus’s right front end, then turning left to pass in front of the bus, and then turning further left and driving down the roadway past the entire left side of the bus. During this maneuver, the Waymo AV passed the bus’s extended crossing control arm near disembarking students (on the bus’s right side) and passed the extended stop arm on the bus’s left side.”
While it remains to be seen how much work NHTSA is actually doing amid the ongoing shutdown of the Federal government, it’s worth noting that, regardless of the outcome, Senator Williams said he plans to introduce new legislation that would hold driverless car companies accountable with higher fines if their vehicles violate traffic laws. If that passes in Georgia, it could set the stage for politicians across the US and even abroad to use similar fins to halt the spread of autonomous taxis in their states.
“Driverless cars should be stopped until it can be figured out,” said Williams. “We should not have this on the road. It’s too dangerous for our children.”
You can read NHTSA summary, below.
We’re typically pretty tech- and autonomous-forward here, but as a parent I would absolutely lose my s*** if a Waymo or Robotaxi or whatever else ran over my kid. but I’ve also seen plenty of human drivers blow past a school bus with a knee on the steering wheel and both eyes glued firmly to their phones. Let us know who you’d be more ready to trust with your kids’ lives in the comments.
SOURCES: WBIR, NHTSA, via School Transportation News.
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![Lion Electric school bus warranties voided, leaving districts stuck [update]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/07/unforgivable.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Nobody ever says “this is business” before doing something nice, and the recently reborn Lion Electric company is keeping that streak alive by doing the unthinkable to cut costs: they’re going to void the warranties on hundreds of electric school buses.
UPDATE 01NOV2025: two Lion Electric buses caught fire, now they’re in more trouble.
This past summer, the fallout from Lion Electric’s dissolution reached a critical mass, and the company’s new owners — the Quebec-based real estate giants Groupe MACH — decided to cancel the warranties on electric school buses sold in the US, leaving many districts with unsafe or broken down buses and no recourse to get their money back while the brand continued to take orders and make money in Canada.
Now, it seems like even the Canadian fleets have some serious safety concerns. School Transportation News and the CBC report that The Quebec Ministry of Education has ordered Lion school bus models be taken out of service immediately after a pair of LionC electric buses caught fire in Montreal, Quebec on Sept 9th, leading to disruptions across the province and a renewed scrutiny of Lion bus safety (Lion360 diesel-powered school buses, which Lion manufactured prior to only producing electric vehicles in 2017, were also affected by the issue).
Lion Bus (the company’s new, official name), has issued an inspection bulletin detailing a four-hour repair, which reads, “We have identified some potential anomalies in a sub-component of the HVAC system that Lion obtains from a third-party supplier … in the interest of safety above all else, we request that Lion bus operators perform the following inspections and modifications: mandatory inspection of several low-voltage electrical connections, replacement of certain electrical connectors, replace fan fuses with less powerful ones, adding a fuse to an HVAC control panel circuit. This inspection and modification procedure must be carried out on all Lion360 (diesel) and LionC 3rd generation and earlier buses (Gen3, Gen2 and Gen1).”
No word yet on whether the issue impacts any of the few Lion Electric buses still on US roads, but remember: Lion Bus wouldn’t help you if it did.
You can read about Lion’s decision to leave US school districts holding the bag on its troubled products in the original July post, below, then let us know how you feel about Groupe MACH’s handling of the situation in the comments section at the bottom of the page.
The warranty story
In a letter issued to exiting Lion Electric customers last week, Deloitte Restructuring announced that the warranties on all Lion vehicles purchased outside of the company’s home Province of Quebec are null and void – leaving dozens of school districts in the lurch with stranded assets that won’t get fixed, and can’t be sold to generate funds for replacements.
“We are working with alternate vendors at the expense of the school district to help keep our electric buses functional and on the road,” explains Dr. Richard Decman, Superintendent of Herscher CUSD No. 2 district in Herscher, Illinois. “Currently, six of our 25 (Lion) electric buses need some type of repair.”
