Posted on 05/22/2020 8:15:29 PM PDT by John W
Hertz, which started with a fleet of a dozen Ford Model T’s a century ago and became one of the world’s largest car rental companies, filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday after falling victim to its mountain of debt.
The coronavirus pandemic has devastated Hertz by grounding business travelers and tourists, making it impossible for the company to continue paying its lenders. A sharp drop in used car prices has also decreased the value of its fleet.
“They were doing quite well, but when you turn off the revenues and you own all these cars and all of a sudden the cars are worth less it’s a very tough business,” said John Healy, an analyst and managing director with Northcoast Research in Cleveland.
By the end of March, Hertz Global Holdings Inc. had racked up $18.7 billion in debt with only $1 billion of available cash.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Decontented cars, for the most part. They bought cars with deleted airbags and such.
I also challenge the assertion that they were “doing really well” - I’d noticed that Hertz had been closing locations in DFW for the last couple years, long before COVID-19.
Worse - Enterprise and Avis are separate companies, and they each took parts of the market away from Hertz who just stood there and did nothing.
I had a '65 Impala that I drove for a quarter-million miles. Later, I had a '72 Impala that didn't seem to have been as well-built. It had a design flaw in that the metal below the back window would rust out and water would leak into the trunk during rainstorms and trips to the car wash--a flaw that plagued GM cars at the time.
It means Cash for Clunkheads Rev. 2020.
They’re still number 2. (No pun intended.) Enterprise has been the biggest rental car organization in the United States for... over a decade now? Hertz was kind of a has been.
That movie would have been “Good Neighbor Sam,” which I saw in a theater in 1964.
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment to the old Avis commercial, when Hertz and Avis were 1 and 2. Perhaps I showing my age...
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment to the old Avis commercial, when Hertz and Avis were 1 and 2. Perhaps I’m showing my age...
I know the commercial series, but it stopped being funny more than a decade ago when Enterprise passed Hertz, and then Avis passed Hertz to slot under Enterprise. Hertz just sat there looking stupid and kept relying on inertia and nostalgia. They were going down anyway - IIRC, that new German car rental firm Sixt was just about to pass them in the US too.
I note that "Good Neighbor Sam" came out in July 1964, and the TV show Bewitched premiered in September of 1964.
Bewitched, of course, also features a married couple in which the husband is an earnest, harried, and ill-used ad man, and the misadventures he gets into while being forced by his management to bend himself into a pretzel for this client or that.
They should have been more enterprising and tried harder.
/s
Junior high "humor" c. 1972
"Wanna Hertz donut?"
Yeah--THUMP
"Hurts, don't it?"
Thanks. That commercial even had an OJ look-a-like.
You beat me to it!
That him! The actor who says “I can walk through the airport” is the exact guy who I was reminded of by the picture of the Florida election doofus who’s looking through the magnifying glass at the hanging chad!
That’s the first time I’ve heard that. I guess I’m not as old as I thought. ;-)
Thanks...I guess.
This is how running a business on borrowed money always ends.
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