Play Ride and Seek with Hertz

In September 1918, the used car dealer Walter L. Jacobs came up with an idea as he was looking at his twelve Model T Ford cars that were parked in the yard rather uselessly waiting to be sold. Why wait for buyers when he could also rent out the cars in the short term against payment? The idea for the first car hire service in America had been born. Just five years later the fleet comprised five hundred vehicles when Jacobs sold his company to John Hertz, the President of the Yellow Cab Company and the Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company. General Motors acquired the so-called “Drive-Ur-Self” system in 1926, and in 1953 it was sold to the Omnibus Corporation.