My thinking is that rental cars have to be returned full or you get billed at the agency’s higher rate. Since you have to drive a little bit to return the car, you top it off so that it’s still full when you get there.
I do know for sure that my wife and I never top off - when the pump clicks itself off, we’re done.
I used to contract for car rental agencies; driving the cars back and forth between local cities to wherever the companies needed them.
I can tell you from my own personal experience that rental cars got more abuse from the employees than they ever did from their customers. This is especially true if one of the managers is an asshole to his or her subordinates.
I actually saw one jackass bring a car up on two wheels driving at excessive speeds around the clover at DFW airport.
Topping off the tank also if you want to fill up the day before you return it so you don’t have to on your way to drop it off.
(Former fuel tank engineer – see my ancient post history.) Yup, this here. On many models forcibly adding more fuel beyond the automatic pump turn-off can do things like flood the carbon filter that recovers the fuel vapors.
An eminent man discusses the matter:
[QUOTE=P.J. O’Rourke]
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?
[/QUOTE]
Wouldn’t the rental agency notice any damage and make me pay for it (apart from normal wear and tear)?
I don’t change my driving habits just because I am driving someone else’s car.
This reminds me of the stories of rock bands trashing hotel rooms and the like. Even if you can afford it, what’s the point? It doesn’t sound like fun to me. It’s not even a moral thing - it just sounds pointless.
Regards,
Shodan
Agreed. Last time I rented I wanted to see if it might be interested in buying that model in the future. Then again, I thrash the cars I own as well so I wouldn’t say I drive very differently in a rental. I am extremely careful not to damage it as I rent with the minimum possible insurance and don’t want to be on the hook for whatever ridiculous waiver/excess their insurance has.
I’m the OP. Thanks everyone for their contributions so far; keep 'em coming.
My daily driver is a performance car. Which I drive pretty hard. Not insane, but I’m aggressive. Not that there’s too much opportunity in Miami’s ginourmous rectilinear suburban sprawl. And on the freeway even 90 is barely starting to get into the upper gears on a seriously fast car.
Driving crazy in some Toyota Camry or Ford Fusion or Chevy Malibu leaves me cold. Especially on unfamiliar roads in an unfamiliar city. Diving hard into some unfamiliar curve of unknown decreasing radius in a car of unknown but definitely crappy handling with definitely crappy brakes and tires doesn’t sound real attractive, the esteemed kopek’s habits notwithstanding.
So summarizing what I think we’ve learned, it sounds like we really have two groups of renters. Folks renting cars for normal typical use who drive them mostly normally with maybe a bit of extra Who cares? It’s a rental. And another group who rent cars specifically to try them out, race them, or otherwise abuse them as part of a deliberate plan. And who presumably do it local to where they live, so unfamiliar roads aren’t part of the problem.
It’s a pretty good bet the first group is the majority of rentals and of mileage. Especially in bigger cities where rural thrashing opportunities are farther away. Though of course individual cars move around between rental locations from time to time.
I do know that I took the little BMW rental into some places on a South African game preserve that I wouldn’t have taken my personal car.
I know more stories about mechanics or transport people trashing cars than I do about rental thrashers.
I got a bunch of cool factory parts off a Mustang that a service guy totalled. I knew the service manager and he told me to stop by, quickly loaded up some cool stuff (wheels, sport body parts, other goodies) he’d stripped from the wreck.
When I had a Mercedes, an awesome AMG engine came up because a mechanic test driving the car switched off the stability control so he could thrash it. Car totalled, injured mechanic fired, priceless engine subject of checkbook-and-lug wrench fight among the other mechanics.
I have five or six more such stories on tap. Can’t think of a renter-thrashing story.
My personal car got a redlight camera violation while in the possession of the repair shop.
There was a corner near the shop posted for no right turn on red for no apparent reason. This was turning off an urban artery onto an old residential side street. And it had a newly installed enforcement camera. And sure enough, the shop’s test driver did the right on red. At a couple mph.
