27 ms·

Renting a car will be a pain until at least 2022

291 points by prostoalex 5y ago

reidjs 5y ago
I realize this won’t work in LA, but if you are traveling for fun/vacation, why not check out places with functional public transit so you don’t need a car? San Francisco, Portland, New York, European Cities, etc.
- finfinfin 5y ago
  Because you still need a car in those places if you want to experience them fully. Eg hiking in the East Bay is still pretty inaccessible by public transport from SF. So yes, you can enjoy the landmarks in the city, but if you want to visit adjacent cities and/or nature - you still need to spend a fortune on Uber or rent a car.
  - sk5t 5y ago
    If visiting New York City, must one also visit the Adirondacks and Montauk as well? How long a vacation are we talking about here?
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    You can visit Philadelphia by train from New York. I'm actually planning a trip with a friend through the Northeast Regional. You can start at the White House / Smithsonian (seeing all of the history there), hop on a train to Philadelphia to see the liberty bell + the original capital of the country, then hop on a train and continue to NYC / Broadway and watch Hamilton. No car (or airplane) needed. 100% trains / metros.
    - hammock 5y ago
      Amtrak is the best way to get between those cities imo. Puts you in the center of the city and avoids a cab onto the island through traffic. Did it for work a bunch
      - ryukafalz 5y ago
        Agree that Amtrak is the best way if you can afford it. If you're on a budget you can also take SEPTA to Trenton and transfer to NJT into NYC. Puts you at the same place, just takes a bit longer.
        dragontamer 5y ago
        If you're trying to save money, the bus system works. But... ugggh. Train is more expensive for good reason! Its a much better experience. If we're talking about the price of Uber-rides / Rental Cars from NYC to Adirondacks... I bet you that the Train to Philly or even Washington DC will be cheaper than a rental car + all those miles you put on it! So IMO, save your sanity and go with the train. But the busses exist if you really need to cut back on $$$ even more.
        ryukafalz 5y ago
        Oh no, I do mean by train! Both the SEPTA route and the NJT route I was referring to are trains - they just don't go the whole way from Philly->NYC, so you need a transfer. Now, frequency on SEPTA's Regional Rail lines has tanked during the pandemic, so using it may not be as practical as it once was. Haven't checked recently. Hopefully they get service back to reasonable levels.
        checker 5y ago
        Adding some other thoughts: - Trains get to skip traffic, but rental car might be cheaper if you're splitting it with friends. - Trains do break down or hit delays sometimes, but traffic is always a risk on I95. - Buses are the cheapest but have random people (dice roll) and traffic. - Parking a rental car might not be cheap in a city center but can be a wash depending on transit costs. Again, parking cost can be split with friends. So my decision is usually situational.
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      As a Philly resident... yep. For those visiting, honestly if you plan to stay anywhere near Center City having a car is more of a hassle than not. Our transit system isn't perfect but it's easily the best way to get around the core parts of the city. And yeah whenever I visit NYC from here it's always by train.
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        What would be the sights to see in Philly? I was planning on mostly wandering around aimlessly (actually, I'll probably still do that :-) ). But I'm all ears for any "must see" locations. Liberty Bell + museums are the main thing I know about.
        thomaslord 5y ago
        This isn't really a sight-seeing thing, but grab a cheese steak! Pat's/Gino's are the famous spots where everyone takes photos, but IMO they're mostly tourist traps at this point. Worst cheese steaks I've had within 100 miles of Philly. Jim's is a good spot, plus it's on South Street which is a good area to walk around in. The South Street area is also home to a bunch of mozaic murals by Isaiah Zagar, which are definitely worth checking out. There are official tours, but you can also just check out the neighborhood map here and explore some of them on your own: https://www.phillymagicgardens.org/about-us/mosaic-mural-map/ https://www.phillymagicgardens.org/about-us/mosaic-mural-map... If you like walks, check out the Schuylkill River Trail - it got caught up in the recent flooding so I'm not sure what kind of shape it's in right now, but I assume it'll get cleaned up pretty quick if it hasn't been already. The view of 30th Street Station and a nearby USPS building is pretty cool at night. I've heard it can get a little sketchy if you're down on the trail at night, but as a 6ft tall white guy I never ran into any issues on the route walked home from work for ~8 months. Your mileage may vary, but the worst thing I ever encountered was kids my age smoking weed down by the river.
        checker 5y ago
        Reading Terminal Market is cool, but I'm not sure how it will be during pandemic conditions (it's usually pretty crowded).
  - mey 5y ago
    Agreed, as a resident of Portland, when we have guests in town, we spend about half their time in the natural areas around Portland. Granted getting to wine country or beautiful waterfalls can be done with various public transit options, sorta, it isn't easy. And you certainly aren't going to get off the beaten path.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    If you're doing a day hike, that's what car shares are for. There's plenty in the East Bay and SF. I only started owning a car when a friend gave us their old beater, but before that and through the earlier portions of the pandemic I used car shares any time I wanted to go hiking.
  - bityard 5y ago
    Ooh, this reminds me of a story from my youth. Two friends and myself went to New York for the HOPE conference in Manhattan. We drove there but we're midwesterners so we didn't want to drive in the city proper. Our plan was to drive to New Jersey, leave our car at a friend-of-a-friend's place, and then catch the train into the city. All went well until we were on our way home. The friend-of-a-friend was supposed to pick us up from the train station and drive us 5 minutes to his house so we could get in our car and head west. But he wasn't answering his phone. While we sat there wondering what to do, I saw a pizza place across the street that said "free delivery" on the sign. I joked that we should order a pizza, give the address where our car was at, and then ask if the driver would deliver us as well. Without laughing, my one friend said, "let's give it a try" and strode off towards the restaurant. We explained our situation and a few minutes later the pizza guy was delivering the pizza, and us, to our car.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    A car is usually pretty optional for most places in Europe. Some natural areas like the Alps have better public transit than most US city centers. Not everywhere is as allergic to public transit as most of the US. SF is also one of the better US cities in this regard. I spent several months in SF without a car and rented a car exactly one weekend to get to some further out hiking. There are actually plenty of transit accessible natural areas.
- clairity 5y ago
  LA has more extensive public transit than either sf or portland. you can get around (to basically all of the tourist destinations) just fine by train, bus (gasp!), scooters and bikes, with the occasional lyft to fill the gaps.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    This just isn't true in a practical sense. LA is far too sprawling to effectively use the train without everything taking an hour longer than driving.
    - asdff 5y ago
      The train is actually the one form of transit that usually beats driving, at least the trains that are grade separated (red and purple). There is no faster way to get between downtown LA and hollywood than the redline for most of the day. The expo line is pretty slow since a lot of it runs at grade, but even then it can beat a day with terrible traffic on the 10 going into santa monica.
      - wcarron 5y ago
        Agreed. Over the past decade I've commuted by some combination of all of LA's train lines, and the orange line, too. Red and purple and the best. Although purple's lack of distance degrades the value. Green, yellow, and expo are decent, but Yellow running at-grade degrades the utility somewhat, as for the expo line, as you said. The Green line didn't freaking connect to LAX, completely negating it's potential utility. Blue line and orange line are by far the worst, being entirely at street level and interrupted constantly with cross traffic. Honestly, what really needs to happen is: 1) Purple line completes intended extension. 2) Submerge the blue line and install new station for connection w/ green. 3) The orange line needs to be submerged and absorbed by the red 4) New rail line from the I-5 that follows the 405 S. It would connect with the expo, LAX/green lines, and terminate with the blue line in LB. The red line would connect/intersect with it slightly north of the 101. Already, those are pipe-dreams due to... well, everything about building public infrastructure. But LA does have the bones for some decent public transit, even if they'll never really invest in it.
- duxup 5y ago
  Man I prefer that. But I can think of all of one trip in the past 10 years in the US where I felt like I was someplace where I could rely on public transportation. It's just not viable for most trips in the US I think.
- silisili 5y ago
  Good idea, but I'd definitely do a lot of reading before going that route. In some cities with a seemingly functional public transit...well, it's not one you'd want to use. NoVa/DC and SF are both good examples though of generally safe, effective public transport.(not speaking of Portland or NY as I haven't used theirs)
- yupper32 5y ago
  San Francisco having a functional public transit system is news to me.
  - codazoda 5y ago
    SF seemed like a walkable city when I visited. I walked from my hotel to Fishermans Warf and back (back is a LOT of up hill). But I think at least parts of it are pretty walkable.
    - asdff 5y ago
      Locally walkable and being able to get somewhere within ten miles as the crow flies in a reasonable amount of time are two entirely different things
  - lastofthemojito 5y ago
