You want to talk about high gas prices? Hertz used to charge its customes $7.99 a gallon to refuel a car. In an interview with The New York Times, the rental car company's chairman and chief executive says Hertz has modified the charge to stop gouging their customers [paraphrasing]. "We are now reducing that to the pump price, which is $4 or so, plus a one-time fee of $6.99," Mark P. Frissora reveals. "We also have a fuel-purchase option. In the past, if you elected to buy the tank of gas in advance, we charged a 10- to 20-cent premium on that tank. But now we give a 15-cent discount to whatever the price is at the pump." Hertz is hoping new customers will cover the lost revenues. But what about the old biz, the vacationeers facing pump shock? "In general, gas prices going up is not a positive thing. However, it is not nearly as negative as you might imagine in rental car land. Typically, the rental car itself and gas are no more than 10 percent of the overall cost of a vacation. We are finding that people aren’t cutting vacations right now. You would think that with gas prices being high, there would be a deterioration, but we haven’t seen that." Yet. In other news, Hertz has just 3k Priora in its Green Fleet; Toyota's hyrbid's residuals are safe. For now.
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A lot of SUV owners I know are renting subcompacts for road trips. It is actually cheaper thanks to the fuel savings.
I carpooled my way to my last car show in Toronto. And I have been taking my son to the meets down south, Memorial Day weekend. so my habits have changed. I have noticed that there seems to be less RV traffic than in previous yrs.
Traveling a total of 1400 miles on I-80/I-90 and I-75 through NY, PA, OH, and MI during the week of July 4th I felt like I noticed several trends that were responses to gas prices.
Average vehicle speed definitely seems lower. I’d say most people are going 5 over the limit instead of 10 over.
Vehicle size also seems to have been reduced. There were far more sedans and compacts driving around with a sprinkling of CUVs and small SUVs. Large SUVs were much less common, and RVs and Hummers were a rarity.
Trailers and the associated gas powered toys were extremely rare. Almost no one out there was pulling a jet ski or a boat. I felt like I saw more people carrying mountain bikes and kayaks than in the past.
I also had the chance to get out on the water around the holiday, and it appeared as though the proportion of sailboats out on the water was far higher than in years past.
In MI, I also saw far fewer out-of-state plates than in the past. The out-of-state plates I did see tended to be from nearby states such as IL, IN, OH, and WI. Not nearly as many FL plates around as previous summers.
Just my personal observations regarding holiday travel this summer.
I just returned froma trip to Bozeman, Montana that included 4 days in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.
I have an Azera (love it!), so I notice Hyundais on the road. I was simply amazed at the number of Hyundais in the parks. There were certainly as many Hyundais as Hondas or Toyotas, probably more. Sometimes we would see as many as 3 Hyundais in succession. US makes were far in the minority. Passenger cars ruled.
I don’t know whether there is that much larger a proportion of Hyundais on the road away from Texas, or whether Hyundai owners are more likely to visit the parks. At any rate, I loved my Sonata and that is what impelled me to buy the Azera. Hyundai is doing something right!
I was in Dallas and had a rental Kia Spectra (from Enterprise). It wasn’t bad at all, aside from half the radiator being devoid of water and overheating a little. They kept trying to up-sell me to one of the 4 SUVs or pickups they had on the lot. I guess that little spectra was quite in demand. Every customer who walked in demanded a subcompact too.
Vehicle size also seems to have been reduced. There were far more sedans and compacts driving around with a sprinkling of CUVs and small SUVs. Large SUVs were much less common, and RVs and Hummers were a rarity.…
How can the mix on the highway change so fast? Where did these vehicles go? Driving habits have most certainly changed, though. I agree that the bulk of the traffic has slowed down.
“How can the mix on the highway change so fast?”
Many families have multiple vehicles. One example are relative who have an Accord and a Suburban. In the past, the Accord was the dad’s every day commuter car while the Suburban did local kid hauling duty plus any longer family vacations. Now, the family is likely to hit the road in the Accord for long trips instead of in the Suburban.
There is also the effect of those who only have a large truck or SUV being more likely to simply not hit the road like they used to. I bet that the percentage of RVs which are parked right now is higher than it has been in July for a long, long time.
I live in Oklahoma and gas is about $3.77. I see plenty of SUVs and large cars on the road. It makes me proud that fellow Oklahomans haven’t resorted to metaphorically neutering themselves with underpowered cars. I think the next question of the day should be “What do you think Americans would do if fuel prices dropped below $2.00?”