A 1960/1970s car couldn’t take that kind of abuse and remain durable. A modern car doesn’t care. Especially not if the new owner will drive 5K miles/year; it’ll be 20 years before they use it up. But which time stuff will be dying of old age and plastic rot, not from mileage.
As a separate matter, IMO the idea that most renters abuse the crap out of the car is mostly urban legend. Some? sure. Most? Nope. Lots of rental cars now have trackers on them; people who really abuse them tend to get a bill or get blacklisted. I don’t know whether e.g. Enterprise uses trackers. We’ve had threads on this and we had a poster who managed a large name brand rental outlet at a major airport and gave some good insider intel.
I bought my 2016 Escape in 2017 with 40K miles. I assume it was a rental.
It was without a doubt the most trouble-free vehicle I had ever owned at the time I sold it 5 years later.
I bought a low-mileage MX-3 from Enterprise or National for my teenage daughter a while back and she drove it for many trouble-free years before selling it. I would do it again if I had too.
Even more important than being drunk, however, is having the right car. You have to get a car that handles really well. This is extremely important, and there’s a lot of debate on this subject – about what kind of car handles best. Some say a front-engined car; some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and can use the trunk as an ice chest. Another thing about a rented car is that it’s an all-terrain vehicle. Mud, snow, water, woods – you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can’t always get it back – but that’s not your problem, is it?
When my brothers, sisters, and I got our licenses, my dad would buy three or four Pintos at a time from Enterprise and we each got a car for going to school, shopping, etc. He got a good deal on the purchases even though he said the curb in front of our home looked like a “Pakistani” taxi stand. I don’t remember any car having major problems; if one did, dad would drive it to a dump and buy another rental. Good times.
If I had 4 teenaged kids driving I could see them getting through quite a few Pintos. There’d be about a crash per month. Buy 'em cheap enough and they’re an insurance writeoff even if the damage is relatively minor.
Insurance? Who am I kidding? Who’d have collision or comprehensive on a teen car? Liability and medical sure, but not coll/comp.
We bought a car from a used car dealer which was a former rental car. No problems with it. When I used to use rental cars it was pretty much to get from the airport to the place I was visiting and back again. Not heavy use at all.
I used to own a Pinto. Great car. No one ever tailgated you.
Depends on the location. In some places they are illegal. Or at least they were about 15 years ago when I occasionally took rented cars to track events in California. ISTR that in my research at the time, many states prohibited trackers on rental cars.
Just checked. Still illegal in California. Here’s a 2018 WaPo article about it:
…California law bars rental companies from tracking their customer’s location until the vehicle has been missing at least five days past its return date.
Some car rental companies want to decrease the number of days significantly, making it possible to track the movements of customers who failed to return vehicles on time. Meanwhile, privacy advocates worry that allowing companies to track customers — even if only after they’ve failed to return a rental vehicle — could open the door to privacy abuses, such as collecting and selling valuable consumer data.
Buying a retired rental car is a great idea. As noted by the OP, it will be completely up to date with all scheduled maintenance, and it will have been kept clean. You can almost certainly rest assured that nobody will have smoked inside it.
And, when you think about it, where do most people drive rental cars? If it’s a business trip, it probably took somebody from the airport to a hotel, and then maybe to some conference center. It’d be basic highway driving.
Even vacationers are probably just going to your typical tourist places, which aren’t likely going to require you to traverse a lot of rough terrain.
Or I guess there’s the person who needs a car while their own is being repaired. I’d expect normal commuting stuff.
Then, consider that all of those drivers are subject to a vehicle inspection once they return the vehicle, and any needed repairs are going to be made immediately.
It’s pretty hard to figure out the downside, really.
That’s what I’m thinking too. I haven’t looked at prices closely, but for someone that might drive 5000 miles a year, and is 62 years old, it seems like a good path to consider.
The used rental should at least have had it’s maintenance done and should be fairly clean.
DH and I rented a Jeep while our car was in the shop (he needed cargo space for all his tools). Since it had 4WD, he did insist on some minor off-roading, with due care. We turned it back in with no damage except a need for vacuuming (he’s a construction worker, so anything he drives to work gets messy).
Another factor in a rental car that’s been continuously used for three years or so: it’s basically guaranteed not to be a lemon with a manufacturing defect. The rental agencies make their profit from having the vehicle on the road as much as possible, and if the car has been going into the shop more than average because the factory screwed something up, the agency will certainly send it back for a replacement rather than eat the cut into their margin. So I would expect a proven rental car to have noticeably improved reliability, considering that by definition it will have beaten the averages on the short-term assembly issues.
My first car was a Renault Encore from Enterprise I used for commuting to school. It was a gutless wonder, but fine for the purpose. We bought a fleet car a few years ago that was about a year old from Carmax. It was pretty much a used car in new condition, and has been grest. Definitely worth checking into buying from a rental company.
The comments here confirm what I’ve generally heard, that buying a used car from a major reputable rental company is usually a good idea.
I’ve never bought a rental, but my previous car was a one-year-old Dodge Caravan that had been on a corporate lease. On balance I’d say it worked out fairly well, but part of the reason it was taken off lease was that although it was just a year old, it had high mileage for its age. The high mileage probably resulted in some repairs happening sooner than might otherwise have been necessary, but it was still a decent value that served me well for over 13 years. What eventually got to it was body rust, underbody chassis rust, and an engine problem that wasn’t worth repairing at that point.
It occurred to me later that if I had paid a lot more for a low-mileage version of the same vehicle, it would have been wasted money because ultimately it wasn’t mileage-related mechanical wear that killed it, it was corrosion. Even the engine problem was corrosion related.