Student Transportation News reports that Lion buses represent fully half of Herscher’s overall fleet of 50 buses, and that the district has received nearly $10 million for the purchase of 25 electric buses and the related charging stations from various state and utility incentive programs.
Herscher isn’t the only district having problems with Lion buses. “All four Lion buses that we own are currently parked and not being used,” Coleen Souza, interim transportation director of Winthrop Public Schools, told Clean Trucking. “Two of them are in need of repairs which would cost us money which we are not willing to invest in because the buses do not run for more than a month before needing more repairs.”
More of the same in Maine, where Yarmouth School Department bought two Lion Electric buses in 2023 with the state covering the costs. According to Superintendent Andrew Dolloff, the buses almost never worked. “We’ve had some sporadic service over the past two years, but as soon as the tech leaves, the buses produce error codes again,” explained Dolloff. ” and “Then the technician quits or is released, and we wait a few months for the next response.”
Dolloff added that Yarmouth’s electric buses did not operate during the 2024-25 school year.
Lion’s new owners are seemingly uninterested in their customers’ plight – which might be easily dismissed if those new owners, Groupe MACH, weren’t also the old owners of Lion Electric.
That’s right, kids. Quebec-based real estate company Groupe MACH, which stepped in to “save” Lion Electric earlier this summer, along with Ontario-based Mirella & Lino Saputo Foundation, bought $90 million of equity in Lion Electric back in 2023. And, while the MACH people may not have been the ones who ultimately made the call about voiding the warranties (that decision was made by the Deloitte bankruptcy team), it is absolutely Group MACH who have, to date, not announced plans to continue to honor those warranties, either.
Make of that what you will.
Deloitte Lion letter
SOURCES: School Transportation News, Clean Trucking, Deloitte.
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The first-ever Liebherr MK 120-5.1E electric crane in customer hands has rolled into the narrow, historic streets of Bern’s old town at 20 meters tall with a 45 meter reach and (of course) zero emissions, no vibrations, and almost no noise.
Deployed by Swiss construction firm Zaugg AG Rohrbach, the new Liebherr electric mobile crane is working hard placing temporary roofs above operational construction sites. It’s precise work, since the narrow streets of Bern’s historic old town weren’t even built for cars — much less massive, five-axle construction machinery. The prices controls and smooth operation of the electric drive mean the MK120-5.1E’s operators could confidently navigate the narrow streets without causing damage and creating new, unpaid jobs for themselves.
“The all-wheel steering allows us to manoeuvre easily in the narrow alleyways,” explained Stefan Stettler, head of the crane department at Zaugg AG Rohrbach. In reverse gear, the crane worked its way along the historic Rathausgasse to its construction site, past the arcades typical of the old town.
In addition to on-board power, the mobile crane can also be plugged into on-site grid power where available, or any mobile power sources capable of offering a steady 63 AMP output for lifting work. A mobile Liebherr Liduro Power Port LPO 100 was on hand in Bern, made available to Zaugg expressly for this purpose. With the Liduro LPO 100 fully charged, Liebherr says the stored energy is good for two full days of crane work.
“The low-noise and emission-free crane work is naturally pleasant for (Bern’s) residents, tourists and passers-by,” explained Stettler. “Especially as we only extended the crane support on the side facing away from the construction site by 50 per cent, allowing pedestrians and cyclists to pass through at all times.”
The MK120-5.1E electric mobile crane offers 8,000 kg (~17,650 lbs.) of lifting capacity, and all of the crane’s drives and winches are powered by electric motors, eliminating both the need to “warm up” or service oil-based hydraulics. It can be had with either a 98 kWh on-board battery (shown) or a 544 hp Liebherr diesel genset.
Electrek’s Take
From compact wheel loaders to radical two-wheeled dumper concepts to massive battery electric retrofit excavators, Liebherr is absolutely killing it in the heavy equipment electrification race. Their electric equipment offerings are proving that EVs can get even the heaviest jobs done, and save big fleets even bigger money while doing it.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Liebherr, via Construction Equipment.
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