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I’ve never fully understood how rental companies manage the risk caused by drivers not having an incentive to treat the vehicles well. There’s a thousand ways
by Waterluvian 3y ago
I’ve never fully understood how rental companies manage the risk caused by drivers not having an incentive to treat the vehicles well.
There’s a thousand ways you can incrementally damage a car that cannot be detected until some time in the future.
I guess with rentals some maintenance tasks can at least be handled. I know someone who leased for three years and never got the oil changed until the day before returning it.
- tiahura 3y agoIn olden times, people were more conscientious and more ethical.
- ThrowAway1922A 3y agoGenerally they were, there's a lot more feral "people" these days.
- HomeDeLaPot 3y agoWhat makes you think that?
- seabrookmx 3y agoWhat about all the public executions, slavery and genocide?
- vivekd 3y agoI don't want to touch on what I see as a futile debate about whether people are generally better or worse now. However I do feel the need to point out that there are currently more slaves in the world than at any other time in history. I don't mean in the idomatic sense of wage slavery or anything. I'm talking about literal slavery - forced labor and ownership of people. Much of the stuff you buy today probably had a slave involved in its production at some point. Corporations say they can't ban slave labour from their supply chain because it's impossible for them to tell what resources had slaves involved in its production. The slave produced supply and legitimate supply of goods is too mixed to adequately track Some reading to get started https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century Also genocide was very prevalent in the 20th century probably more than at any other time
- tiahura 3y agoThe discussion is about the behavior of car renters so really only since the 1950s is relevant.
- alemanek 3y agoFairly certain horse rentals were a thing. Might be a bit of a stretch but post houses would fit the bill [0]. So, this lets us go back to the 2nd century BC. Just need to find some data on renter behavior now. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_house_(historical_building) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_house_(historical_build...
- mensetmanusman 3y agoCities have public executions weekly or daily without any law involved now…
- a2tech 3y agoMy wife leased a car for 2 years and never put enough miles on it to require the oil to be changed. Does that qualify are damaging the vehicle? Hertz works by flipping cars every few years (2-3, depending on mileage) and post rental inspections for obvious damage. It's not too complicated.
- throwaway5959 3y agoYour wife didn’t change the oil on her (leased) car for two years?
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoShe only drove 3000 miles per year?
- hef19898 3y agoOil changes are what, every 30k km for new cars? Totally possible to not have a single service or oil change in two years.
- ghaff 3y agoYou should probably get it changed once a year--although it also probably isn't some grave error to let it go a couple years if you haven't been putting a lot of miles on.
- hef19898 3y agoOEM maintenance manuals for wvery newish car I had, across miltiple brands, since MY 2008 an initial service interval of 3 years, and then 30,000 km or two years. Yearly oil changes stopped being a thing in the 90s, unless we talk about heavy use and / or harsh environments.
- Tempest1981 3y agoAlthough check the definition of "heavy use" -- it may include commuting during rush hour.
- HWR_14 3y agoHow far in the future? High turnover is priced into rental cars. They normally only last 2-4 years or 25k-40k miles. Meanwhile, all preventative maintenance (oil, etc.) is trivial to ensure happens on time and problems can be solved earlier because no one has an incentive to ignore the warnings (because a repair would be inconvenient or expensive). And they must get a great deal on replacement parts and mechanic services are no where near retail.
- dawnerd 3y agoIt was my understanding that’s why most rental car companies also run used car sales so they can flip the cars before they get too bad.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIf you're only keeping the car 2-3 years you can get away with pushing the oil change intervals out or skipping some of them and other maintenance. I would not believe that rental companies are strictly following the manufacturers maintenance schedules, when they can save money and not suffer the consequences of deferring maintenance.
- HWR_14 3y agoThey sell the cars when they are done with them, and regular maintenance is monitored by the onboard computer. It would be stupid to save a few dollars to obviously ding the resale value.
- Tempest1981 3y ago> maintenance is monitored by the onboard computer So is there a way for the prospective buyer to query this log? And can't it be marked as done without doing the work?
