Hertz is among the travel brands working to create a modern mobility ecosystem. Its fleet of Hertz, Dollar and Thrifty rental cars in the Americas will be 100% connected by the end of the year, according to the payment website, PYMNTS.com.
Hertz says 75% of the fleet is already connected – that’s 285 000 vehicles.
With its telematics-equipped cars, Hertz has realised financial benefits from higher fleet uptime, improved damage monitoring, more accurate fuel measurements, and reduced theft and bad debt. The company says repossession recovery times are reduced by 50% on connected vehicles.
Hertz explained that data from connected cars enabled the company to see information such as the location of the car, the charge level of its battery and any triggering of its engine service indicator. And it plans to add more features to leverage telematics data to improve inventory management and planning practices.
The company’s pricing and fleet management engines are under development to drive efficiency and improved return on assets. It said it was collaborating with Amazon Web Services to modernise and digitise key elements of its mobility platform.
As Hertz in the Americas progresses its move to the cloud over the next 18 to 24 months, its aim is to operate more efficiently and realise tangible cost reduction relating to expenses associated with its legacy platforms and physical data centres.