Tesla is fighting the EV sales slump with short-term rentals

Tesla is now in the business of short-term car rentals, as the company tries to mitigate falling sales in the US following the expiry of federal tax credits for electric vehicles. Rentals are currently being offered in two California Tesla stores in San Diego and Costa Mesa, with plans to expand to more locations by the end of this year, Electrek reports. Vehicles can be rented for three to seven days, with prices starting at $60 per day, depending on the Tesla model. To sweeten the deal, Tesla is allowing customers to charge the vehicles at Supercharger locations and use supervised Full Self-Driving for free, alongside providing a $250 credit for renters who choose to purchase a Tesla. Read more: [https://www.theverge.com/news/817477/tesla-direct-short-term-ev-rentals-tax-credit](https://www.theverge.com/news/817477/tesla-direct-short-term-ev-rentals-tax-credit)

No doubt each rental car will be called a delivery even though it's to themself. Gotta keep pumping those numbers....

Just as a comparison you can rent a model 3 in Australia for about $75/day or a BYD Atto 3 for about $47/day..... The Model 3 is a hard sell honestly.

I would like to know how many of the recent deliveries are for their ‘robotaxi business. I believe they will just write off tax depreciation on these vehicles and sell them cheap in used car markets.

Wait, so they’re disrupting taxis *and* rental cars?? Shit, that’s another easy trillion in market cap.

I can get a minivan for $60/day in Costa Mesa. I can get a C-class for $38.

If they are going to start a rental business they should at least try to be competitive. There are a lot of cars available for less than $60/day that aren't going to incinerated their occupants.

Haha for sure

Turo is much cheaper than this

https://electrek.co/2025/11/10/tesla-cant-sell-cars-so-renting-them-now/ Some more details in this article.

This is another way this company will burn through all its cash. They obviously don't see the writing on the wall with weakening consumer sentiment and the AI bubble masking an economic slump. I cheer for their demise.

Probably each rental contract will be counted.

They already offered free 2 day test drives iirc. This just seems like an extension of that. Getting people to pay them so the dealerships don't have to pay to keep their overflow off site. The problem with judging ownership from a rental is you don't see the whole picture, like how costly or time consuming repairs can be.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, EV sales are booming - just Tesla slumping.

I could rent a Corolla for $30 and not have to spend 30 min. freezing my ass off in a charging station, assuming there is one within a reasonable distance.

But they don't have the Testicle's Avanced Heating System. [https://c.ndtvimg.com/2022-11/lfi24du\_tesla-burst-into-flames\_625x300\_21\_November\_22.jpg?downsize=773:435](https://c.ndtvimg.com/2022-11/lfi24du_tesla-burst-into-flames_625x300_21_November_22.jpg?downsize=773:435)

I don’t think so. This comes with free supercharging. I spent $100 on my 3 day road trip this weekend. That means the turbo would have to be less than $30. I’ve never seen that for a Tesla with FSD.

Corolla hatch would be about $51 a day from the same location for comparison. A similar midsized SUV to the Atto 3 in an ICE vehicle would be about $67 Just for comparison on Australian car rental prices. Edit: The odd time I rent cars its usually the cheapest one available and as im comfortable with EVs (i drive a Kia EV6) i would rent the Atto 3 every time.

Didn't Hertz publicly order a silly number of them only to get zero interest and ultimately dump the program?

Ah yes. Turo. The Air BnB of car rentals. People will never learn.

Assuming I was Joe Sixpack who didn't know what death traps these cars are, I would be tempted to rent one if the price was reasonable (competitive with other ICE compacts) but the prices are about double that, in the range of luxury vehicles.

Tesla needs to get the memo telling them their figurehead is the reason for this and nothing is going to fix it other than removing him from the company. Regardless, they don't care. They aren't in the car business. They are into selling oceanfront property in Nevada.

Yes. But a lot of that was Hertz issues, not Tesla issues. They didn’t clearly offer EVs on the app, they weren’t available at all locations, and they didn’t have any sort of plan for charging. Some locations had chargers. Some didn’t. They didn’t charge them fully before going out, and followed the same policy as gas cars (bring is back with the same amount you started with), and they’d do the same “pre pay your fuel” BS, using the the same rates even as gas cars.

Rent them once to an employee for 2 miles, ship them to the used car lot. $60/day is steep and EVs suck for many rental use cases. It's why Hertz got fucked over by Tesla.

