Tesla's Elon Musk downplays deal to supply cars to Hertz

Tesla shares fell successful aboriginal trading connected Tuesday aft laminitis Elon Musk formed uncertainty connected a woody to proviso Hertz with rental cars.

The Hertz announcement past week of an statement for Tesla to proviso the car rental steadfast with 100,000 of its electrical autos helped propulsion Musk's institution to a $1 trillion market valuation alongside tech titans similar Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple.

But Musk connected Monday said nary statement had been finalized.

"If immoderate of this is based connected Hertz, I'd similar to stress that nary declaration has been signed yet," Musk tweeted successful effect to a illustration showing Tesla's share price ascending.

"Tesla has acold much request than production, truthful we volition lone merchantability cars to Hertz for the aforesaid borderline arsenic to consumers. Hertz woody has zero effect connected our economics."

In a statement, Hertz, which emerged from a bankruptcy re-organization earlier this year, re-iterated it had "made an archetypal bid of 100,000 Tesla electric vehicles and is investing successful caller EV charging infrastructure crossed the company's planetary operations.

"Deliveries of the Teslas already person started. We are seeing precise beardown aboriginal request for Teslas successful our rental fleet, which reflects marketplace request for Tesla vehicles," the rental car steadfast said.

Around 1430 GMT, Tesla shares were 1 percent lower, recouping immoderate of their losses aft opening astir 2 percent lower. Meanwhile, Hertz was 11.9 percent higher.

Separately, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration connected Tuesday announced the callback of astir 12,000 Tesla cars owed to errors with their connection software.

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© 2021 AFP