car rental

Feb 11 2022

You’d think that after Hertz realized they were mistakenly sending customers to jail, and facing a class action lawsuit, they would take steps to ensure they stop doing it if for no other reason that it would look bad in court to continue but also because post-bankruptcy incidents wouldn’t receive shielding by the bankruptcy court.

And yet I heard from a reader this morning about another incident that occurred this month alleging jail time during the Texas ice storm as a result of a false Hertz report.

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Feb 11 2022

Hertz seems to have a real problem sending customers to jail for no good reason. As best I have been able to tell, it seems that when a customer changes cars, or extends a rental, Hertz sometimes doesn’t record the transaction correctly in their system. They show the original car as overdue and unreturned, report it stolen, and the customer gets arrested.

But this is a rather unique twist on the Hertz saga. Colorado resident Drew Seaser: He was arrested for stealing a car from Hertz that was rented in Georgia – even though he’d never rented from Hertz… or been to Georgia.

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Dec 08 2021

According to attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case – which seeks $530 million in damages – there are over 180 people that have been falsely arrested based on Hertz errors. That number is rising, with 26 new victims identifying themselves in the past month. And this doesn’t seem to be just a past problem at Hertz, either, because 8 new victims “have come forward with proof of new false arrest incidents” that occurred this year.

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Dec 04 2021

Hertz is allowing current elite members to gift status to one person of their choosing, and that status will last through June 30, 2022. Current Five Star members can gift Five Star, and Presidents Circle members can gift Presidents Circle.

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Oct 25 2021

Rental car prices have in many cases become the biggest expense of a trip. Rental companies offloaded vehicle inventories during the pandemic, and didn’t place orders. The market for cars is tight. And travel has picked back up. So there’s more people looking for cars than there are cars. Prices are sky high.

Hertz went through bankruptcy. And now they’re refreshing their fleet with…100,000 Teslas. Wow.

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Jul 10 2021

I’ve argued that Hertz needs to do something pretty basic, even before properly balancing the number of cars they have with the number of rental reservations they accept, and growing their fleet of cars to meet demand. Hertz needs to stop filing false police reports against their customers. Now they’ve got a new issue I haven’t seen before. They appear to be going after a reader for failing to return a car that they never even rented.

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Jul 07 2021

Rental car prices have in many cases become the biggest expense of a trip. Rental companies offloaded vehicle inventories during the pandemic, and didn’t place orders. The market for cars is tight. And travel has picked back up. So there’s more people looking for cars than there are cars. Prices are sky high.

On my most recent trip Hertz was oversold by more than 60 and they had just one car. I got it. In situations like this I recommend tipping. You can debate in the comments whether the current circumstance justifies making more than one rental reservation, from different car companies. That fails Kantian ethics (how would this look if everyone did it?) but it’s a guerrilla tactic in a Mad Max-style world where everyone is out for themselves.

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