    But at the same time San Francisco is indeed a nightmare to park in. I had the worst rental car luck of my life in San Francisco - and no, I didn't really want to have a car in SF, but I was taking a road trip up from LA, then San Luis Obispo, through Big Sur, to SF and then onwards to wine country. We stayed a couple of nights with a friend in SF, and on the first night I hunted for what felt like an hour to find a street parking space, and I FINALLY found an open spot that didn't have any signs for parking restrictions. The next day we went to get the car and it was gone. There was red paint and "NO PARKING" on the curb that I missed in the dark, so the car was towed to a city impound. In addition to a parking ticket, there was a nasty note on the windshield about how I was a bad person for parking in front of a physical therapy facility and infirm people rely on that spot to be dropped off, etc. Something like $500 later, I retrieved the rental car and got lucky this time with a legal spot right in front of my friend's house. Shortly thereafter, I heard a crash out front and thought "wouldn't it be funny if that was our car?". It was. An elderly gentleman plowed into it. But apparently not before parking enforcement had visited again - there was another ticket on the windshield, apparently this time I hadn't properly curbed my wheels on the gently sloped street. So yeah, in San Francisco I might take the flawed public transit, or Uber/Lyft, or scooters, or walking, or crawling or anything else over bringing a car into the city.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Most of my vacations are combination with visits to friends/family. So until transport works where ever they choose to live I'm stuck needing a car.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    Just for example: When I visit my family over holidays, they live 10 miles from the nearest bus station, 35 miles from the nearest Amtrak station, and 100 miles from the nearest international airport, nearly two states away. There are no local taxis, busses, light rail, nothing. I'm not sure how public transportation would ever work for this kind of trip. This is the case for the vast majority of small towns in the USA.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Public transportation works for that type of trip in some places. Not in the US though. If the dense cities can't even make it work where it is easy there is no point in trying those places that you point out where it is hard.
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      Assuming your family have a car, wouldn't they meet you at the bus station/railway station/airport? Mine almost always do, even though there are much better public transport options than you have. I don't generally have any use for a car while I'm visiting them, so there would be no point renting one. (I can see this would be different if you are a family of five or similar.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Lammy 5y ago
  >functional public transit >San Francisco Citation needed: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/02/20/transit-overload/ https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/02/20/transit-overl... "San Francisco’s example may be the worst in the United States"
- vincentmarle 5y ago
  San Francisco has great public transit if your trip starts near a BART station and ends near a BART station. Otherwise, not so much..
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  Do you actually have to ask why people would not want to travel to San Francisco, Portland, and New York?
jrochkind1 5y ago
Does it seem to anyone else that the global economy was a lot more fragile than we thought?
- drstewart 5y ago
  Rental car prices being slightly higher due to supply shortages doesn't make the economy seem fragile. In fact, if that's one of the worst after effects of a global pandemic, I'd call it extremely robust.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    It’s not the worst shortage. It’s a fairly high-profile example, but there are a wide variety of shortages. I think it’s fair to say that a lot of consumers aren’t much affected by them. Many businesses are scrambling, though.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      > I think it’s fair to say that a lot of consumers aren’t much affected by them. Not directly but indirectly through higher prices on just about everything. Plus ever had your dishwasher break? Good luck getting parts… that stuff is in super short supply right now and that is just one instance. Think about elevators, MRI machines, you name it… The supply chain runs deep.
      - skybrian 5y ago
        Yes, it's all hiding just under the surface. If your dishwasher didn't break, you don't notice. Similarly, most of the time, most people don't need a rental car, but the price of car rentals suddenly becomes more relevant if your car is in the shop for repairs.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  You wouldn't call a building fragile just because it got destroyed by a thermonuclear bomb. I wouldn't call the global economy fragile just because it falls apart when every government at once imposes draconian lockdowns for months to years.
fy20 5y ago
I rented a car last month in Spain, it was a less than year old Seat Ibiza. I booked a couple of weeks in advance, but prices seemed no different than before the pandemic. Is this just a US issue, if so, why is the US being hit so much harder than elsewhere? Surely it should be the opposite, as the lockdowns in the US were often much less strict than Europe.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Supposedly the US rental companies assumed their business would tank due to lockdowns so sold off much of their vehicle inventory. Then when people turned out to travel anyway through the pandemic, they tried to buy more vehicles and found they were hard to get due to supply chain issues. I think it depend on the specific location. Here in Bozeman the airlines are complaining they can't fill planes because travelers can't rent cars here so they travel somewhere else or stay home. But for example LAX seems to have cars, albeit higher price than before.
- josh_today 5y ago
  I just booked a car in the US this week. Same prices and availability as before covid
yardie 5y ago
City-dweller here. I was on the public transport bandwagon. Then summer 2020 came and I realized the buses were at limited capacity, Uber and Lyft drivers were practically non-existent, and the big 3 car rentals were liquidating their inventory. So I bought a used car, just in time too. I still hate car ownership: the parking fees, maintenance, shocking price of gas, insurance, etc. It's costing me $20/day to sit mostly in a garage. I was saving up for a BEV. But realized air travel is out of commission and a BEV might not be practical for road trip vacations, at least not right now.
- throwaway123x2 5y ago
  I feel you. I was about to sell my car right as the pandemic started but now I'm glad I didn't. Uber/Lyft quickly went out of the range of using for ordinary everyday things post-pandemic.
- nostromo 5y ago
  Folks that support American urbanism have been set back decades. Smaller apartments in dense, walkable neighborhoods have been pretty miserable places to live for over a year now. The bargain was that you don’t need a house with a yard when you can have an apartment surrounded by parks, restaurants, and bars; that you don’t need a car when you have transit; that you don’t need a home office… Then all of that was taken away in a heartbeat with little regard to its effectiveness. Suddenly owning a house and a car were critically important again. It’s going to take a long time for people to come back.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Yup. In a fit of hysteria and panic, we destroyed a decade of urbanization. Oh yeah, and we completely f’d over our kids. Like, shamefully so. History will harshly judge the people who pushed these public policies.
    - yakz 5y ago
      There may have been blunders with the policies, but if we're talking about history judging things harshly... I think it's far more likely that the massive disinformation campaigns, irrational and willful non-compliance with reasonable safety measures, and cowardice when faced with the need for vaccination that will get the brunt of it.
conductr 5y ago
They left off the part where rental companies sold off a bunch of inventory in 2020 because low demand and fixed lease payments. They thought they could flex up inventory when travel resumed. It was a reasonable assumption at the time as I don't believe anyone was talking about chip shortages back then and new cars were being heavily discounted as well. FWIW - I rented a car in May and paid about $2000 for 4/5 days. I forget the specifics but the midsized economy class was only about 10% cheaper than a luxury SUV, so I upgraded. It was in Boston.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Did you personally pay that!? What made it worth it? I paid about $400 for a new Rav4 recently in Canada after seeing crazy prices like yours, which still seemed high.
  - conductr 5y ago
    Yes, I paid. I shopped around and considered alternatives. But it was our first COVID era travel/vacation. It was originally meant to be an international trip but since everything was still very restricted we decided to moved all our reservations up to Boston and visit the cape cod area. We did that with plenty of time, not last minute. But after switching flights, hotel, booking new excursions, etc we went rental car shopping and realized we were in too deep to back out. Having a toddler during lockdown was exhausting and we really wanted a vacation lol.
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      Hey, I feel you and that's a killer response that makes sense to me. The $400 car I mentioned was similar, though no kid. Was hoping for a more extensive less-local trip, but had to make the best of it and were surprised with prices having not heard about the shortage. Congrats on being able to get out for a bit my friend.
supernova87a 5y ago
Maybe someone can explain in kindergarten terms for me -- A root cause of this problem is that the rental car companies sold off a lot of their fleets thinking that the pandemic would absolutely crater demand for >1 year. Am I misunderstanding? Those cars went somewhere -- they didn't go into the dump. Wherever those cars went, why are they not causing some cushion / surplus in a different place that relieves some shortage? They got locked up in a warehouse and are inaccessible? Sold off and can't be bought back? Reporters in their simplistic descriptions make it sound like those cars just evaporated.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  The car companies did the same, but what they did was cancel their slots for chip production while having little chip inventory. So yeah, the root is back to the car companies. The rental car companies probably would have been dealing with a much smaller problem from the overall car demand increase from their sell-off if the car companies had maintained their production capacities of their supply chains.