Car sales numbers have minimal impact on the stock price. At least... in the short term while it's not cratering their cash. The stock price is primarily linked to the S&P 500 market price. So long as that keeps lifting, Tesla will too. If it crashes, then Tesla's stock will crash too. The reason is clear in the details in the article. They're renting them for $60+ per day for 3-7 day stints, allowing the cars to charge at Tesla chargers for free, and is enabling FSD on them. "...alongside providing a $250 credit for renters who choose to purchase a Tesla." They're primarily using this as an advertising campaign to get more people to try their cars and buy them, to sell more FSD subscriptions, to get those same customers talking about their FSD experiences to their peers / families during the holidays, to get more FSD data in the region, to get more first timers to try FSD and see how the system performs for a person who has no experience with it, and yes to generate decent revenue since this is probably making them more than selling the car outright brand new. With them only enabling it in specific areas, I imagine it's also about trying to either use people from the region to trial their FSD system in the region to expand their "robotaxi" (with an employee in the car) service there, or they're attempting to get existing experienced Tesla/FSD owners who are traveling to CA to rent their cars and train FSD in the region. Hell, I wouldn't even be shocked if the cult-like shareholders traveled there, at their own expense, just to help train the system. They are.. afterall... valuable unpaid interns.

> EVs suck for many rental use cases. They're great, but existing rental car policy sucks for them.  If I rent an EV to drive around a city for a few days, how the hell am I supposed to figure out how to recharge it so it goes back full? If Hertz just charged the cars themselves, it would have been fine.

I used it in Orlando, FL when i visited universal studios. didn’t travel a lot but it was close to 25$ per day.

It didn’t make sense until I read the part about $250 credit towards a purchase. If you’re going to buy a Tesla anyway, you can rent for 3 days and beat the heck out of a rental first.

I’d go even further and say they’re going to be cars Tesla or other Musk companies bought before tax credit died so they can bilk more money from tax payers at the 11th hour.

They do charge them but most are sitting at 80% max. I had a few through the years and it worked fine in markets where I wouldn't drive over the mileage to need to charge and I could drop it off for them to deal with it just as I do with gas cars. The issue arises when they don't know what you need the car for. When I needed to drive from Seattle to Vancouver to Whistler and back, no way an Ionic 6 would have been a good idea. If I'm renting in an area I'm local to, I know all the charging spots. If I'm traveling, it's a level of complexity I don't need. I tried charging a 2024 EV6 without CCS near Hertz HQ last year and failed miserably at the only Chargepoint enroute to the airport.

This is a sign of desperation.

Ohh so it's the tax credits that are the reason for Teslas sales now ehh? Not him ostracizing his target market? lol

You have never seen a recent EV charging map and it shows. And I’m sure you can find 30 mins in your entire day to fully charge for free. Idk why everyone likes to make it sound like charging is the most inconvenient thing ever. EV cabins are a really pleasant place to be. Folks roadtripping appreciate the break and if you’re only daily local driving it’s a complete non issue from the jump due to overnight charging. (Yes even apt complexes!!) Y’all still judge EV’s based on outdated information.

Do you know how hard it is to insure a tesler, of course its expensive ;) I'd hate to be the sucker who buys one of these "used". Abused from rentals and exclusively supercharged.

I get that you’re exaggerating, but you’re not far off from the model that Mercedes-Benz has been using for years to feed their CPO program.

No, “we all” don’t.  Some of us who try to make rational arguments about the relative merits of BEVs vs. ICEVs have at least as much of a problem with people giving BEVangelists the material to create straw-man arguments.

Im sure it is a great business case. It is so profitable that the serious rental companies severely downscaled their Tesla volumes, citing they aren’t profitable :)

When I rented one, I was required to return it with at least 80% charge or get charged a fee.  I don't have an EV at home and I know most charging stations don't let you drive up and swipe a card to charge.

Tesla's CFO must have a private jet gassed and ready to get them to a non extradition country on a moment's notice

If I'm renting a car, I'm either on vacation or traveling for work, in either case my time is valuable and in either case I'm in a hotel.

Every fare is a "delivery".

It should be with the high risk. I'd never buy any type of fleet vehicle used. Tragedy of the commons!

I'm sure they have telemetry sending back data about where you've been and how you drive. They can't use all sorts of excuses to say you "damaged" somethig to ding you for more money.

