I was six the first time I drove a car. My dad’s Ford Ranchero. It was half truck, half muscle, and all attitude. Not long after, I was steering my grandfather’s Ford tractor across open fields and working on cars in my dad’s auto-parts store. I learned early that machines respond to touch, that power demands respect, and that nothing in this world quite compares to the feeling of an engine under your hands.
The evolution of the automobile and the democratization of the road is as American as anything in our 250-year story. Before the interstates, before the road trip became a rite of passage, before the family station wagon became a cultural institution, Americans and cars belonged together. Freedom wasn’t just a word in a founding document. It needed an engine. It needed somewhere to go.
Later, my dad drove a 1972 Mercury station wagon with a 429 engine. Lots of horsepower and no brakes. I used to take it out on dates, come home about midnight on hot summer nights, and park it while the brakes smelled like something was genuinely on fire. My parents would wake up convinced the house was burning. It wasn’t. It was just the Mercury still cooling down from another night of living.
For my friends and me, there was something deeply, fundamentally American in those early driving experiences. The nostalgia for those days runs deep. We were young, we were free, and we had engines that made us feel like both.
Today, as the CEO of Hertz, I get to buy more cars than almost anyone else on the planet, about 600,000 vehicles in our fleet at any given time. Yet none of this feels like work. All of it feels like a continuation of something that started in my dad’s driveway. Which is why I race cars — a NASCAR Camaro — and collect them, too: a 2019 Corvette ZR1 on a manual transmission, a Mustang GTD, a Ford Raptor R.
In 1918, when automobiles were still a luxury most Americans could only admire from the sidewalk, Hertz was founded on the idea that freedom of movement wasn’t a privilege. It was something that ought to belong to anyone with a road in front of them and somewhere to be.
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In 1966, Hertz took that idea to the track, putting 1,000 Shelby GT350H Mustangs into rental lots across the country so any American with a driver’s license and $17 a day could feel what it was like to really drive. They called it the Rent-a-Racer.
As a racer myself, I see the appeal. My Geezer Pleaser Camaro gets plenty of track time, and another of my race cars is a 1976 Corvette built by the legendary John Greenwood. That car ran the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1976, powered by a 454 engine that sounds like the actual voice of God.
For over a century, Hertz didn’t just rent cars. They handed Americans the keys to their own freedom and trusted them to find their own road.
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Today, the road is changing and the conversation on cars in America is, too. Rideshare, EVs, and self-driving are changing our relationship with driving. I believe in where it’s going, but I also believe that the car didn’t just change this country. It revealed it. It showed us who we are: restless, optimistic, always pointed toward something just over the next hill.
That is not something that gets engineered away. It gets honored. Passed down from a father who lets his kid steer a Ranchero across an empty lot, to that kid who grows up and never fully recovers from the thrill.