- pandaman 5y ago
  From my understanding, a used rental is just a couple of notches above the bottom of the market so people who bought those replaced their beaters and sent those to the junk yard. So they are not stored anywhere but are being used in place of the cars that went out of the market.
  - davchana 5y ago
    Most of the rental cars come in as brand new; & usually gets sold between 3 years or 36000 miles. Any car at that stage is certainly not a beater. A beater (with regular usage) will be something like 10+ years old and or 200,000 miles or over. See the cars at enterprisecarsales.com , where most of the cars are Enterprise Rentals.
    - thomaslord 5y ago
      Some people may not consider it a beater, but rental cars get treated like absolute crap (regular gas even if they should get premium, traditional oil vs synthetic, renters beat them up because they don't care). If I were choosing between a rental car at 36,000 miles or a non-rental at 46,000 miles, I'd assume the non-rental would give me fewer problems in the short term and probably make it to a higher mileage in the end. Still better than the proverbial $500 Civic with 250,000 miles, 7 owners, and 3 accidents, but not great vehicles to own by any stretch of the imagination.
josh_today 5y ago
Just rented a car and it was as cheap and easy as it was pre covid. Use costcotravel.com
speedgoose 5y ago
I don't miss the old fashioned car rental companies since I use my local non-profit car sharing organisation. I just use my phone and I get to drive a modern EV for a very affordable price without stress. No human contact needed.
- random314 5y ago
  Website?
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    The non profit one is https://bilkollektivet.no/ https://bilkollektivet.no/ You also have Vy which is owned by the Norwegian state : https://www.vy.no/alt-om-reisen/andre-transportmidler/vybil https://www.vy.no/alt-om-reisen/andre-transportmidler/vybil And then nabobil.no or hyre.no in the for profit side.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
As a systems guy, I find this situation quite interesting in the way in which it exposed interlocks in the car rental pipeline that were previously not visible. What I hadn't appreciated was that Car Rental companies had constructed a model where they bought new cars, rented them for a couple of years, and then resold them. The car would depreciate of course but as a bulk car buyer they got the cars at a discount on dealer cost because, well they bought more than the average dealer did. So when they depreciated they didn't lose as much value as you and I might experience if we bought a car, held it for two years, and resold it to a dealer (worst case) or another buyer (best case). So the rental agency simply tracked how much the car would "lose" in value over its working lifetime, plus the cost of needed maintenance (generally relatively low), and offset that with income of renting it out. So the math was something like (making up numbers here) $5,000 of depreciation loss against say 400 rental days at $50/day or $20,000 of rental income. Say $1000 for maintenance during those 2 years and you've got $14,000 of "gross income" into the company, per car to pay employees and operating costs etc. Now this makes sense and it is a fine business model, but an interesting quirk is that revenue is directly proportional to the number of 'working' cars you have out there bringing in the bucks. More cars, more income. And if you buy the car on credit there is an interest expense sure but you don't use up working capital to bulk up your fleet and boost your income. As a result, car rental companies were carrying a HUGE amount of debt pre-pandemic which was all in car investments. Then BOOM, the black swan of a pandemic hit and air travel stopped for all intents and purposes and now rental car companies are sitting on fleets of cars where they have to make the monthly payment on the debt but those cars aren't earning any income. This burns money in a hurry! So they did the only thing they could do, and sold off their fleets for the most part so that they could retire all that debt. Some, like Hertz, were already in Chapter 11 bankruptcy when they did that. Late 2020 was an excellent time to buy a car from one of the rental companies because they were really motivated to get them off their balance sheets. And this then is the fun part. So the pandemic also put a huge blip in the supply chain. And since every single car company had switched to "just in time" manufacturing where they don't stock parts to make cars, they expect a smooth flow of those parts from the supply chain to feed their assembly lines, had to stop making cars. They had no parts. What is more, the humans in the pipeline like truck drivers, container crane operators, container ship crews, freight forwarding staff, Etc. were quarantining or not working because of the pandemic risk and those are jobs you cannot do "remotely" no matter how much you might want to. So the supply of new cars dried up, and won't untwist until the entire chain is back up and running at capacity again. So now the pandemic is "less scary" because smart people have vaccinated themselves and they start traveling again. And those people want to rent cars. Which is great for rental car companies, except they cannot rebuild their fleets because there aren't any cars to buy. And this adds the second fun twist, if you bought a car new in 2019 (as I did), and it is the kind of car rental companies might rent (which mine is), you get letters from the dealer in 2021 offering to buy it back from you for more than you paid for it! What is more, when you see all those cars that are going to be 'totalled' by the insurance company because they were under water in the southern part of the US or on the east coast, those cars used to be sold for pennies on the dollar in "salvage sales" in which salvage dealers would recover parts and/or do enough repairs to resell them with a salvage title. The bidding for those cars is much more intense given the demand by rental car companies for stock, any stock, to boost their fleets. It is a remarkable example of a system where the parts are interconnected in non-obvious ways that has a non-intuitive response to shocks to the system. As with most "emergent" systems like this one though, sending a shock through it does two things; it illuminates these previously unseen inter dependencies, and it tends to kill off weak players.
neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210917073652/https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-09-13/car-rental-problems-persist-until-at-least-2022 http://web.archive.org/web/20210917073652/https://www.latime... https://archive.is/RHW1J https://archive.is/RHW1J
busterarm 5y ago
The last time I rented a 16' truck for a 1k+ mile one-way move was 6 years ago. It was $400 traveling north along the US east coast. My previous move towards that direction 4 years prior was $1200. I'm renting another 16' truck for a move going south on the same route next week. The truck and insurance cost over $5000. I looked at purchasing a box truck as an alternative to reduce the hit to my wallet. Box trucks cost around 2.5x what they did two years ago. I'm finding 10+ year old beat up GMC trucks going for over $100k.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  > Box trucks cost around 2.5x what they did two years ago. I'm finding 10+ year old beat up GMC trucks going for over $100k. a) Where the fuck are you looking? The heavy equipment section of CL in every major city is littered with 10-20yo 15-26ft box trucks for $5-16k depending on specs and condition. b) Purchase price doesn't really matter that much if you are reselling it when you're done.
switch007 5y ago
My local Hertz in the UK has sky high prices and plenty of new cars. They have no high mileage cars. They’re just profiteering. Enterprise raised their already high prices even higher. Their fleet looks about the same as pre pandemic too. Edit: and hertz aren’t content with their high prices, they also recently added a fake 15 minute offer expiry countdown on the booking page. Absolute scumbags.
ojagodzinski 5y ago
public.... transport! It is a thing outside US.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Between flights canceled and this, you don't want to fly. I drove instead of flying recently instead - except for the long drive getting there, it was far better to be in your own car.
- bluGill 5y ago
  I thought that this summer. This I found out hotels are charging double normal if they even have rooms open. Probably another local specific thing though.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    It is not a locale specific thing. Wages for hotel staff have gone up at least 20% in multiple cities around the country based on other people I have talked to, and costs for supplies have gone up even more. It makes me happy though because it just means that the people having to work evenings, nights, weekends, and holidays are finally gaining some negotiating power.
mysterydip 5y ago
A coworker finished up a trip a day early. Got hos flight changed, then they said "there's no rentals to take you from the airport home." He ended up taking an Uber to a nearby relative's house, as the airport was two hours from his house.
rco8786 5y ago
I've rented 4 cars in the last year in 4 different states and have had literally no problems and did not notice any major price gouging. ~$150-200/day for a large SUV on all occasions, seemed like plenty of stock available across companies.
- dawnerd 5y ago
  That’s actually quite a lot. Last suv I rented right before pandemic was under 100/d.
  - rco8786 5y ago
    I’m talking Chevy Tahoe/suburban SUV fwiw. The biggest things you can rent.
vecinu 5y ago
