EV Rental Cars is spreading its wings across America, though don't expect to find any EV1s waiting for you at the airport in Philadelphia. Pictured outside their LA office are Joe Borges, Terry O'Day and Gail Lee.

An Interview with Terry O'Day, VP, EV Rental Cars May 26,2001

In every vision there must be a measure of pragmatism. The trick is to keep the dream alive while dealing with the bottom line realities of the business world.

So far, EV Rentals has managed to do both as it introduces its clean vehicle's business model to airports on the American East Coast. Curiously, it was on an airline flight back into Los Angeles that company founder, real estate developer Jeff Pink, came up with the idea for EV Rentals. Terry O'Day, the firm's vice president for business development explained to EV World the genesis of the company.

Pink was returning from a trip to Hawaii when "he looked over the layer of smog that sits over the LA basin and decided at that point that he wanted to do something that would be beneficial for the environment." So according to O'Day, the real estate developer gave up his twenty year career in real estate development to begin a rental car company using electric cars.

"So about a year later he was buying GM EV1s, the Gen Ones from my wife who was an EV1 specialist at the time. . ." The company officially opened for business December, 1998 with eleven electric vehicles, nine EV1s and two Ford Ranger EVs at Los Angeles International Airport under the Budget Rent-A-Car banner. Within five months, the company had added the Honda EV Plus and the Toyota RAV4 EV. By the end of the year, they had added the Nissan Altra.

Today the fleet make-up of EV Rental differs considerably from what Jeff Pink and Terry O'Day originally envisioned. Electric cars are still available in at California locations, but the majority of the cars either use compressed natural gas or are SULEV-class gasoline vehicles.

There are now a total of 250 cars in the fleet including 135 CNG-fueled Honda Civics and Ford Crown Victoria's, 53 SULEV Nissan Sentra CAs, 35 battery electric cars. The remaining 27 cars are hybrid-electric Toyota Prius and Honda Insights.

Budget Backs the Notion of EV Motion

Budget Rent-a-car is one of the largest car rental (hire) companies in the United States. It has offices on or near most major and mid-sized airports. To EV Rental's good fortune, Budget is also one of the more innovative in the business. O'Day says that its larger partner specializes in niche and specialty vehicles with some 35% of their fleet consisting of everything from Ford Rangers to Jaguars renting for $350 a day. Budget's slogan is "Get Out of the Ordinary."

"We figured no cars applied better than our electric cars," O'Day said. "So, Jeff approached Budget and Budget was interested." Under terms of the agreement worked out between the two firms, Budget provides most of the actual airport rental car services. "Probably some of our renters don't even know they are renting from EV Rental Car. Some of them probably think they are still with Budget."

"Their staff will rent the cars, prepare the car on the lots by washing and cleaning it. They will also take your reservation. What we do is we typically have an on-site manager that will oversee the process for a particular airport location. Then we also customize the rental process for our vehicles in our company. So our staff will come in and provide training for the Budget staff. We'll also install chargers as necessary. Set the fueling stations for natural gas vehicles or whatever else is required to fuel them. And in every way [we] try to streamline the process cars fit and are easy for budget to rent alongside their vehicles."