Car rental giant Hertz is reportedly preparing for bankruptcy | Hacker News Reader

Car rental giant Hertz is reportedly preparing for bankruptcy

businessinsider.com

33 pointselsewhen12 comments

It seemed to me over the years they got really fancy, investing a lot in their fleet (many luxury cars), their garages, and facilities. The company of today feels very different to the more humble car rental service of my youth. Every car that I ever rented or saw seemed nearly new. I was always shocked at how frequently they turned over their inventory and it seemed to me a machine that really needed to be kept in motion lest it crash. It seems to me they had some kind of sophisticated calibrated model whereby they would buy late-model cars, have consumers drive them just under X miles, and then re-sell the cars on the market before they got too low on price again. They got hit on both sides of the funnel — rentals and sales.

There's probably some really interesting optimization there around depreciation schedules, maintenance, resale values and the like

Maybe, but my guess is that buying them new and then maintaining and driving them for 250k miles or more would calculate out the best.

(Buying used with around 25k miles would be even better, but hard to scale up.)

But you don't see that, I think because the main factor in their calculation is the customer experience of driving a fresh, new car that rarely has any mechanical trouble and that keeps customers coming back which outweighs all the other savings.

I made a similar observation with Budget. Twice in the past year I picked up a car that had less than 100 miles on the odometer.

I wan't drop a single tear. Every time I rented from Hertz it put strange additional charges on my tab.

Having briefly worked in the industry for one of their competitors, you wouldn't believe how they treat their staff and customers. Also all the cars are leased.

My exact thought.

Where can I find the cars that Hertz is going to sell before the bankruptcy?

It will probably be a chapter 11. Meaning operations will continue, debt restructured, existing equity holders will be wiped out.

You don't even need to wait: https://www.hertzcarsales.com/

>Our apologies, there are no matches within 1000 miles of postal code null.

US only?

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