Shattered! When Rental Cars Go (Sort Of) Wild

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

I closed the driver’s door and the back window of the 2017 Hyundai Sonata simply fell into the passenger compartment, a thousand little pieces sprinkled over my luggage, my spare pair of shoes, my son’s child seat. It was about 10:45 on a Saturday night. Danger Girl, my son, and I were nearly 400 miles away from home. It was 26 degrees outside. And we were about 40 miles from the nearest town with more than one stoplight.

Did I mention that the car in question was a rental?

Twenty-three years ago, I went on an interview with Enterprise Rent-A-Car. It’d put an ad in the paper saying they wanted recent college graduates to staff their locations. As a recent college graduate myself, one without any particular direction in life, or what they call “career velocity” nowadays, I thought perhaps I’d be a good fit for the company.

Boy, was I wrong. The ad had specified “entrepreneurial nature a MUST!” so I’d arrived chock-full of tales from the mail-order bike shop I’d opened at the age of 19 and run for more than a year before being torpedoed by a poor choice of business partners on my part. I envisioned myself managing the hell out of an Enterprise car location the same way I’d run my bike shop race team with the proverbial iron fist.

After waiting in a hotel lobby with a bunch of dudes who looked just like every Sigma Chi at my school but who lacked the happy-go-lucky cheer of those fellows, I was ushered into a dingy little conference-room-slash-interview-chamber. A rather sour-looking fellow with cheap shoes asked me, “Did you play any sports in college?” I was perhaps 90 seconds into a recapitulation of my pro BMX career that, in my opinion, was both forthright about my lack of success while also providing adequate context for the difficulties of trying to get a degree and travel to races at the same time when he waved his hand, cut me off, asked three or four questions that were clearly answered by the résumé in front of him, then brought the interview to a firm and unfriendly halt. So much for my rental-car dreams.

In the years since, I’ve rented more than a hundred cars from various Enterprise outlets and I’ve come to realize it hires a very specific sort of male “manager.” They’re all flat-faced, profoundly incurious young men with backgrounds in junior-college football, considerable ability to cast a shadow, Chinese “wingtips,” and a manner of speaking that’s alternately cocky and feckless. They read from a script that’s been drilled into them.

Part of that script: “How did you want to handle the coverage on the automobile?” I can imagine that phrase being focus-grouped to death. I find it infuriating, because I always gave them the same response and I always get the same answer.

Flat-Faced Linebacker for Kent State: How did you want to handle the coverage on the automobile?

Me, in a hurry to get on the road: I reserved the car on my Amex Platinum. I expect them to cover it.

FFLfKS: What’s going to happen is that we’ll have to make a claim against your insurance and then you can go to the credit card company afterwards and make a secondary claim and …

… at which point I’ve either zoned out or the dude has stopped talking, or maybe both. Every once in a while I will have a particularly bright bulb, who says, “Your credit card won’t cover the damage,” to which I respond, “For $450 a year, they had better.” But since I’ve never damaged a rental car in any particularly noticeable fashion, I’ve never put much more thought into it than that.

Which is why you could have knocked me down with a feather this past Saturday night when my back window imploded. The scenario was this: We’d taken this rental Sonata to Camp Woodward, deep in the heart of Pennsylvania Amish country, so my son could ride his new BMX bike at the Lot 8 skatepark. I’d just run into the nearest town to get Danger Girl some lasagna.

“Where’s the fork?” she inquired, upon seeing the lasagna.

“Uh, I guess I’d better get one,” I replied, and I went back out to the Sonata. The windows had fogged over and I was worried about backing over one of the children on bikes and scooters who were zipping all over the place, so I clicked on the rear defroster. Instead of clearing, the back window appeared to fog more. So I rolled down my window, looked behind me, backed up, and went to get a fork from the on-premises lodge/hotel. When I got there, I opened my driver’s door, got out, and closed it again, at which point the spider-webbed window fell into the back seat.

At this point, I had some non-trivial concerns. I wasn’t all that worried about “how I was going to handle the coverage”; a back window can only cost so much, and I’d refer the bill to Amex anyway. I was more concerned about how I was going to get my son back home in sub-freezing conditions. Even if I covered the back window with a trash bag and drove with the side mirrors like a Lamborghini Countach owner, how could I be certain that every single bit of shattered glass was out of the car? What if the bag ripped out and a little tornado full of glass pieces blew up into my son’s face?

So I called Enterprise. It was a surprisingly painless process. The lackey on the other end said Enterprise had a car at the National office in State College, about 40 miles from Woodward. They said I could send my wife in the morning to get it. Which is what I did. By the time Danger Girl brought us back our new car — a Chrysler 200 — the skatepark was closed for the weekend and it was time to go.

To my surprise and delight, there was no drama about “one way rentals” or “substitution fees” or any of the other drama I’ve heard over the years from fellow travelers (as opposed to fellow-travelers, which means something else entirely) about problems they’ve had with rental cars. Back home, the flat-faced six-foot-four fellow in the cheap wingtips did a condition report on the Chrysler, noted that I’d filled the tank, and brought the rental to a satisfactory close.

Speaking honestly, I don’t think I could have done any better of a job were I managing an Enterprise location, so maybe the fellow who sent my résumé to the circular file way back in ’93 knew what he was doing after all. I will say that I’m slightly freaked-out about the potential durability of Hyundai’s heated glass after this episode. But these things happen, I suppose. In the end, I have no complaints.

