Yep. My Dad in his late 70s uses this system and it works great for him.
People make fun of it, but for people with low tech literacy this is actually far better than having a mish-mash of solutions where some their logins end up automatically saved in iOS on their phone, some are saved in Chrome on the desktop, some are just in their head, they don’t know where anything is, and are constantly losing access and resetting credentials all the time.
And it definitely reduces the burden on me of parental tech support, when its all in the book.
I’m not sure how you can make the points you make, and still call it a “generally brilliant solution”
The entire point of this system - like anything a giant company like Hertz does - is not to be fair to the customer. The point is to screw the customer over to make money.
Not allowing human employees to challenge the incorrect AI decision is very intentional, because it defers your complaint to a later time when you have to phone customer support.
This means you no longer have the persuasion power of being there in person at the time of the assessment, with the car still there too, and means you have to muster the time and effort to call customer services - which they are hoping you won’t bother doing. Even if you do call, CS hold all the cards at that point and can easily swerve you over the phone.
It’s all part of the business strategy.