- HWR_14 3y agoApparently, this is still mostly done via paper records. I believe either electronic or paper records are easy to forge. However, that gets into "technically possible, but unlikely". After all, what you are suggesting is that the Hertz (or other large rental) company, to save a marginal amount of money, will commit widespread fraud and risk the massive lawsuit from faking records and then using those records to convince people to buy cars? Meanwhile, they risk damage to a car keeping them from renting it out while it's repaired. And the cost of standard maintenance is probably less than they make in the day or two it's out of service.
- deaddodo 3y ago> I know someone who leased for three years and never got the oil changed until the day before returning it. This is pretty easily detectable with modern ECUs.
- BonoboIO 3y agoTo me it seems that nobody cares, not the driver or the lease company. All priced in. „Don’t be gentle it’s a rental“ Everybody drives their car as if they stole them.
- hef19898 3y agoIn terms of off-road capability it goes: 4x4, rental, rental 4x4.
- olyjohn 3y agoOil changes? How does the ECU know? Only if someone resets the oil change indicator. All you have to do is reset the indicator and not change the oil.
- megaman821 3y agoThis article is basically stating the opposite of your intuition. Rideshare drivers are causing much more damage the car renters, so they are taking unexpected losses by using half the EV fleet for rideshare.
- darkwater 3y agoHow can one fuck a rental car in a way it can be detected only days or weeks later? Personally I tend to be 10X cautious with a rented car because I never pay for full assurance coverage, because I feel it like being robbed (the same way renting a child's seat makes you feel, I paid more for the seat that for the car itself)
- latchkey 3y agoI went to Mexico once, damaged the side of a brand new rental car (big huge dent in the side of the door from a close corner in an alley). Shockingly to me, the repairs (which they estimated and billed me for when I returned the car), were less than the insurance (that I didn't purchase).
- rightbyte 3y agoSometimes you can just suck dents out with a, you know, the thing a plumber use in the sink or toilette. Then you repaint the edges of the dent if they are visible.
- latchkey 3y agopaint scratched + dent... there was a low cement staircase as I was going around a right hand corner of a small alley... didn't see it... whoops.
- seabrookmx 3y agoUnderbody damage? On an ice vehicle smashing up the oil pan for instance. Anecdotally, the folks checking over the vehicle before taking it back also do quite a poor job and miss things. A friend of mine I was helping move put a solid dent in the box of a u-haul and they didn't even notice.
- ghaff 3y agoYeah, it's usually a pretty cursory check. I've definitely had a number of scrapes over the years that weren't major but weren't totally trivial either and they've never been flagged. Right now I'm driving a rental that has some gouges in the paint up front that I had to make sure got added to my rental contract; presumably these were not identified after a prior rental.
- ahoka 3y agoMandatory service every year? Not that hard.
- hef19898 3y agoYearly services are still thing? All newish cars I know are on a 2 years and/or 30,000 km schedule.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Yearly services are still thing? Usually yes. Certain sports cars with turbos or superchargers mandate 6 month service periods for their engines. And you need to abide to that if you don't wanna void your warranty. This is a scam by the auto industry.
- hef19898 3y agoMaintenance intervalls are not a scam... And high performance engines and cars are obviously different from normal cars...
- 3c6bYDXLMj 3y agoCome on. Given the context, “certain sports cars” obviously wasn’t what GP was talking about.
- crazygringo 3y agoThey do manage the risk. It's all priced in. That's precisely one of the reasons why renting a car is so expensive. If they hadn't set prices to account for that risk, the rental companies would have all gone bankrupt decades ago.
- cavisne 3y agoHertz presumably use the fleet telemetry data Tesla provides [1] which probably give some interesting insights into how a car gets damaged. https://github.com/teslamotors/fleet-telemetry/blob/main/protos/vehicle_data.proto https://github.com/teslamotors/fleet-telemetry/blob/main/pro...