I had a terrible experience renting from Klass Wagen in Romania this week. I think they're scamming their customers as much as they can before going bankrupt. I booked a SUV with my Sapphire Preferred card that has primary car insurance on it but when I went to pick the car up, I had the sleaziest sales experience of my life. The agent tried to sell me their insurance for $70/day but I told him, no I'm covered. He said due to COVID they have a new policy that any scratch, dent or chip, no matter how small, will be fixed and the cost deducted from my $1700 deposit. I was ready to decline until he showed me the car I booked. It had so many scratches, dents and damage, including coffee stains on the headliner, that I gave in and took their insurance because I needed to leave that day. As we were taking pictures and documenting the myriad of damage, I realized I was going to be on the hook for something when I returned the car. He said they cash in 90% of deposits... I think that was a lie as well. Lo and behold, once I took the insurance, I got "upgraded" to a nicer and cleaner car. After seeing other reviews, a bunch of people fell for the same scam. They must be hemoraging money and have resorted to such scummy practices, it was really off putting. I'm going to try and do a charge back for the insurance part, I felt really bad after the experience.
sonicggg 5y ago
How can the chip shortage cause a car shortage in 1 year? Cars are not perishable items. The existing supply should prevent us from going into chaos for longer than that.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Easily, when the big guys decide we won't make cars in 1 year. And drop their orders for parts. Now they want to make them, but other industries have instead gotten their rights to buy parts. No parts, no goods...
jzymbaluk 5y ago
I keep hearing that car rentals are expensive and terrible, but it's not at all matched my experience. I just rented a car for last weekend 9/10 - 9/12, and it cost me 95 dollars including taxes and fees for the whole weekend. This seems like an incredible deal, when car rentals are apparently so strained?
- ryanianian 5y ago
  Perhaps you rented at a location that wasn't extremely popular (major airports)? TFA mentions it's a pretty local problem.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    I've rented in DC, PA, and now VA and have not experienced much, if any, problems so far.
  - jzymbaluk 5y ago
    I picked up and returned at Dulles International Airport outside Washington DC, which was pretty busy. My theory was that maybe the airport had an excess of rental car inventory on that weekend (being the weekend after Labor Day weekend) and that they were happy to get some inventory off the lot even though I was picking up and returning at the same weekend
- mattm 5y ago
  It also depends on which company. The budget rental companies, which I assume Dollar Rent a Car would fall under, are notorious for doing stuff like this pre-pandemic as well.
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
  It depends on the location. Orlando has plenty of reasonable rates. If you want to pick up a car at Portland, however, not only does a quick search suggest you're 7 or 8 weeks from any availability at all, but it's twice as expensive as a last-minute rental in Orlando. A colleague that had to visit Seattle recently ended up renting a U-Haul truck out of desperation.
jgalt212 5y ago
> “The area where the compact cars were was empty,” he said, adding that he has demanded a full refund. > As a result, car rental prices jumped to an average high of $120 a day this summer, compared with about $45 at the beginning of the year, according to a study by the travel booking site Hopper.com. Maybe they need to be even higher?
cwmma 5y ago
nobody seems to be mentioning the car rental monopoly that currently exists: https://connorleech.info/blog/the-american-rental-car-cartel https://connorleech.info/blog/the-american-rental-car-cartel
ghaff 5y ago
I have admittedly not actually picked up the keys to a rental car yet. Hopefully I will tomorrow. However, I locked in a reservation on a car quite a few months ago when the horror stories started circulating and the pricing was indeed pretty bad. But since then I switched that rental and made another rental and the pricing strikes me as fairly normal. Not cheap and with the usual outrageous taxes and fees but these are with major non-discount rental car companies (albeit with a good corporate discount) but not out of the realm of what I consider "normal."
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pokoleo 5y ago
For anyone looking to rent a car, I'd recommend using autoslash.com It's an aggregator that allows you to pick from the other aggregators, and you don't pay until you pick up. The prices are consistently within 10% of the lowest price that I can find online. You fill out a simple form (pickup/dropoff times/location, car preference), and it emails you quotes. They don't spam me, which is nice. I tend to request the same quote multiple times over the weeks before my trip. It'll frequently find you something for less than what you initially paid for. Ignore their janky UI, it's the real deal.
flixic 5y ago
It's been a long, long time since I read an LATimes article. It looks like they finally allowed people from Europe to view their website, after years of blocking it completely due to not willing to deal with GDPR. Well done, and "finally".
twelve40 5y ago
That whole industry is so weird. This year, I've seen Hertz locations with people waiting for multiple hours (!) to fill out a bunch of papers forms, at least half an hour per rental of just waiting on a human to write up your super-generic contract. Other locations may demand weird shit like a must-have return flight ticket. On the other hand, there is Turo where (once you registered) the whole "typing up the contract and signing it in your blood for 30 minutes" is non-existent: you just find your car and open it, no humans involved, no stupid rental branches with multi-hour lines. Turo is definitely not for everybody, but I think they need to start to learn from each other - it is possible to make the booking and pick-up process instant and save a ton of time (and money).
AlbertCory 5y ago
Neighbor took a vacation to Hawaii a couple months ago. The cars available to rent were $250/day and up. He passed. Fortunately, there's a car equivalent of AirBNB, and he was able to rent an individual's car for around $80/day (I can't remember the name of the service, unfortunately). I guess when you're on an island, cars aren't all that fungible.
- esturk 5y ago
  Is it called Turo?
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    I think that's it
- syntheticcorp 5y ago
  Probably Turo? I’ve used them before to rent high horsepower cars off people.
- smilekzs 5y ago
  Turo prices have also gone significantly up...
cryptoz 5y ago
> getting denied the vehicle they reserved Why do car rental companies have such a problem with this? I haven't rented a car in 5 years, but I rented a bunch in the 5 years before that. I don't think even once I was actually able to get the car I reserved, they are always out. There's even a joke from the '90s in Seinfeld about this. Why are car rentals so much worse than other industries with reservations? Rarely would this happen at a restaurant or a hotel. Only cars seem to have this problem.
Ansil849 5y ago
> Due to a vehicle shortage, the car rental agency offered him a van that he said reeked of cigarettes and marijuana instead of a compact car. Jimenez refused the malodorous van, and after a more than two-hour wait he settled for another van with more than 60,000 miles, visible body damage and a “musty odor” that seemed to come from the air conditioning system. > A global microchip shortage that has cut production of new cars continues to deal a heavy blow to car rental companies How is a car shortage an excuse for rental car agencies to act in this unacceptable manner? If I reserve a specific kind of car, I expect that reserved car to be there. If there is a shortage, then do not make that particular car available on the booking portal. This is like if you reserved a hotel room, and were put into a janitorial closet instead, with the excuse being that this was because of a wallpaper shortage. This is completely untenable conduct.
- jessriedel 5y ago
  I agree that it's wrong for rental car companies to use the term "reserve" in this was, but it's by now standard practice. They absolutely do not have a physical car (or one of a set of a class of car) guaranteed to be available. Instead, they make statistical predictions; usually they do have the car, or at worse a nicer car that they will upgrade you to for free. But when there is a supply shock, all bets are off.
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    If I reserve something, I expect it to be there. Car rental companies should not be allowed to play the game of lying to consumers under the understanding that lying is "by now standard practice". This is what consumer protection laws are explicitly for. If a car rental company wants to 'play the odds' and say that they're likely, but not definitely, going to have a car available, then sure that's their prerogative, BUT then they should not be legally allowed to make it appear like you are actually reserving a vehicle that will be there...that is fraud. Let's look at an analogy with even just the same object. Let's say I run a car dealership. 9 times out of 10 you get the car that I told you you're going to get. But every tenth time, I just happen to be out of stock because I didn't predict that a market could have shortages and didn't plan accordingly. In that instance, I then give you a completely different car than the one you thought you were buying, oh and this one also happens to reek of vomit and smoke. This would not in a million years be acceptable.
NoblePublius 5y ago
Somehow this article doesn’t mention Turo. There are a dozen Tesla Model 3s available to rent on Turo around LAX right now. Many less than $100/day.
black_13 5y ago
Life will continue to be a pain in 2022 ...
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throwaway984393 5y ago
I just took a cross-country trip and rented cars in 3 different states. My experience was fine, and the prices were about normal, if not cheap. I'm sure there will be problems, but it's very possible that the media will be exaggerating for headlines. It's not like a rental car will just fall apart if it's kept and maintained for an extra year or two. They're made of metal, not paper mache, and replacement parts are still available.
tim333 5y ago
Europe too - I was looking at my 2019 contract for 30 days car rental out of Nice airport - 238 euro. The cheapest one now - 741 euro or 3x near enough.
Meph504 5y ago
Ehh services like turo will bubble up, I just got back from a 5000 mile road trip in a turo car, cost less than enterprise would, and had a much better car. I'm usually not big on gig economy services, but this one has made it much easier, and the owner of the vehicle was stoked, he earned 2 car payments in 9 days. * I'm not plugging turo, I just don't know any others in that space and is the one I use.

