Hertz, the battered symbol of America’s financialised car-rental industry, has now turned to Amazon — the behemoth of digital consumerism — to unload its fleet of pre-owned vehicles. This partnership, greeted with a short-lived surge in Hertz’s stock price and mirrored by the fall of rival retailers, is not a sign of renewal but of desperation.

Amazon Autos, itself a recent incursion into the used-car market, promises efficiency and reach, but it also deepens the corporate monopoly that strips workers, consumers, and even local economies of autonomy.

Hertz, once hailed for its aggressive pivot to electric vehicles, has been forced into humiliating retreat, discarding its green ambitions for the familiarity of gasoline-powered fleets. It is beset by the failure of AI-powered surveillance systems that punish customers for phantom damages, a metaphor for the broader cruelty of automation imposed without accountability.

Meanwhile, hedge fund titan Bill Ackman swells his stake, drawn not to the company’s hollow promises of innovation but to the bloodless arithmetic of cost-cutting and profit extraction.

This marriage of Hertz and Amazon is not about mobility or consumer choice. It is about survival within a system where scale, speculation, and monopolistic control dictate the fate of corporations — and where ordinary people are reduced to mere data points in the machinery of commerce.