Rental car company Hertz has halted its plans to purchase EVs from Polestar, on the heels of slowing down its electrification strategy by selling off some of the EVs it already owned.
After a filing in January revealed Hertz decided to cut its EV fleet by around 20,000 vehicles, CEO Stephen Scherr reportedly asked Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath to pause purchases in 2024, according to a report from the Financial Times. Ingenlath said the automaker agreed to waive requirements to purchase a certain number of Polestar EVs this year, so long as Hertz agrees to avoid selling the vehicles early, or for significantly cheaper than they were purchased.
According to Ingenlath, the companies agreed Hertz would “keep the cars longer than a year, we work with them, and we have the right to first refusal whenever they want to take them out of the fleet.”
Polestar has sold Hertz about 13,000 of the 65,000 units agreed upon in the 2022 deal. Despite the pause on 2024 sales, Ingenlath said the companies have a “clear intention” to re-introduce large-scale Polestar sales in the future, though they’ll “have to review at the time” whether to reboot the company’s EV sales in 2025.
In January, Hertz started selling off some of its Tesla inventory, ahead of the company’s filing stating it was looking to slash its EV fleet. Hertz is set to report its earnings Feb. 6.
The news comes just days after reports suggested Polestar's parent company, Volvo, could be preparing to off-load Polestar, with Volvo owner Geely set to take over. It also comes after Polestar announced plans to cut around 15% of its global workforce, and just months after the automaker entered production of the Polestar 4 crossover SUV.