291 points by prostoalex 5y ago

I realize this won’t work in LA, but if you are traveling for fun/vacation, why not check out places with functional public transit so you don’t need a car? San Francisco, Portland, New York, European Cities, etc.

finfinfin 5y ago
Because you still need a car in those places if you want to experience them fully. Eg hiking in the East Bay is still pretty inaccessible by public transport from SF. So yes, you can enjoy the landmarks in the city, but if you want to visit adjacent cities and/or nature - you still need to spend a fortune on Uber or rent a car.
- sk5t 5y ago
  If visiting New York City, must one also visit the Adirondacks and Montauk as well? How long a vacation are we talking about here?
- dragontamer 5y ago
  You can visit Philadelphia by train from New York. I'm actually planning a trip with a friend through the Northeast Regional. You can start at the White House / Smithsonian (seeing all of the history there), hop on a train to Philadelphia to see the liberty bell + the original capital of the country, then hop on a train and continue to NYC / Broadway and watch Hamilton. No car (or airplane) needed. 100% trains / metros.
  - hammock 5y ago
    Amtrak is the best way to get between those cities imo. Puts you in the center of the city and avoids a cab onto the island through traffic. Did it for work a bunch
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      Agree that Amtrak is the best way if you can afford it. If you're on a budget you can also take SEPTA to Trenton and transfer to NJT into NYC. Puts you at the same place, just takes a bit longer.
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        If you're trying to save money, the bus system works. But... ugggh. Train is more expensive for good reason! Its a much better experience. If we're talking about the price of Uber-rides / Rental Cars from NYC to Adirondacks... I bet you that the Train to Philly or even Washington DC will be cheaper than a rental car + all those miles you put on it! So IMO, save your sanity and go with the train. But the busses exist if you really need to cut back on $$$ even more.
        ryukafalz 5y ago
        Oh no, I do mean by train! Both the SEPTA route and the NJT route I was referring to are trains - they just don't go the whole way from Philly->NYC, so you need a transfer. Now, frequency on SEPTA's Regional Rail lines has tanked during the pandemic, so using it may not be as practical as it once was. Haven't checked recently. Hopefully they get service back to reasonable levels.
        checker 5y ago
        Adding some other thoughts: - Trains get to skip traffic, but rental car might be cheaper if you're splitting it with friends. - Trains do break down or hit delays sometimes, but traffic is always a risk on I95. - Buses are the cheapest but have random people (dice roll) and traffic. - Parking a rental car might not be cheap in a city center but can be a wash depending on transit costs. Again, parking cost can be split with friends. So my decision is usually situational.
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    As a Philly resident... yep. For those visiting, honestly if you plan to stay anywhere near Center City having a car is more of a hassle than not. Our transit system isn't perfect but it's easily the best way to get around the core parts of the city. And yeah whenever I visit NYC from here it's always by train.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      What would be the sights to see in Philly? I was planning on mostly wandering around aimlessly (actually, I'll probably still do that :-) ). But I'm all ears for any "must see" locations. Liberty Bell + museums are the main thing I know about.
      - thomaslord 5y ago
        This isn't really a sight-seeing thing, but grab a cheese steak! Pat's/Gino's are the famous spots where everyone takes photos, but IMO they're mostly tourist traps at this point. Worst cheese steaks I've had within 100 miles of Philly. Jim's is a good spot, plus it's on South Street which is a good area to walk around in. The South Street area is also home to a bunch of mozaic murals by Isaiah Zagar, which are definitely worth checking out. There are official tours, but you can also just check out the neighborhood map here and explore some of them on your own: https://www.phillymagicgardens.org/about-us/mosaic-mural-map/ https://www.phillymagicgardens.org/about-us/mosaic-mural-map... If you like walks, check out the Schuylkill River Trail - it got caught up in the recent flooding so I'm not sure what kind of shape it's in right now, but I assume it'll get cleaned up pretty quick if it hasn't been already. The view of 30th Street Station and a nearby USPS building is pretty cool at night. I've heard it can get a little sketchy if you're down on the trail at night, but as a 6ft tall white guy I never ran into any issues on the route walked home from work for ~8 months. Your mileage may vary, but the worst thing I ever encountered was kids my age smoking weed down by the river.
      - checker 5y ago
        Reading Terminal Market is cool, but I'm not sure how it will be during pandemic conditions (it's usually pretty crowded).
- mey 5y ago
  Agreed, as a resident of Portland, when we have guests in town, we spend about half their time in the natural areas around Portland. Granted getting to wine country or beautiful waterfalls can be done with various public transit options, sorta, it isn't easy. And you certainly aren't going to get off the beaten path.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  If you're doing a day hike, that's what car shares are for. There's plenty in the East Bay and SF. I only started owning a car when a friend gave us their old beater, but before that and through the earlier portions of the pandemic I used car shares any time I wanted to go hiking.
- bityard 5y ago
  Ooh, this reminds me of a story from my youth. Two friends and myself went to New York for the HOPE conference in Manhattan. We drove there but we're midwesterners so we didn't want to drive in the city proper. Our plan was to drive to New Jersey, leave our car at a friend-of-a-friend's place, and then catch the train into the city. All went well until we were on our way home. The friend-of-a-friend was supposed to pick us up from the train station and drive us 5 minutes to his house so we could get in our car and head west. But he wasn't answering his phone. While we sat there wondering what to do, I saw a pizza place across the street that said "free delivery" on the sign. I joked that we should order a pizza, give the address where our car was at, and then ask if the driver would deliver us as well. Without laughing, my one friend said, "let's give it a try" and strode off towards the restaurant. We explained our situation and a few minutes later the pizza guy was delivering the pizza, and us, to our car.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  A car is usually pretty optional for most places in Europe. Some natural areas like the Alps have better public transit than most US city centers. Not everywhere is as allergic to public transit as most of the US. SF is also one of the better US cities in this regard. I spent several months in SF without a car and rented a car exactly one weekend to get to some further out hiking. There are actually plenty of transit accessible natural areas.
clairity 5y ago
LA has more extensive public transit than either sf or portland. you can get around (to basically all of the tourist destinations) just fine by train, bus (gasp!), scooters and bikes, with the occasional lyft to fill the gaps.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  This just isn't true in a practical sense. LA is far too sprawling to effectively use the train without everything taking an hour longer than driving.
  - asdff 5y ago
    The train is actually the one form of transit that usually beats driving, at least the trains that are grade separated (red and purple). There is no faster way to get between downtown LA and hollywood than the redline for most of the day. The expo line is pretty slow since a lot of it runs at grade, but even then it can beat a day with terrible traffic on the 10 going into santa monica.
    - wcarron 5y ago
      Agreed. Over the past decade I've commuted by some combination of all of LA's train lines, and the orange line, too. Red and purple and the best. Although purple's lack of distance degrades the value. Green, yellow, and expo are decent, but Yellow running at-grade degrades the utility somewhat, as for the expo line, as you said. The Green line didn't freaking connect to LAX, completely negating it's potential utility. Blue line and orange line are by far the worst, being entirely at street level and interrupted constantly with cross traffic. Honestly, what really needs to happen is: 1) Purple line completes intended extension. 2) Submerge the blue line and install new station for connection w/ green. 3) The orange line needs to be submerged and absorbed by the red 4) New rail line from the I-5 that follows the 405 S. It would connect with the expo, LAX/green lines, and terminate with the blue line in LB. The red line would connect/intersect with it slightly north of the 101. Already, those are pipe-dreams due to... well, everything about building public infrastructure. But LA does have the bones for some decent public transit, even if they'll never really invest in it.
duxup 5y ago
Man I prefer that. But I can think of all of one trip in the past 10 years in the US where I felt like I was someplace where I could rely on public transportation. It's just not viable for most trips in the US I think.
silisili 5y ago
Good idea, but I'd definitely do a lot of reading before going that route. In some cities with a seemingly functional public transit...well, it's not one you'd want to use. NoVa/DC and SF are both good examples though of generally safe, effective public transport.(not speaking of Portland or NY as I haven't used theirs)
yupper32 5y ago
San Francisco having a functional public transit system is news to me.
- codazoda 5y ago
  SF seemed like a walkable city when I visited. I walked from my hotel to Fishermans Warf and back (back is a LOT of up hill). But I think at least parts of it are pretty walkable.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Locally walkable and being able to get somewhere within ten miles as the crow flies in a reasonable amount of time are two entirely different things
- lastofthemojito 5y ago
  But at the same time San Francisco is indeed a nightmare to park in. I had the worst rental car luck of my life in San Francisco - and no, I didn't really want to have a car in SF, but I was taking a road trip up from LA, then San Luis Obispo, through Big Sur, to SF and then onwards to wine country. We stayed a couple of nights with a friend in SF, and on the first night I hunted for what felt like an hour to find a street parking space, and I FINALLY found an open spot that didn't have any signs for parking restrictions. The next day we went to get the car and it was gone. There was red paint and "NO PARKING" on the curb that I missed in the dark, so the car was towed to a city impound. In addition to a parking ticket, there was a nasty note on the windshield about how I was a bad person for parking in front of a physical therapy facility and infirm people rely on that spot to be dropped off, etc. Something like $500 later, I retrieved the rental car and got lucky this time with a legal spot right in front of my friend's house. Shortly thereafter, I heard a crash out front and thought "wouldn't it be funny if that was our car?". It was. An elderly gentleman plowed into it. But apparently not before parking enforcement had visited again - there was another ticket on the windshield, apparently this time I hadn't properly curbed my wheels on the gently sloped street. So yeah, in San Francisco I might take the flawed public transit, or Uber/Lyft, or scooters, or walking, or crawling or anything else over bringing a car into the city.
bluGill 5y ago
Most of my vacations are combination with visits to friends/family. So until transport works where ever they choose to live I'm stuck needing a car.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Just for example: When I visit my family over holidays, they live 10 miles from the nearest bus station, 35 miles from the nearest Amtrak station, and 100 miles from the nearest international airport, nearly two states away. There are no local taxis, busses, light rail, nothing. I'm not sure how public transportation would ever work for this kind of trip. This is the case for the vast majority of small towns in the USA.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Public transportation works for that type of trip in some places. Not in the US though. If the dense cities can't even make it work where it is easy there is no point in trying those places that you point out where it is hard.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    Assuming your family have a car, wouldn't they meet you at the bus station/railway station/airport? Mine almost always do, even though there are much better public transport options than you have. I don't generally have any use for a car while I'm visiting them, so there would be no point renting one. (I can see this would be different if you are a family of five or similar.)
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Lammy 5y ago
>functional public transit >San Francisco Citation needed: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/02/20/transit-overload/ https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/02/20/transit-overl... "San Francisco’s example may be the worst in the United States"
vincentmarle 5y ago
San Francisco has great public transit if your trip starts near a BART station and ends near a BART station. Otherwise, not so much..
Consultant32452 5y ago
Do you actually have to ask why people would not want to travel to San Francisco, Portland, and New York?