I'm not against EVs at all but I find them impractical for my needs.

Interesting imagination you have in which Tesla has thought of everything, and everything happens for a good reason and everything is going according to their master plan.

Whether it arrives dead or alive.

And on the other hand, the cold hard reality is that 90% of the people renting cars in the US still haven't ever driven an EV so Hertz employees had to spend 15 minutes explaining how charging worked and then if the customer said yes another 20 minutes in the lot showing them how a car without buttons and independent controls worked all while everyone else from the same fucking airport shuttle was standing around pissed as hell that one of the two fucking Hertz employees working at that location was spending so much time with that one customer. Source: I was in that line. Haven't rented from Hertz since.

Why is it that when I post common sense, people think I'm a fan of or touting Tesla / Elon Musk? It took me all of 5-10 minutes to read the article, think about the financial and technological reasons for making such a move, and write a common sense post of what such a policy could be used for. Are you telling me you don't think a company worth over $1 trillion has an executive team considering the multiple benefits of such a policy before implementing it, and instead they're just making decisions off the cuff with no foresight of the benefits of such a move? Like wtf dude.. I'm constantly super critical of Elon Musk, I call him out for being a n-azi and a pathological liar, and point out that he's absolutely no genius and merely a beneficiary of government subsidies, multiple times per week. I'm among one of the most critical people on the company, on Musk, and on the stock price being hyperinflated on Reddit, pointing out that it's only a matter of time before the company stock collapses with a market correction. Like wtf... I have no interest in touting this company's choices. I didn't even say the above were gonna work out. I just said that these are valid reasons for why they would implement such a policy to try and maximize the value of such a move.

There is a better way. Approving $1T pay package for the CEO.

Yeah, you have to download the app and add a card for pretty much all of the networks. My corporate rental rate gives me 75 miles which is fine if I'm there for a day or two or the hotel is close to their offices. I think the cars need a slightly different setup to make customers comfortable renting them. Instead, they used to just give a waiver sheet to sign that I would need to figure out my charging to supersede their existing fuel language paperwork they didn't even change. If their app could give you guidance on where to charge or it was bundled with the car, people might be more willing to deal with it.

Why would you be freezing at a charging station? You didnt know you can sit inside your car while charging?

eh, IME charging with a Tesla on long trips reduces the 80mph speed on major interstates to 60mph effective. This adds ~3 hours on a very long 12 hour road trip drive. Half of the added wait though is good, since it combines grabbing something to eat and getting out and walking around a bit. I wouldn't subject a family to this I guess, but for me it's fine.

yup, Teslas aren't for casuals. I rented a Polestar 2 last month from Hertz and that was a bit tricky to get used to, and I've been driving BEVs for 10+ years now.

Thats 12 more deliveries today! Would have been higher, but it there was fog and rain. /S

Endless demand he said. Buy a Tesla and use turn on Robotaxi for passive income while you WFH or in the office. FSD coming soon... since 2014 :rofl:

Q4 is shot for Tesla…rentals are dumb for traveling electric…too much time spent at charging stations. I did a NY to Maine trip..JFK to JFK rental…have to stop every 2-2.5hrs(fortunately, superchargers are all along I-95) Got a car had 38%, charged near airport..the wait is over 1hr…construction traffic all along 95 so range anxiety factors a lot..just a mess.. I bet EV rental is ok for the city but not for a long trip.

Worth a 2.1% stock gain.

I rented a model 3 in San Diego a few years ago but that was because the hotel offered free charging. It’s probably an edge case…. All the bad UX makes them terrible rental cars. Any ice car you rent you just get in the car and everything is where you expect it to be - not so for a Tesla…

Yeah, the loaner to CPO market is great for juicing sales numbers. I live in Atlanta and I'm pretty sure corporate for Porsche hands out cars like candy so they can fill their used car lots. Have a couple neighbors going through more than a few fancy Porsches and all of them having manufacturer tags. Back before the pandemic, it was easy to tell when FCA or Ford was having a slow quarter when a mess of Chargers/Challengers/Jeeps or shiny new Fords would show up on the Avis lot. They'd be there for a bit but would usually disappear before they hit 40k miles. Now, the cars will be chugging along past 50k. Given the slowdown in new sales market again, I expect the delivery mileage rental cars to start popping up again soon.

