
Car rental giant Hertz is reportedly preparing for bankruptcy - elsewhen
https://www.businessinsider.com/hertz-rental-car-company-prepares-for-possible-bankruptcy-report-2020-4
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leoh
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.

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

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jjeaff
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.

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

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nm-f
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.

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

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theandrewbailey
You don't even need to wait:
[https://www.hertzcarsales.com/](https://www.hertzcarsales.com/)

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