jrochkind1 5y ago

Does it seem to anyone else that the global economy was a lot more fragile than we thought?

drstewart 5y ago
Rental car prices being slightly higher due to supply shortages doesn't make the economy seem fragile. In fact, if that's one of the worst after effects of a global pandemic, I'd call it extremely robust.
- skybrian 5y ago
  It’s not the worst shortage. It’s a fairly high-profile example, but there are a wide variety of shortages. I think it’s fair to say that a lot of consumers aren’t much affected by them. Many businesses are scrambling, though.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    > I think it’s fair to say that a lot of consumers aren’t much affected by them. Not directly but indirectly through higher prices on just about everything. Plus ever had your dishwasher break? Good luck getting parts… that stuff is in super short supply right now and that is just one instance. Think about elevators, MRI machines, you name it… The supply chain runs deep.
    - skybrian 5y ago
      Yes, it's all hiding just under the surface. If your dishwasher didn't break, you don't notice. Similarly, most of the time, most people don't need a rental car, but the price of car rentals suddenly becomes more relevant if your car is in the shop for repairs.
josephcsible 5y ago
You wouldn't call a building fragile just because it got destroyed by a thermonuclear bomb. I wouldn't call the global economy fragile just because it falls apart when every government at once imposes draconian lockdowns for months to years.

fy20 5y ago

I rented a car last month in Spain, it was a less than year old Seat Ibiza. I booked a couple of weeks in advance, but prices seemed no different than before the pandemic. Is this just a US issue, if so, why is the US being hit so much harder than elsewhere? Surely it should be the opposite, as the lockdowns in the US were often much less strict than Europe.

dboreham 5y ago
Supposedly the US rental companies assumed their business would tank due to lockdowns so sold off much of their vehicle inventory. Then when people turned out to travel anyway through the pandemic, they tried to buy more vehicles and found they were hard to get due to supply chain issues. I think it depend on the specific location. Here in Bozeman the airlines are complaining they can't fill planes because travelers can't rent cars here so they travel somewhere else or stay home. But for example LAX seems to have cars, albeit higher price than before.
josh_today 5y ago
I just booked a car in the US this week. Same prices and availability as before covid

yardie 5y ago

City-dweller here. I was on the public transport bandwagon. Then summer 2020 came and I realized the buses were at limited capacity, Uber and Lyft drivers were practically non-existent, and the big 3 car rentals were liquidating their inventory. So I bought a used car, just in time too. I still hate car ownership: the parking fees, maintenance, shocking price of gas, insurance, etc. It's costing me $20/day to sit mostly in a garage. I was saving up for a BEV. But realized air travel is out of commission and a BEV might not be practical for road trip vacations, at least not right now.

throwaway123x2 5y ago
I feel you. I was about to sell my car right as the pandemic started but now I'm glad I didn't. Uber/Lyft quickly went out of the range of using for ordinary everyday things post-pandemic.
nostromo 5y ago
Folks that support American urbanism have been set back decades. Smaller apartments in dense, walkable neighborhoods have been pretty miserable places to live for over a year now. The bargain was that you don’t need a house with a yard when you can have an apartment surrounded by parks, restaurants, and bars; that you don’t need a car when you have transit; that you don’t need a home office… Then all of that was taken away in a heartbeat with little regard to its effectiveness. Suddenly owning a house and a car were critically important again. It’s going to take a long time for people to come back.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Yup. In a fit of hysteria and panic, we destroyed a decade of urbanization. Oh yeah, and we completely f’d over our kids. Like, shamefully so. History will harshly judge the people who pushed these public policies.
  - yakz 5y ago
    There may have been blunders with the policies, but if we're talking about history judging things harshly... I think it's far more likely that the massive disinformation campaigns, irrational and willful non-compliance with reasonable safety measures, and cowardice when faced with the need for vaccination that will get the brunt of it.

conductr 5y ago

They left off the part where rental companies sold off a bunch of inventory in 2020 because low demand and fixed lease payments. They thought they could flex up inventory when travel resumed. It was a reasonable assumption at the time as I don't believe anyone was talking about chip shortages back then and new cars were being heavily discounted as well. FWIW - I rented a car in May and paid about $2000 for 4/5 days. I forget the specifics but the midsized economy class was only about 10% cheaper than a luxury SUV, so I upgraded. It was in Boston.

brailsafe 5y ago
Did you personally pay that!? What made it worth it? I paid about $400 for a new Rav4 recently in Canada after seeing crazy prices like yours, which still seemed high.
- conductr 5y ago
  Yes, I paid. I shopped around and considered alternatives. But it was our first COVID era travel/vacation. It was originally meant to be an international trip but since everything was still very restricted we decided to moved all our reservations up to Boston and visit the cape cod area. We did that with plenty of time, not last minute. But after switching flights, hotel, booking new excursions, etc we went rental car shopping and realized we were in too deep to back out. Having a toddler during lockdown was exhausting and we really wanted a vacation lol.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Hey, I feel you and that's a killer response that makes sense to me. The $400 car I mentioned was similar, though no kid. Was hoping for a more extensive less-local trip, but had to make the best of it and were surprised with prices having not heard about the shortage. Congrats on being able to get out for a bit my friend.

supernova87a 5y ago

Maybe someone can explain in kindergarten terms for me -- A root cause of this problem is that the rental car companies sold off a lot of their fleets thinking that the pandemic would absolutely crater demand for >1 year. Am I misunderstanding? Those cars went somewhere -- they didn't go into the dump. Wherever those cars went, why are they not causing some cushion / surplus in a different place that relieves some shortage? They got locked up in a warehouse and are inaccessible? Sold off and can't be bought back? Reporters in their simplistic descriptions make it sound like those cars just evaporated.