What do they do after someone rents them. If I pick one up Monday morning, it comes back Thursday morning (three full days). Even staying in state I'm putting at least 500 miles on it. Hell, I'll be loading suitcases in it when I pick it up. The whole point is for people to put it through it's paces, right? I'm not driving it to the grocery store and to visit a friend once and let it sit in the driveway. I guess they assume every person who does this will fall in love with it and have to buy it. They are assuming wrong.

good luck in waiting for it to charge

I find your faith in the justice system quaint and endearing. I strongly suspect that no one from Tesla will get charged with anything.

Those will now all be used cars. Nominal rental income, huge depreciation of value. This makes no sense.

I dont envy anyone doing a 1000 mile road trip especially without taking breaks lol. I did the maths and its close to 1600km and yeah thats a 2 day job for me with plenty of breaks.

The path to a trillion. Apparently

Hertz also didn't let you link your account to the car during the rental period. What a missed opportunity. They should have demanded this from Tesla. It would have been great to sit in a rental, sign into my Tesla account, and have every feature of the car immediately update on the rental until my period is up. Instead you got a super shitty key card in a huge plastic case.

You mean they're fighting the massive unsold inventory with short-term rentals.

fight a long term slump with a short term solution. what a brilliant guy. btw this is after all of the car rental companies dumped all of their teslas and EVs due to horrible maint costs. [https://www.newsweek.com/hertz-drops-20000-rental-electric-vehicles-favor-gas-powered-models-1859999](https://www.newsweek.com/hertz-drops-20000-rental-electric-vehicles-favor-gas-powered-models-1859999)

hertz bought 100,000 teslas in 2020 and then dumped them all 2023-2024-2025 huge loss for hertz. hertz also dropped its other electric EVs. probably you have to think about the average dumbshit that rents a car. way too complicated to install an app to charge at a charging station. and on the other side, hertz didnt help customers with charging stations or things.

The grab a bite to eat thing while charging doesn’t work for everyone. We eat at independent restaurants when we travel, which rarely have easily accessible charging. I rented EVs in Chicago, LA, and Silicon Valley. Charging sucked in all circumstances. I loved the cars, and am considering one for my next car, but for local use only. Was no fun driving around Menlo Park looking for available chargers the waiting. Even Teslas were charging at non-Suoer Chargers.

Cant wait to hear how tesla rolls back the miles on the rentals before selling them.

I would argue it was an EV issue to be fair. EV in the rental is just difficult. Generally if you are renting, you do not want to be looking for a supercharger, nor do you want to be waiting long on slow chargers and you do not often have the luxury of charging at home. The thing that EV has an advantage of. If I rented an EV at some destination, it likely would be for the EV experience. Not based on fuel savings or economics or ease of use. Because it likely will be not the greatest experience if you need just raw transport and no hassle.

I gave you an upvote, because I think you are right here. Tesla has a problem - oversupply. Using them as rentals is a way to mitigate this, that is certainly better than parking up excess cars in a field. Will it be profitable - no, but it will be cash generative. Something I predict we will see more and more of from Tesla. (Rental fleet, opening deposits on Optimus robots, dumping off lease cars into the market below their book value, half-priced burgers on Monday, etc. etc.) Car volumes are falling, car margins are falling, but that doesn't really matter as long as they can continue as part of the S&P and juice the stock on hype. They need to cover the gaping hole left by the ending of the carbon credits money. This rental scheme will be just the first of many knee-jerk attempts to get quick cash. The problem with cash grabbing is it's almost always detrimental to building a long term sustainable business.

People won’t buy the Nazis car, but I bet they will rent them

There aren’t that many Tesla Robotaxi vehicles.

I guess they will count rentals as sales counts for 20M Tesla sales within 10 years to get his $1trillion pay package.

1 trillion to musk zero to rest…smoke and mirrors We all need $100k robots to hand out Halloween candy…

t’s interesting how every time Tesla faces a dip in core demand, it redirects the narrative to something new, rentals, robotaxis, or AI. That’s not accidental. It’s how they protect valuation through *momentum stories* instead of product cycles. The real question is: how many pivots can sustain belief before fundamentals have to catch up?

