https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
I personally use other companies when I rent a car... but I'm also paranoid about the kind of nonsense described in the article, so I just buy the damage coverage when I rent the car. It means renting a car is far more expensive than it should be, but it saved my bacon the last time I rented when someone dinged the paint.
It's funny that the AI bogeyman is used in the article to make this new tech seem scarier. The problem is the general practice of trying to milk you for money over regular wear and tear.
Avis employee: "Sounds like you got part of the car dragging."
Me: "Yeah I noticed that."
Avis employee: "Don't worry about it, here's your receipt."
Like you, I always pay for the insurance. It just makes sense.
However, I've always noticed that Hertz is very dependent on the particular branch you rent from, and I generally avoid them unless I have met the general manager for the location and gotten to know them. In that case, it's been the _best_ company I've used. Otherwise, I stay far, far away. Enterprise seems more consistent.
If you ever do rent a car, make sure to take a good video around the car, of the roof, and the underside and inside for good measure.
For that matter, the car rental firms routinely bundle damage waivers/insurance products into their volume/corporate contracts and still arrive at prices below the retail base rates.
I don't think it's the insurance itself that's being sold here at all. It's more more predatory than that: it's the kind of price discrimination that squeezes a premium for "peace of mind" from the segment of their retail trade who are nervous, inexperienced, risk-averse, or financially unable to accept the small risk of an expensive event. Like a payday loan—it's spectacularly expensive to be poor.
Of course, Hertz has been a dumpster fire of a business for the last five years. Burning billions on electric vehicles, torching the share price, switching CEOs, not to mention falsely accsuing customers of theft. Maybe best to stay away from them for a bit.
Providing a good or service with a profit margin is so old fashioned what is this 1920? Nowadays you use your big MBA brain to do a business with another big brain MBA that also has rich parents that your parents are friends with. Then both ride away from the smoldering rubble of the company on their yachts when their options vest in 3-5 years.
Because if you are a big brain MBA you know that is about how long it takes for your yacht to be constructed
The current process is ridiculous - a random teenager in a vest with 15 minutes of training inspects the car when you check it out, and then you get a former drill sergeant when you check it back in. The current process is no less fair and Hertz is no less evil - but in this case its at least impartial and the scans are transparently available.
I don't think it's impartial: the implication here is that the same technology is not available to the renter, so Hertz can easily claim damage that was already present at checkout that an ordinary customer picture can't refute. That asymmetry seems bad to me.
Is basic ass covering weird?
The point was that basic ass covering isn't good enough; my visual scan and phone photos aren't going to match what a machine designed to find defects can do.
(I think everyone does - or at least should do - what you do. I certainly do.)
Edit: And as another poster said, this means they get to double dip by depreciating the asset and charging the customer for that wear.
(It's also far from the original point, which is purely about symmetry.)
If you put most people's cars under those lights you'd be shocked at how much damage you'd find.
Whenever I rent a car, after getting the keys I walk around the car and take photos of it on my phone from every angle. If I notice any scratches or dents, I tell them. But I still keep the photos, just in case. Then I do the same when I return it. That way if - at any point - they say I damaged the car, I have timestamped photos.
It feels like an obvious, easy way to cover my arse if there's a dispute. Otherwise you're basically screwed if they claim you got the car scratched up.
I'm really surprised other people don't do that. Its what my family has done from before we even had digital cameras.
Turns out, you can send them all the pictures you like - all they did was send me a work order for scratches + repaint in a poorly specified location, with no comment on the pictures. No amount of emails or phone calls asking them to indicate where on the car was supposedly scratched led to anything - I just got passed around and around...
If my credit card insurance didn't cover it (Chase reimbursed me in full relatively easily), I would have taken the next step and did a chargeback. Maybe it would have been helpful if I needed to press the issue. But the presence of some tens of pictures between me and my wife didn't seem to accomplish much
Naturally I closed both accounts after this experience (the whole point of PayPal was to have protection in these cases...) but I suspect almost all companies are optimized for reducing support costs even if it means just a few lost customers.
Whether you can be bothered or not is of course another question.
Is the rental company actually getting the repairs done? If not, then they're double dipping: Depreciating the car, and charging the customer.
And I know they're not getting the repairs done, because when I rent a car, they show me a list of the dings that it's already sustained.
How would they handle that?
Renting a car with any liability exposure is a recipe for frustration. As far as I'm concerned, these scans mean that one will be billed if they legally can be. Regardless of actually accruing damage.
(Of course, NYT writing an article and people being mad is part of that settling to reasonableness process)
Remember when they were a prestige brand?
Unfortunate overlap with when their commercials featured OJ Simpson.
If your car breaks down away from a major airport, you need to tow it back because Sixt only operates at airports in certain states.
It would make a lot more sense to scan the car immediately when I return it, point out the damage, and bill me right there. I don't think that is what they do though? Is the scanner in another location?
A well functioning legal system would throw out everything in those contracts on that basis alone.
Disney recently tried to use the terms and conditions of a Disney+ subscription to get out of a claim arising from their theme parks.
Automation has made it so easy to bury society in legally binding click-through contracts. It's very unclear what innovation or business model the general public would be deprived of if we severely limited click-through agreements, or even wet signature contracts below certain thresholds.
Man, just sell a product or service and be normal.
Whereas in tech the opposite is true. The goal is to get people to agree to something they do not understand. This incentivizes long confusing walls of text and convoluted language so that people just click without reading.
Ultimately the difference is that when push comes to shove tech has not been required to prove people even read (much less understand) what they are signing.
Psa: in most places they would try to scam you by removing a small piece of trim (under the rearview mirror, below bumper,..) and on your return claim it as a damage. That’s why you need to take a video and pics while taking the car. This trick saved me probably tens of thousands of dollars by now.
The scans are evidence. Whether the are sufficient evidence to overcome whatever counterevidence you can provide (the civil standard of proof for liability being a preponderance of the evidence, not the beyond a reasonable doubt standard for criminal liability) is a matter that would be decided at trial (or, more likely, arbitration.)
> They were charged $195: $80 for the damage and $115 in fees, including those incurred “as a result of processing” the damage claim and the “cost to detect and estimate the damage” that occurred during the rental. Hertz offered to reduce the charge to $130 if they paid within one day.
Yea, that's just a scam. Charging fees for charging fees.
Then 20 yrs later, I rented from hertz a car with balding tires with the steel belts showing thru the worn tires. I did not catch that, as the garage I reviewed the car was DARK. Unfortunately, my destination did not have a nearby Hertz location. My mother in law entered the picture and after several “may I speak to your supervisor” we escalated pretty high and the next day, a flatbed truck showed up with a car for me and they took the other away.
pseudolus•6mo ago