gregwebs 5y ago
The car companies did the same, but what they did was cancel their slots for chip production while having little chip inventory. So yeah, the root is back to the car companies. The rental car companies probably would have been dealing with a much smaller problem from the overall car demand increase from their sell-off if the car companies had maintained their production capacities of their supply chains.
pandaman 5y ago
From my understanding, a used rental is just a couple of notches above the bottom of the market so people who bought those replaced their beaters and sent those to the junk yard. So they are not stored anywhere but are being used in place of the cars that went out of the market.
- davchana 5y ago
  Most of the rental cars come in as brand new; & usually gets sold between 3 years or 36000 miles. Any car at that stage is certainly not a beater. A beater (with regular usage) will be something like 10+ years old and or 200,000 miles or over. See the cars at enterprisecarsales.com , where most of the cars are Enterprise Rentals.
  - thomaslord 5y ago
    Some people may not consider it a beater, but rental cars get treated like absolute crap (regular gas even if they should get premium, traditional oil vs synthetic, renters beat them up because they don't care). If I were choosing between a rental car at 36,000 miles or a non-rental at 46,000 miles, I'd assume the non-rental would give me fewer problems in the short term and probably make it to a higher mileage in the end. Still better than the proverbial $500 Civic with 250,000 miles, 7 owners, and 3 accidents, but not great vehicles to own by any stretch of the imagination.

josh_today 5y ago

Just rented a car and it was as cheap and easy as it was pre covid. Use costcotravel.com

speedgoose 5y ago

I don't miss the old fashioned car rental companies since I use my local non-profit car sharing organisation. I just use my phone and I get to drive a modern EV for a very affordable price without stress. No human contact needed.

random314 5y ago
Website?
- speedgoose 5y ago
  The non profit one is https://bilkollektivet.no/ https://bilkollektivet.no/ You also have Vy which is owned by the Norwegian state : https://www.vy.no/alt-om-reisen/andre-transportmidler/vybil https://www.vy.no/alt-om-reisen/andre-transportmidler/vybil And then nabobil.no or hyre.no in the for profit side.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

As a systems guy, I find this situation quite interesting in the way in which it exposed interlocks in the car rental pipeline that were previously not visible. What I hadn't appreciated was that Car Rental companies had constructed a model where they bought new cars, rented them for a couple of years, and then resold them. The car would depreciate of course but as a bulk car buyer they got the cars at a discount on dealer cost because, well they bought more than the average dealer did. So when they depreciated they didn't lose as much value as you and I might experience if we bought a car, held it for two years, and resold it to a dealer (worst case) or another buyer (best case). So the rental agency simply tracked how much the car would "lose" in value over its working lifetime, plus the cost of needed maintenance (generally relatively low), and offset that with income of renting it out. So the math was something like (making up numbers here) $5,000 of depreciation loss against say 400 rental days at $50/day or $20,000 of rental income. Say $1000 for maintenance during those 2 years and you've got $14,000 of "gross income" into the company, per car to pay employees and operating costs etc. Now this makes sense and it is a fine business model, but an interesting quirk is that revenue is directly proportional to the number of 'working' cars you have out there bringing in the bucks. More cars, more income. And if you buy the car on credit there is an interest expense sure but you don't use up working capital to bulk up your fleet and boost your income. As a result, car rental companies were carrying a HUGE amount of debt pre-pandemic which was all in car investments. Then BOOM, the black swan of a pandemic hit and air travel stopped for all intents and purposes and now rental car companies are sitting on fleets of cars where they have to make the monthly payment on the debt but those cars aren't earning any income. This burns money in a hurry! So they did the only thing they could do, and sold off their fleets for the most part so that they could retire all that debt. Some, like Hertz, were already in Chapter 11 bankruptcy when they did that. Late 2020 was an excellent time to buy a car from one of the rental companies because they were really motivated to get them off their balance sheets. And this then is the fun part. So the pandemic also put a huge blip in the supply chain. And since every single car company had switched to "just in time" manufacturing where they don't stock parts to make cars, they expect a smooth flow of those parts from the supply chain to feed their assembly lines, had to stop making cars. They had no parts. What is more, the humans in the pipeline like truck drivers, container crane operators, container ship crews, freight forwarding staff, Etc. were quarantining or not working because of the pandemic risk and those are jobs you cannot do "remotely" no matter how much you might want to. So the supply of new cars dried up, and won't untwist until the entire chain is back up and running at capacity again. So now the pandemic is "less scary" because smart people have vaccinated themselves and they start traveling again. And those people want to rent cars. Which is great for rental car companies, except they cannot rebuild their fleets because there aren't any cars to buy. And this adds the second fun twist, if you bought a car new in 2019 (as I did), and it is the kind of car rental companies might rent (which mine is), you get letters from the dealer in 2021 offering to buy it back from you for more than you paid for it! What is more, when you see all those cars that are going to be 'totalled' by the insurance company because they were under water in the southern part of the US or on the east coast, those cars used to be sold for pennies on the dollar in "salvage sales" in which salvage dealers would recover parts and/or do enough repairs to resell them with a salvage title. The bidding for those cars is much more intense given the demand by rental car companies for stock, any stock, to boost their fleets. It is a remarkable example of a system where the parts are interconnected in non-obvious ways that has a non-intuitive response to shocks to the system. As with most "emergent" systems like this one though, sending a shock through it does two things; it illuminates these previously unseen inter dependencies, and it tends to kill off weak players.

neonate 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210917073652/https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-09-13/car-rental-problems-persist-until-at-least-2022 http://web.archive.org/web/20210917073652/https://www.latime... https://archive.is/RHW1J https://archive.is/RHW1J

busterarm 5y ago

The last time I rented a 16' truck for a 1k+ mile one-way move was 6 years ago. It was $400 traveling north along the US east coast. My previous move towards that direction 4 years prior was $1200. I'm renting another 16' truck for a move going south on the same route next week. The truck and insurance cost over $5000. I looked at purchasing a box truck as an alternative to reduce the hit to my wallet. Box trucks cost around 2.5x what they did two years ago. I'm finding 10+ year old beat up GMC trucks going for over $100k.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
> Box trucks cost around 2.5x what they did two years ago. I'm finding 10+ year old beat up GMC trucks going for over $100k. a) Where the fuck are you looking? The heavy equipment section of CL in every major city is littered with 10-20yo 15-26ft box trucks for $5-16k depending on specs and condition. b) Purchase price doesn't really matter that much if you are reselling it when you're done.

switch007 5y ago

My local Hertz in the UK has sky high prices and plenty of new cars. They have no high mileage cars. They’re just profiteering. Enterprise raised their already high prices even higher. Their fleet looks about the same as pre pandemic too. Edit: and hertz aren’t content with their high prices, they also recently added a fake 15 minute offer expiry countdown on the booking page. Absolute scumbags.

ojagodzinski 5y ago

public.... transport! It is a thing outside US.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Between flights canceled and this, you don't want to fly. I drove instead of flying recently instead - except for the long drive getting there, it was far better to be in your own car.

bluGill 5y ago
I thought that this summer. This I found out hotels are charging double normal if they even have rooms open. Probably another local specific thing though.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It is not a locale specific thing. Wages for hotel staff have gone up at least 20% in multiple cities around the country based on other people I have talked to, and costs for supplies have gone up even more. It makes me happy though because it just means that the people having to work evenings, nights, weekends, and holidays are finally gaining some negotiating power.

mysterydip 5y ago

A coworker finished up a trip a day early. Got hos flight changed, then they said "there's no rentals to take you from the airport home." He ended up taking an Uber to a nearby relative's house, as the airport was two hours from his house.

rco8786 5y ago

I've rented 4 cars in the last year in 4 different states and have had literally no problems and did not notice any major price gouging. ~$150-200/day for a large SUV on all occasions, seemed like plenty of stock available across companies.

dawnerd 5y ago
That’s actually quite a lot. Last suv I rented right before pandemic was under 100/d.
- rco8786 5y ago
  I’m talking Chevy Tahoe/suburban SUV fwiw. The biggest things you can rent.

vecinu 5y ago

I had a terrible experience renting from Klass Wagen in Romania this week. I think they're scamming their customers as much as they can before going bankrupt. I booked a SUV with my Sapphire Preferred card that has primary car insurance on it but when I went to pick the car up, I had the sleaziest sales experience of my life. The agent tried to sell me their insurance for $70/day but I told him, no I'm covered. He said due to COVID they have a new policy that any scratch, dent or chip, no matter how small, will be fixed and the cost deducted from my $1700 deposit. I was ready to decline until he showed me the car I booked. It had so many scratches, dents and damage, including coffee stains on the headliner, that I gave in and took their insurance because I needed to leave that day. As we were taking pictures and documenting the myriad of damage, I realized I was going to be on the hook for something when I returned the car. He said they cash in 90% of deposits... I think that was a lie as well. Lo and behold, once I took the insurance, I got "upgraded" to a nicer and cleaner car. After seeing other reviews, a bunch of people fell for the same scam. They must be hemoraging money and have resorted to such scummy practices, it was really off putting. I'm going to try and do a charge back for the insurance part, I felt really bad after the experience.

sonicggg 5y ago

How can the chip shortage cause a car shortage in 1 year? Cars are not perishable items. The existing supply should prevent us from going into chaos for longer than that.

