Personally, when I have a rental, I beat the living shit out of it. I floor it every chance I get and take risks I’d never imagine trying in my own car.
Should I feel guilty about this, or do you do the same?
I do that too if it’s a relatively powerful car. But I mostly rent cars when I travel for work, and that means I get a subcompact or compact, most of which suck for that. Besides, I usually spend only what time in the car I absolutely have to – drive from airport to hotel, hotel to work each day, back to airport – so I’m not in the thing enough to do much more damage than that.
When I rent cars for personal use I do tend to beat the hell out of them. Drove a Cavalier to San Diego a couple years ago, a gutless vehicle by nature but I managed to make it stick to 75-80 mph most of the trip. And on hills with that tiny engine, that was a trick and a half.
I don’t feel guilty about it. I figure I’m paying for the right to use the car, and short of keeping it for myself, crashing it, or stripping it bare before I turn it back in, I should be able to drive it the way I want.
Luxury cars and others offering substantial size and power get treated as if they were my own. In the instances when I am forced to accept a mid-sized car, the poor thing is always made to suffer my indignation. Few are those who have heard a Mazda weep with terror, and I am one among them.
I feel no urge to abuse rental cars or any other vehicles. They’re mere tools, and as such, I try to use them as intended. I hate to think that I’m risking my life by renting a car that someone felt compelled to treat like crap…
But that’s just me, I guess…
I floor my car at every chance I get, so I imagine I’d do the same with a rental.
I rent a lot of cars, both for work and for personal use. My coworkers and friends and I having this running joke, where we will cackle fiendishly and say “It’s a rental!” whenever someone has a little spill, or otherwise threatens to abuse the car.
But this is really more of a joke than anything else. In reality, I treat the car very well. First, because driving is so much of a habit that I would have to make an effort to treat the car differently (flooring it, etc). Also, I don’t want to do anything unsafe in any car that I am driving (extreme speeding, weaving in and out of lanes), whether I own it or rent it. And finally, I don’t want to trash the inside of the car, because why would I want to drive around in a car that had garbage piling up, or yucky spills on the seats?
The big exception to this was what I like to call “the ill-fated rental car.” Some friends and I rented a car to drive about 10 hours away for a long-weekend. This car was a magnet for misfortune. If something could spill, it spilled. If the road was muddy, the mud completely coated the car. A truck turning into a construction site two lanes over kicked up some gravel, a piece of which went flying and nicked our windshield. While we were paying for gas inside the station, as the car sat by the pump, another car pulled into the lot and promtly rear-ended the rental. By the end of the weekend, it looked like we had purposefully destroyed this car. I was mortified to return it to the rental agency, but they took it back without comment.
I abuse them in the sense that I take them where I normally wouldn’t take my own car. I do most of my vacationing out west, so the rental sees a lot of dirt roads and the like. And LOTS of miles.
a couple of years ago i rented a car on the Big Island of Hawai’i. it was about $20 a day, but because i was 24 years old (under 25), i had to pay $25 a day for a underage drivers fee. i wasn’t happy.
so when we got to Mauna Kea and they said only 4x4 vehicles were advised to go to the summit (14,000 steep feet), we didn’t stop. and on the way down, i had no trouble driving in first gear with the emergency brake on the whole way. i figured the $25 was my “pre-repair” bill.
not to mention i hit every pothole in the road.
now, as a post-25er, i’m pretty respectful to rentals.
I tend to drive them gentler than my own car. Usually, Hertz just gives me one of the ubiquitous Ford Tauri. I find them to be somewhat ponderous, while my personal car is made for throwing into corners and running the gearbox to keep the revs in a good range. The Tauri are smooth quiet boring rides, and I treat them as such.
I drive rentals all the time out of town.
I never treat them as bad as my own car.
They start clean, inside and out, and that in itself stops me from bringing in mud, etc.
I treat 'em like a rental.
In the sense that it is not my personal property so therefore I feel little need to pamper or try to extend the life expectancy of said vehicle. This means driving through rather than around pot holes. Curb? What curb?? Parking ramps? There’s at least an inch to spare in that space!
Laughed out loud when I saw this thread’s title. Of course, I beat the shit out of them! Gotta see the 0-60 time on an entrance ramp with the pedal to the metal. Last summer we went out west and resnted some 4-wheel drive Jeep-type thing (I am so ignorant about makes and models). Have to admit I succeeded in scaring myself at times, the things I had that puppy doing. The missus stopped asking if we could take the car there. She knew what my response would be. “Of course we can. It has 4-wheel drive!”
As long as you bring it back with no readily visible damage …
And for the follow-up question, would you ever buy a rental/fleet car? Bwahahaha!
Drive it like you stole it… 
Last time I was in a rental vehicle, it was in Mexico and the check-point guards found marijuana seeds under the carpeting. They weren’t even ours, so this situation was terrifying since it was a federal offense.
Luckily they let our group go. phew!
Um-hmm. Sure. A likely story. Whatever you say, Welfalicious. 
I drive a rental the same way I drive my own car, considering it’s subject to the same laws of traffic and physics. Of course, I’ll barrel right over potholes in a rental, but I wouldn’t do anything crazy like jump curbs or turn corners like Joey Chitwood. Anyway, they’re usually shitty compact cars that are no fun to drive.
A few weeks ago, I got a beige Buick Century as a rental car for a 600 mile drive to Kansas City. It’s the ultimate old man’s car, with large knobs, directionals that get louder as they’re left on longer, an old fashioned pull switch for the light – the only thing that was missing was a slow drivin’ hat. I didn’t need it, though. Equipped with a radar detector, it’s about as stealth as you’ll see on the road, nice and anonymous. Cops don’t expect to see a Buick Century zipping by at 90. The law left me alone the entire trip.
Gutless? PAH! Curtis’s Z24 made almost 300 HP on the dyno running on ONLY 3 cylinders (out of 6) AND 8psi (out of 24) AND only up to 4000 rpm (out of 6500). Gutless?
–Tim
quite simply, I beat the piss out of rentals.
I once had a rental with Michigan plates and I was down at OSU, someone asked me if I was actually form MI, I had to not only tell them “No,” but also key the car saying “It’s a rental, I swear!”
Never, ever buy a rental car.
This has to be one of the funnier comments I’ve read all weekend. It’d be even better if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so painfully true.
Well let’s just say that its very fun to use the parking brake to stop.
Ooooo!!! There we go…
Let’s change this a bit… What have you done in a rental that you wouldn’t do in your own car?
I did the handbrake thing. It wasn’t all that exciting, unless of course you were going fast enough and timed it just right, then you can get yourself into a full slide and corner like knowbody’s business.
I also mowed through a four foot snow-bank with a rental car. I’d seen it on T.V. and was trying to re-enact the commercial to my friends. No damage, amazingly.
What else have I done… ahhh, I’ll let you guys add to it. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.