3 ms·

Several Toyota dealers where I use to live offered rentals. Most of the big players, have a small "fleet" they use as loaner vehicles (maintenance, body work,

Several Toyota dealers where I use to live offered rentals. Most of the big players, have a small "fleet" they use as loaner vehicles (maintenance, body work, etc). Since new cars have pretty big markups, they run them for a year and basically take a small loss when they go to sell them. It seems like this system provides the missing piece to easily rent idle vehicles from the "loaner fleet".

gnicholas 7y ago
How do you find out about this? I'd love to know where I can rent a Sienna or something for a road trip, and the rental companies are terrible at actually having the car you "reserved".
- SkyPuncher 7y ago
  This is a good start: https://www.toyota.com/rental/index.html https://www.toyota.com/rental/index.html You can also search Google/Bing for local dealerships and check if they have a rental section. ------ We're planning to do something similar to test some of the lane keep systems on a long road trip.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    FWIW, the lane keep assist in the Toyotas is still pretty rough. I test drove the 2019 RAV-4 Hybrid a couple times, and it is unusable in the right lane (it will steer you into an exit barrier, trying to keep you centered between your left lane marker and the diverging exit lane marker). Even in a center/left lane, it still ping-pongs around more than I'd like. That is to say, I could imagine getting pulled over on suspicion of drunken driving, and sheepishly saying "I'm sober, I'm just using the LKAS, which performs roughly as well as a drunk". The Honda system seemed better (2019 CRV) to me, though I didn't test it for quite as long.
    - SkyPuncher 7y ago
      Thank you! I'm really interested in LKAS, but none of the car bloggers seem to touch it. We have a lot of country highway driving and LKAS seems like a nice way to reduce fatigue. Bummer that it's not up to par yet.
      - gnicholas 7y ago
        Yes, this is one of the critical features that is holding up my purchase of a new vehicle. I am holding onto a 12-year-old Volvo wagon because I'm not sufficiently impressed by any of the current offerings. The RAV4 Hybrid gets great mileage but has not-great LKAS and the CVT is very loud; the CRV isn't a hybrid (coming to the US next spring) and the LKAS seems OK but not amazing; and the Subaru Outback is a great vehicle with good pricing, but it's not hybrid either and the EyeSight system hasn't been updated since 2017. If Toyota were committed to OTA updates, I'd probably have bought a RAV4 by now. But if they're going to keep the driver assist technology static in the hopes of getting you to upgrade sooner, I'm not going to buy until the tech is up to snuff. It's also pretty lousy that all of these companies brag about how all of their driver-assist safety tech is included in the base model — but they force you to upgrade if you want blindspot warnings. For me, that's a much more critical and commonly-used feature than automatic braking, for example. As for the car bloggers, Tom Voelk sometimes touches on it, and I try to encourage this by commenting about it or asking about it in the comments.
    - bradknowles 7y ago
      Interestingly, we recently rented a new Ford Escape with radar-controlled adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping. I was pleasantly surprised that it worked as well as it did, and didn’t try to steer me off at exits, etc.... Obviously, it only works when the road is well-marked. And I did find that it usually put me a little further to one side of the lane than I like, but maybe it’s just me that’s off and not the car. Overall, I had a good enough impression that this is now a feature that I will actively look for on any new car we might buy.

gnicholas 7y ago

How do you find out about this? I'd love to know where I can rent a Sienna or something for a road trip, and the rental companies are terrible at actually having the car you "reserved".

SkyPuncher 7y ago
This is a good start: https://www.toyota.com/rental/index.html https://www.toyota.com/rental/index.html You can also search Google/Bing for local dealerships and check if they have a rental section. ------ We're planning to do something similar to test some of the lane keep systems on a long road trip.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  FWIW, the lane keep assist in the Toyotas is still pretty rough. I test drove the 2019 RAV-4 Hybrid a couple times, and it is unusable in the right lane (it will steer you into an exit barrier, trying to keep you centered between your left lane marker and the diverging exit lane marker). Even in a center/left lane, it still ping-pongs around more than I'd like. That is to say, I could imagine getting pulled over on suspicion of drunken driving, and sheepishly saying "I'm sober, I'm just using the LKAS, which performs roughly as well as a drunk". The Honda system seemed better (2019 CRV) to me, though I didn't test it for quite as long.
  - SkyPuncher 7y ago
    Thank you! I'm really interested in LKAS, but none of the car bloggers seem to touch it. We have a lot of country highway driving and LKAS seems like a nice way to reduce fatigue. Bummer that it's not up to par yet.
    - gnicholas 7y ago
      Yes, this is one of the critical features that is holding up my purchase of a new vehicle. I am holding onto a 12-year-old Volvo wagon because I'm not sufficiently impressed by any of the current offerings. The RAV4 Hybrid gets great mileage but has not-great LKAS and the CVT is very loud; the CRV isn't a hybrid (coming to the US next spring) and the LKAS seems OK but not amazing; and the Subaru Outback is a great vehicle with good pricing, but it's not hybrid either and the EyeSight system hasn't been updated since 2017. If Toyota were committed to OTA updates, I'd probably have bought a RAV4 by now. But if they're going to keep the driver assist technology static in the hopes of getting you to upgrade sooner, I'm not going to buy until the tech is up to snuff. It's also pretty lousy that all of these companies brag about how all of their driver-assist safety tech is included in the base model — but they force you to upgrade if you want blindspot warnings. For me, that's a much more critical and commonly-used feature than automatic braking, for example. As for the car bloggers, Tom Voelk sometimes touches on it, and I try to encourage this by commenting about it or asking about it in the comments.
  - bradknowles 7y ago
    Interestingly, we recently rented a new Ford Escape with radar-controlled adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping. I was pleasantly surprised that it worked as well as it did, and didn’t try to steer me off at exits, etc.... Obviously, it only works when the road is well-marked. And I did find that it usually put me a little further to one side of the lane than I like, but maybe it’s just me that’s off and not the car. Overall, I had a good enough impression that this is now a feature that I will actively look for on any new car we might buy.