Ekaros 5y ago
Easily, when the big guys decide we won't make cars in 1 year. And drop their orders for parts. Now they want to make them, but other industries have instead gotten their rights to buy parts. No parts, no goods...

jzymbaluk 5y ago

I keep hearing that car rentals are expensive and terrible, but it's not at all matched my experience. I just rented a car for last weekend 9/10 - 9/12, and it cost me 95 dollars including taxes and fees for the whole weekend. This seems like an incredible deal, when car rentals are apparently so strained?

ryanianian 5y ago
Perhaps you rented at a location that wasn't extremely popular (major airports)? TFA mentions it's a pretty local problem.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  I've rented in DC, PA, and now VA and have not experienced much, if any, problems so far.
- jzymbaluk 5y ago
  I picked up and returned at Dulles International Airport outside Washington DC, which was pretty busy. My theory was that maybe the airport had an excess of rental car inventory on that weekend (being the weekend after Labor Day weekend) and that they were happy to get some inventory off the lot even though I was picking up and returning at the same weekend
mattm 5y ago
It also depends on which company. The budget rental companies, which I assume Dollar Rent a Car would fall under, are notorious for doing stuff like this pre-pandemic as well.
banana_giraffe 5y ago
It depends on the location. Orlando has plenty of reasonable rates. If you want to pick up a car at Portland, however, not only does a quick search suggest you're 7 or 8 weeks from any availability at all, but it's twice as expensive as a last-minute rental in Orlando. A colleague that had to visit Seattle recently ended up renting a U-Haul truck out of desperation.

jgalt212 5y ago

> “The area where the compact cars were was empty,” he said, adding that he has demanded a full refund. > As a result, car rental prices jumped to an average high of $120 a day this summer, compared with about $45 at the beginning of the year, according to a study by the travel booking site Hopper.com. Maybe they need to be even higher?

cwmma 5y ago

nobody seems to be mentioning the car rental monopoly that currently exists: https://connorleech.info/blog/the-american-rental-car-cartel https://connorleech.info/blog/the-american-rental-car-cartel

ghaff 5y ago

I have admittedly not actually picked up the keys to a rental car yet. Hopefully I will tomorrow. However, I locked in a reservation on a car quite a few months ago when the horror stories started circulating and the pricing was indeed pretty bad. But since then I switched that rental and made another rental and the pricing strikes me as fairly normal. Not cheap and with the usual outrageous taxes and fees but these are with major non-discount rental car companies (albeit with a good corporate discount) but not out of the realm of what I consider "normal."

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pokoleo 5y ago

For anyone looking to rent a car, I'd recommend using autoslash.com It's an aggregator that allows you to pick from the other aggregators, and you don't pay until you pick up. The prices are consistently within 10% of the lowest price that I can find online. You fill out a simple form (pickup/dropoff times/location, car preference), and it emails you quotes. They don't spam me, which is nice. I tend to request the same quote multiple times over the weeks before my trip. It'll frequently find you something for less than what you initially paid for. Ignore their janky UI, it's the real deal.

flixic 5y ago

It's been a long, long time since I read an LATimes article. It looks like they finally allowed people from Europe to view their website, after years of blocking it completely due to not willing to deal with GDPR. Well done, and "finally".

twelve40 5y ago

That whole industry is so weird. This year, I've seen Hertz locations with people waiting for multiple hours (!) to fill out a bunch of papers forms, at least half an hour per rental of just waiting on a human to write up your super-generic contract. Other locations may demand weird shit like a must-have return flight ticket. On the other hand, there is Turo where (once you registered) the whole "typing up the contract and signing it in your blood for 30 minutes" is non-existent: you just find your car and open it, no humans involved, no stupid rental branches with multi-hour lines. Turo is definitely not for everybody, but I think they need to start to learn from each other - it is possible to make the booking and pick-up process instant and save a ton of time (and money).

AlbertCory 5y ago

Neighbor took a vacation to Hawaii a couple months ago. The cars available to rent were $250/day and up. He passed. Fortunately, there's a car equivalent of AirBNB, and he was able to rent an individual's car for around $80/day (I can't remember the name of the service, unfortunately). I guess when you're on an island, cars aren't all that fungible.

esturk 5y ago
Is it called Turo?
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  I think that's it
syntheticcorp 5y ago
Probably Turo? I’ve used them before to rent high horsepower cars off people.
smilekzs 5y ago
Turo prices have also gone significantly up...

cryptoz 5y ago

> getting denied the vehicle they reserved Why do car rental companies have such a problem with this? I haven't rented a car in 5 years, but I rented a bunch in the 5 years before that. I don't think even once I was actually able to get the car I reserved, they are always out. There's even a joke from the '90s in Seinfeld about this. Why are car rentals so much worse than other industries with reservations? Rarely would this happen at a restaurant or a hotel. Only cars seem to have this problem.

Ansil849 5y ago

> Due to a vehicle shortage, the car rental agency offered him a van that he said reeked of cigarettes and marijuana instead of a compact car. Jimenez refused the malodorous van, and after a more than two-hour wait he settled for another van with more than 60,000 miles, visible body damage and a “musty odor” that seemed to come from the air conditioning system. > A global microchip shortage that has cut production of new cars continues to deal a heavy blow to car rental companies How is a car shortage an excuse for rental car agencies to act in this unacceptable manner? If I reserve a specific kind of car, I expect that reserved car to be there. If there is a shortage, then do not make that particular car available on the booking portal. This is like if you reserved a hotel room, and were put into a janitorial closet instead, with the excuse being that this was because of a wallpaper shortage. This is completely untenable conduct.

jessriedel 5y ago
I agree that it's wrong for rental car companies to use the term "reserve" in this was, but it's by now standard practice. They absolutely do not have a physical car (or one of a set of a class of car) guaranteed to be available. Instead, they make statistical predictions; usually they do have the car, or at worse a nicer car that they will upgrade you to for free. But when there is a supply shock, all bets are off.
- Ansil849 5y ago
  If I reserve something, I expect it to be there. Car rental companies should not be allowed to play the game of lying to consumers under the understanding that lying is "by now standard practice". This is what consumer protection laws are explicitly for. If a car rental company wants to 'play the odds' and say that they're likely, but not definitely, going to have a car available, then sure that's their prerogative, BUT then they should not be legally allowed to make it appear like you are actually reserving a vehicle that will be there...that is fraud. Let's look at an analogy with even just the same object. Let's say I run a car dealership. 9 times out of 10 you get the car that I told you you're going to get. But every tenth time, I just happen to be out of stock because I didn't predict that a market could have shortages and didn't plan accordingly. In that instance, I then give you a completely different car than the one you thought you were buying, oh and this one also happens to reek of vomit and smoke. This would not in a million years be acceptable.

NoblePublius 5y ago

Somehow this article doesn’t mention Turo. There are a dozen Tesla Model 3s available to rent on Turo around LAX right now. Many less than $100/day.

black_13 5y ago

Life will continue to be a pain in 2022 ...

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throwaway984393 5y ago

I just took a cross-country trip and rented cars in 3 different states. My experience was fine, and the prices were about normal, if not cheap. I'm sure there will be problems, but it's very possible that the media will be exaggerating for headlines. It's not like a rental car will just fall apart if it's kept and maintained for an extra year or two. They're made of metal, not paper mache, and replacement parts are still available.

tim333 5y ago

Europe too - I was looking at my 2019 contract for 30 days car rental out of Nice airport - 238 euro. The cheapest one now - 741 euro or 3x near enough.

Meph504 5y ago

Ehh services like turo will bubble up, I just got back from a 5000 mile road trip in a turo car, cost less than enterprise would, and had a much better car. I'm usually not big on gig economy services, but this one has made it much easier, and the owner of the vehicle was stoked, he earned 2 car payments in 9 days. * I'm not plugging turo, I just don't know any others in that space and is the one I use.