With a little ‘inventive’ bookkeeping they can pretty much call every vehicle in the inventory as delivered to their robotaxi business. Doesn’t matter how many actually are used as robotaxis

Yep, it's really only a matter of time before they significantly cut supply and layoff workers at this rate. That said, given Musk's connection to the federal government and MANY other billionaires who will pressure the government, IMO, it's only a matter of time before the federal government gives him another massive subsidy giveaway. That's been his and the government's MO since the early 2000s. A never ending river of subsidies. That is unless we see a removal of corrupt establishment parties from leadership. In fact, I wouldn't be shocked if it was his influence that lead to the revocation of the federal EV tax credit... as I'll explain further down. We could definitely see a major correction in the stock prior to that; in fact, I think that's exactly what Musk wants to happen. When that correction starts is what's hard to project. I'm looking for ***possibly*** a dip in TSLA going into mid December, and then ***possibly*** one more major rally to re-test that top (and fail) going into the end of the year and/or early next year... What could cause a possible rally back to ATH? Well for starters, the supreme court deciding Trump's tariffs are unconstitutional and reverses them. Q1/Q2 is when we'll start to see the market bubble begin to pop, with Tesla potentially dropping down to as low as $100-125 over the span of many months in 2026. I'm looking for Tesla to hold off on their xAI purchase until after TSLA has a major correction. Then they'll buy xAI while Tesla's stock price is lower, arguing that it'll help boost the stock. (The reality is, like always, the stock will crash and then rocket back up on account of market dynamics and manipulation either way.) The purchase of xAI in an all shares sale when Tesla's stock is low means it'll take more Tesla shares to buy it, and Musk, who owns as much as 58% of xAI, will get a much larger chunk of new Tesla shares in the sale, and his ownership stake in Tesla will rocket above 25%. As to that major correction, I can only imagine that Musk himself, his family members, his billionaire friends, the board, etc... will be selling into the correction. Why? Because after the correction, they can buy back in at a lower price and lock up a larger percentage of shares in the company. Sure, they may have to pay taxes on those sales, but they'll make out better for doing so. This $1 trillion pay package was always just a distraction of what's actually going on. What's important is that it'll quickly give Musk tens of billions in stock options, which he can collateralize for billions in tax free loans. When the stock falls and Tesla buys xAI, then Musk will pump that loan money and any other money he's raised through share sales back into Tesla stock by buying shares on the retail market, pumping the stock and his net worth back up, causing a massive short squeeze. It won't just be Musk doing this, it'll be his cohort of family, billionaire friends, and institutions who are all in on the game. Musk wants to game his way to becoming the first trillionaire... on paper... because he has major insecurity and narcissism problems, and a god complex, and thinks wealth will give him meaning and control over others. Here's the kicker... the loss of the tax credit was likely by his own design, given that he bought himself immense policy influence in this administration. He wanted this to happen so it would tank the stock price, so he could force Tesla to buy xAI when TSLA's stock price is much lower, gaining a much larger share of Tesla by doing so as TSLA buys his stake in xAI. He knows that the federal government will almost certainly re-activate the EV tax credits in later years, and in fact with his immense wealth, he and his family/buddies will have the government influence to push that policy, helping to once again re-inflate Tesla's valuation. Remember that the S&P 500 doesn't need a broad crash among all stocks for the index to crater, given that the indexes are largely boosted by the Mag 7 and other AI / tech stocks. It just requires a broad sell-off of bubble tech stocks. Other stocks haven't appreciated anywhere near as much as these stocks and are more likely to perform equally if not better than the indexes... whereas stocks like Tesla, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, etc... will underperform the market. In the last major correction in early 2025, the S&P 500 dipped 21%, while Tesla dipped 56%. The same thing will happen any time the S&P 500 experiences a major correction; Tesla massively underperforming the index. \_\_\_\_ The silliest part about everything I just said is that it has absolutely no reliance on Tesla, the company, having good financial performance. It's literally all just about gaming the stock market.

Desperado.

Gotta hit that 8.5!! Pump pump pump!

Yeah, I think I read they only have 20 in Austin and 4 have already crashed thanks to Full Reckless Driving.

(rimshot)

In the world of Testicle, everything does happen for a reason. The reason is that it's all part of the theater to pretend TSLA is a real company rather than just a lot of vaporware. Everything they do comes down to trying to pump the stock.

The thing is, once they are used as rentals, they will have to sell them as used cars, which means a huge drop in the sale prices. I think it's just another walnut in their big shell game.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see another "too big to fail" excuse for corporate welfare when the bubble finally bursts.

Did Hertz report any of them stolen?

