Understand any stock in simple English
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Hertz rents cars and trucks to travelers and businesses, and also sells used cars from its fleet.
Hertz is, at its core, a company that owns a giant pile of cars and lets people borrow them for a day, a week, or a month. You see it at airports — the counters, the shuttle buses, the rows of keys — but the real money machine is simpler than that. Hertz buys cars at a discount, rents them out at a profit, then sells them used before they lose too much value. The customer is mostly travelers, but also businesses that need a temporary fleet, insurance companies replacing a customer's wrecked car, and people whose own car is in the shop. In 2024, the company brought in roughly $9 billion in revenue, split between renting vehicles (about three-quarters) and selling used ones (the rest).
Think of it as a car-flipping business that happens to also be a rental business. The rental side pays the bills and covers the depreciation while the cars are young. The used-car side is where Hertz cashes out. If resale prices are high, Hertz makes money on both ends. If they crash — as they did after 2022 — the whole model squeezes. That is exactly what happened: the company bet big on electric vehicles, mainly Teslas, expecting strong resale values, and when prices fell, it took a painful write-down and scaled back that plan.
Hertz has been public, private, and public again. It started in 1918 with a dozen Model T Fords in Chicago, grew into a global brand, and went bankrupt in 2020 during the pandemic travel collapse. It emerged in 2021, then listed on Nasdaq. Since then it has struggled with high debt, weak earnings, and leadership turnover — including a brief, much-publicized stint by a former Goldman Sachs executive. Recent priorities are cutting costs, shrinking the EV fleet, and repairing the balance sheet. Free cash flow is mostly going toward debt reduction rather than buybacks or dividends, which is typical for a company still climbing out of a turnaround.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026