When confronted they reimbursed me for the fine and posted the enforcement picture on their wall of shame with all the others.
Overall I found it funny rather than annoying.
I think it’s pretty much BS, precisely because autocrossing a rental is extremely unlikely to do anything at all to hurt it mechanically, even in terms of tire and brake wear. The problem is that if you take a car to redline a few times, threshold brake going into corners, and really get the tires squealing on an on-ramp, people think you’re some crazy car abuser. But that’s just how I drive my own cars most of the time; they’re designed for that sort of thing. Chucking a rental Yaris into a corner at 50mph on 185 series economy tires is actually pretty darn tame compared to, say, hitting the same corner at 55mph in a mustang with 315s in the rear and a load of grip trying to keep 3800 lbs on the road through some squishy rubber suspension bushings.
I guess what you’d have to be concerned about are people hitting speed bumps at 60mph, or reversing at 15mph and then throwing it into drive. Stuff like that could really screw a car up, but given the millions of rental cars in the country and the relatively rarity of complete assholes who are going to break a car for no reason, I don’t think it’s much of a concern. I’ve never bought an off-rental, but I wouldn’t be afraid to.
Having done training for Hertz technicians I can tell you that yes some people do trash the hell out of rentals.
One story I heard was some guys rented a 4WD pick up got the protection and had two of them towed back in with severe damage (one alternator full of mud, and the electrical system dead, and the other with a hydro-locked engine before Hertz revoked their rental privileges.
More than once I have come across cases of people using rental cars as pick a part.
2015 rental car with a part built in 2012 for example. Or a car with 3,000 miles and bald tires.
It happens.
Ref Rick’s story …
I’ve always wondered just how much the “full protection insurance” on the rental really is a license to negligently destroy the vehicle on their dime. Their lawyers wrote the terms and I’d sure expect them to include a disclaimer against wilful behavior. Maybe a bit hard to prove in court, but useful for the real extreme cases.
I never buy the extra coverage, so I’ve never read the terms in detail. Anyone know?
I’ve driven and damaged rental cars but I always had the extra insurance. No matter how they look, you just walk away.
I used to rent one for Ft. hood and used the Tank trails quite a bit. The difference between a rental car and a tank? You can take a rental car anywhere.
I was a station manager for one of the big rental car companies. The vast majority of renters were business men or families and both took pretty decent care of the cars. Generally the worst things they did involved dog hair or maybe a ton of sand in the carpets from a visit to the beach. It’s hard to vacuum that stuff out and it would really slow down our guys who handled cleaning up cars.
But like any business, a certain percentage of people are jackasses. The rental agreement essentially said that if you did something intentionally to damage the car, the damage waiver would not apply. We had a staff of accident investigators whose sole job was to figure out that stuff when cars came back damaged.
They’d look to see if the driver at the time of damage was the renter or someone authorized to drive. Off-road was expressly prohibited in the rental agreement as was deliberate and negligent damage. For example, if you drove a car into flood waters, that was on you. Parking in a lot that flooded wasn’t the same, we ate that under the damage waiver. The investigators had seen it all and were very good about nailing people for deliberate damage.
As Rick mentioned, using the rental car as a source of cheap tires and parts, was much more common. Rent a car that matches yours at a weekend rate of less than $50 per day. Drive car home to your matching car, swap tires and rims, return rental car with bald tires. $400 worth of tires for just the cost of a day rental or two.
Then there are people that do this to rental cars:
Exactly. And I rent utilitarian cars and don’t need to “see what they can do”.
How often did they get away with that? You have credit card & license numbers, and unless they were fake, you could track them down pretty well.
I can’t speak for others but I’ve often said a rental car is the only true all-terrain vehicle. For me, it’s a rented Cadillac with a GPS, a cloud of dust, and a hearty “Hi-yo Silver” when it comes to exploring the dirt roads of the Southwest desert.