Dinged Rental Cars, Dinged Wallet
At the most, I would rent a car once or twice a year when I find myself traveling to remote cities for friends’ weddings, for example. Luckilly, this has not yet happened to me.
According to the New York Times, it’s common for rental car companies to charge mutiple customers for the same dings or dents on cars. There are a few examples where the company in question — in this case Enterprise — has charged customers’ credit cards $500 before the car has been inspected.
How many motorists are billed for existing damage to the cars they rent? Of the scores of complaints I have received about damage disputes, I counted about a dozen recent cases that seemed to fit the bill. All of them involved Enterprise.
Enterprise defended their actions in the article, saying the customers were misbilled due to their returning the rented vehicles on a Saturday. Now, generally I’m quite trusting and I give others the benefit of the doubt, but if that’s the best excuse they can come up with, it’s a sorry state of affairs.
The best advice is to thoroughly inspect the vehicle before you sign the rental agreement. Walk around the car and mark down any blemish that the company might try to blame on you. I generally don’t take the extra insurance offered by the rental company as between my own insurance and AAA, everything’s covered. Most of all, don’t get into any accidents.
Speaking of accidents, now it’s confession time: One time, I rented a small truck (like U-Haul or Ryder) for moving my worldly possessions from one town to another. As I drove around the gas station between filling up and returning the vehicle, I think I took out part of the roof of the building that extended past the side. The truck was fine.
Has anyone else had any interesting experiences with rental cars or the companies?
Article comments
I got a rental car from Enterprise in August and while I was driving on the freeway a rock or something hit the windshield and cracked it. I didn’t accept the rental car insurance and I only had liability insurance on my car. I was ready to open my checkbook and pay for the damage but it turns out that in Texas if you have liability insurance on your car then it will cover up to $5000 on a rental car with no deductable. If you have additional coverage on your car then the rental car is covered to the extent of the coverage on your car. This is not the case in all states though.
When my mother-in-law was helping my husband and I move a couple of years ago the group of us stayed with a family friend for a couple of days. The friend asked my MIL to move our U-Haul truck up the driveway a bit. In doing so, MIL forgot about the large overhead on the U-Haul. She pulled up next to the house and completely destroyed the little roof overhang above the side door. The house shook from the impact. Ooops! Luckily friend’s husband is a do-it-yourselfer, and we are all still friends :)/
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