Vehicle rental defies Zeitgeist: Sixt boss thinks electric cars are “serious political mistakes”

05/29/2018

Vehicle rental company defies zeitgeist Sixt boss considers electric cars “serious political mistake”

DPA

CEO of Sixt AG, Erich Sixt

Erich Sixt rumbles again against electric cars, “I do not believe in e-cars, that’s politically a serious mistake,” said the boss and major shareholder of Germany’s largest car rental company Sixt on Tuesday in a conference call. Among other things, the 73-year-old pointed out that important raw materials such as Cobalt for the batteries in Chinese hand are.

In addition, the construction of the charging infrastructure devoured a lot of money. “The range is still a disaster, you have to invest billions here.” At Sixt electric cars are hardly in demand as a rental car, only a few customers who wanted to try it out. Some then called the landlord for help because they were left on the highway to Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Car rentals are generally difficult with electric cars. They are usually more expensive to buy than vehicles with internal combustion engines. The lower operating costs, on the other hand, benefit predominantly customers. These shy moreover, especially for long cross-country driving experiments with new technologies.

Even in the homeland of the electric car pioneer Tesla, the vehicles are no longer in demand as a rental car, said Sixt. “Wealthy people take a Tesla for conscience reassurance.”

The only exception is the holiday island of Sylt, where Sixt holds a fleet of around 200 BMW i3s and i8s. “I would rent one right away – it’s quiet and fits well in the landscape.” If the attitude of the driver change something, but Sixt will react: “If I am wrong, we buy as many electric cars, as the customer wants.”

Sixt relies on car sharing

Sixt is currently equipping its cars with telematics systems in order to be able to use them for car sharing. The company from Pullach near Munich wants its existing partner BMW Make competition, By the end of the year, 40,000 Sixt cars in Germany will be rented via an app. That is far more than all car sharing providers have together.

“Car sharing is nothing but renting,” said Sixt. However, he obviously does not think of the classic car sharingin which the cars can be parked at any place. This is a “very, very small segment”, which is feasible only in a few large cities.

Sixt had sold its 50-percent stake in the car-sharing company DriveNow to BMW for € 209 million. BMW wants to team up in the business with its competitor Daimler, which had acquired the minority stake of the French Sixt competitor Europcar in car2go.

Meanwhile, tourists fill Sixt’s coffers. The foreign business brings in the current quarter already 60 percent of revenue, said Erich Sixt on Tuesday. Tourists and private customers now account for 61 percent of the business, corporate customers only 31 percent. A few years ago, it had been the other way around.

In the first quarter, car rental sales abroad increased by more than 15 percent, in domestic and leasing business by 7 percent. The strongest growth came in the US, France, Spain and England. In New York, Denver, Chicago and Hawaii, Sixt opens new stations this year – in Hawaii, he has especially “Japanese tourists in mind,” said the CEO. Astonishingly enough, he now earns money with the network in Italy, which was raised only a year ago.

nis / RTR / dpa

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