I could be tempted to rent an EV is it was just for a day trip where I could just take it back and let them charge it. That is only if the price is competitive. If a comparable ICE car is cheaper, then that's what I'm getting.

Hertz has been having a lot of problems in recent years.

Something is better than nothing.

The whole sensationalistic "$1T pay package'" is all part of that fiction. It's a scam to give the illusion that TSLA has a future so the cattle will stay interested.

Tbh I wonder how many "billionaire buddies" he actually has. Sure there are a number of paper billionaires (all from tech / vc land)- but I bet a lot of "old money" billionaires would love to cut him off at the knees..

Not really. If renting the cars nets you a million in revenue but costs you two million, then something is actually worse than nothing. The rental business has high fixed costs and low marginal revenue. It would take a long time to drive any type of positive outcome. Especially if your rental cars are Tesla EVs.

1M - 2M = -1M, 0 - 2M = -2M! I'm sure they have some kind of angle working but you are right it's going to still be a big loss. Musk seems to be playing some kind of shell game with his assets lately between this and pawning off CyberToasters off on SpaceX.

2m in my example was not the cost of not renting, it is the fixed cost of starting up a rental business. I can guarantee you that there are better ways to recoup the existing sunk costs than a rental business. Holding inventory is very expensive for them, any option that takes vehicles off the their ledger would be preferred to a rental shell game.

And that's after Hertz dumped their entire Tesla inventory because they sucked as rental cars.

Losing the ability to sell carbon credits is go8mg to crush their already inflated PE. Likely going to swing to losing money. Couple that with the bitcoin drop and their next earnings should be gross.

Teslavana.

Car rental companies should have always allowed returns over 20% charge for no money. Make it easier to rent one and more people would. Beats struggling to find a charger by their airport before your flight to get it back to 70% is a nightmare.

> Are you telling me you don't think a company worth over $1 trillion has an executive team considering the multiple benefits of such a policy before implementing it, and instead they're just making decisions off the cuff with no foresight of the benefits of such a move? The company that has effectively no governance and is run by a drug addled red-pilled loon with a messiah complex whose last major product may well be the biggest failure in automotive history? Where was this foresight with the CT? Where was the foresight when they allowed Musk to take one of the most popular brands in the world and make it one of the most unpopular?

Curious which ev you’ve ever driven that had you “freezing your ass off in a charging station”? Come on. You can tell the truth. We all know what your truth is anyways.

I've used AirBnB all around the world 90% of the time for the last six years. The major complaints seem to be from the US, which I stay away from anyway. The rest of the world it works great, for the consumer. Pretty horrible for many cities and the locals though when investors start abusing it.

Pulling Musk at this point would do nothing to fix the Tesla brand. It is permanently tainted with huge sections of the public now. Selling anything on mass to the public now is going to be a big challenge for them absent some truly compelling product that has no competition.

To be fair hertz did the dumb thing and ordered a ton of models that had the least range possible. So renters had to constantly stop for charging which is annoying af. If they had made the program for local driving only, or had longer range models, they probably would’ve had a better response.

I actually ran the loaner program at major OEM way back. Nothing changes. These cars are likely sitting in open-end leases. They are booked as sales immediately. They are creating a near-new inventory bubble that will bite them in a few months as a pile of low mileage used cars that have to be priced to compete against brand new units. The used vehicle market is very efficient at supply and demand pricing.

if each car came with a tesla robot that would drive you around and give you handjobs in the parking lots AND would drive to the charging station and charge the car for you while you slept and it was free, then yeah i agree the EV car renting program at hertz wouldve been better. but here we are in the real world, not mark zuckerbergs metaverse vr world. where you dont need an app on your phone to pump gas. why an app on your phone to plug your car in at a charging station? because the people who came up with the idea dont actually drive their own cars , pump their own gas, or charge at charging stations.

Musk will do Musk when it comes social media, saying stupid shit, and lying through his teeth. The CT was a disaster because Musk overpromised their version of an EV pickup truck, when it was at the beginning stages of development, and when Tesla was attempting to rapidly grow vehicle production. This isn't remotely the same thing. I highly doubt it was Musk that came up with this rental policy.

> they will have to sell them as used cars Only if they get caught selling used as new and someone in the government can actually hurt them for doing it. They've sold used as new before. They wipe the computer/odometer and it seems new.

I wouldn't doubt that for a minute.