Not that I can say the same for Danger Girl. “I hated this car the moment I saw it,” she griped as we loaded up the trunk with bags and helmets. “How is a Chrysler a replacement for a Hyundai?”

“You know,” I replied, “people were asking that same question 30 years ago, with a different emphasis.”

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

More by Jack Baruth

Comments
Join the conversation
5 of 95 comments
  • Dal20402 Dal20402 on Jan 18, 2017

    The biggest fight I've ever gotten in with a rental car company was with Enterprise (as parent company of National) over a windshield in a 2007 Impala SS that spontaneously cracked while parked overnight on a Seattle street. They tried to bill me for the "damage," and I refused to pay because it was a defect in their car. It escalated to several angry letters to their collection agency and a minor hit on my FICO. I never paid and eventually they stopped pursuing it. Oddly, only a few months earlier they didn't blink an eye or charge me a penny when I brought them back a LaCrosse with a badly cracked front bumper and a dangling fog light that was at least arguably my fault (metal in roadway at night, not seen until too late to avoid).

    • See 2 previous
    • FreedMike FreedMike on Jan 19, 2017

      @dal20402 That does indeed help...

  • Hifi Hifi on Jan 20, 2017

    OMG... I just dealt with this same type of problem with Enterprise. I had rented a minivan, but what I ended up with was a Dodge cargo van. It didn't really matter that it was a cargo van, I just needed hauling space. So I took it. I drove it to our family weekend house, went to the nursery and got some flowers for the yard, loaded them into the rear of the van and then went home. When I went to unload the stuff I'd bought, some of the flowers and mulch bags had been pushed deeper into the van, so I went around to the side to use the sliding door. And the fucking door fell off completely. It slipped off the track and was hanging completely off on one side. I couldn't open it fully or shut it at all. So, to the folks at Enterprise, the way to infuriate your customers is to give them a shit car that literally falls apart, not have a replacement available immediately, put a $500 charge on my CC while the damage was being "investigated," then charge me a $150 fee because the car that was eventually provided as a replacement after three days was considered a "one way" drop off. If you want to turn a loyal "platinum" customer into a raging lunatic, that's how to do it. I've rented countless cars since then, and Enterprise has redeemed themselves. They have the best service by far. But that particular instance was not handled properly, so this story hits home.

  • KOKing I owned a Paul Bracq-penned BMW E24 some time ago, and I recently started considering getting Sacco's contemporary, the W124 coupe.
  • Bob The answer is partially that stupid manufacturers stopped producing desirable PHEVs.I bought my older kid a beautiful 2011 Volt, #584 off the assembly line and #000007 for HOV exemption in MD. We love the car. It was clearly an old guy's car, and his kids took away his license.It's a perfect car for a high school kid, really. 35 miles battery range gets her to high school, job, practice, and all her friend's houses with a trickle charge from the 120V outlet. In one year (~7k miles), I have put about 10 gallons of gas in her car, and most of that was for the required VA emissions check minimum engine runtime.But -- most importantly -- that gas tank will let her make the 300-mile trip to college in one shot so that when she is allowed to bring her car on campus, she will actually get there!I'm so impressed with the drivetrain that I have active price alerts for the Cadillac CT6 2.0e PHEV on about 12 different marketplaces to replace my BMW. Would I actually trade in my 3GT for a CT6? Well, it depends on what broke in German that week....
  • ToolGuy Different vehicle of mine: A truck. 'Example' driving pattern: 3/3/4 miles. 9/12/12/9 miles. 1/1/3/3 miles. 5/5 miles. Call that a 'typical' week. Would I ever replace the ICE powertrain in that truck? No, not now. Would I ever convert that truck to EV? Yes, very possibly. Would I ever convert it to a hybrid or PHEV? No, that would be goofy and pointless. 🙂
  • ChristianWimmer Took my ‘89 500SL R129 out for a spin in his honor (not a recent photo).Other great Mercedes’ designers were Friedrich Geiger, who styled the 1930s 500K/540K Roadsters and my favorite S-Class - the W116 - among others. Paul Bracq is also a legend.RIP, Bruno.
  • ToolGuy Currently my drives tend to be either extra short or fairly long. (We'll pick that vehicle over there and figure in the last month, 5 miles round trip 3 times a week, plus 1,000 miles round trip once.) The short trips are torture for the internal combustion powertrain, the long trips are (relative) torture for my wallet. There is no possible way that the math works to justify an 'upgrade' to a more efficient ICE, or an EV, or a hybrid, or a PHEV. Plus my long trips tend to include (very) out of the way places. One day the math will work and the range will work and the infrastructure will work (if the range works) and it will work in favor of a straight EV (purchased used). At that point the short trips won't be torture for the EV components and the long trips shouldn't hurt my wallet. What we will have at that point is the steady drip-drip-drip of long-term battery degradation. (I always pictured myself buying generic modular replacement cells at Harbor Freight or its future equivalent, but who knows if that will be possible). The other option that would almost possibly work math-wise would be to lease a new EV at some future point (but the payment would need to be really right). TL;DR: ICE now, EV later, Hybrid maybe, PHEV probably never.
Next