Yes, it was real. On Sunday I wrote about a Hertz customer being charged $10,000 for driving his rental car too much on a month-long, unlimited miles rental. And when he questioned the charge, he was threated with arrest.
Customer: You’re going to charge this to $10,000 to my credit?”
Hertz: “Yes.”
Customer: “When this literally, that’s not even allowed. I never signed…”
Hertz: “You show me where it says I can’t charge it.”
Customer: “Right here, it literally says I won’t get charged anything, it says miles allowed, free miles, it literally says to refer to this if there’s anything extra. I’ve never signed anything saying I can only go 100 miles a day, or anything like that, or that I would have to pay more.”
Hertz: “But you also never signed anything saying you were going to be allowed to drive 25,000 miles in a month.”
Customer: “No, unlimited is 100,000 miles.”
Hertz: “No it is not.”
@lifeisfun3000 Unlimited means a reasonable amount? @Hertz #scam #rentalcar #hertz #fyp #viralvideo ♬ original sound – Life
Several of you simply did not believe this was real. But this is the same company that kept charging Tesla renters hundreds of dollars for failing to refill the gas.
Bet the whole thing never happened. Scam. Stunt. Fake.
I’m not sure if this is real or a skit.
Hertz is bad but this is just a goof video by someone with a new TikTok account trying to rack up likes and followers fast with anything that might go viral. Don’t help this joker and just ignore it please.
Sorry, not buying the story.
Hertz, though, disagrees. They’ve apologized.
Customer satisfaction is our top priority at Hertz, and we sincerely regret this customer’s experience at one of our franchise locations.
Per the terms of the contract, the customer will not be billed for mileage. Our franchisee is addressing the employee’s conduct and reinforcing our customer service standards and policies to ensure they are understood and followed consistently across our locations.
To me, this whole thing just seemed on-brand considering the Hertz toll scam, arrests, and Hertz refusing to admit its mistake lest the police stop believing them when they file false police reports.
How does an employee of a franchisee just decide on a $10,000 amount?
The investment to argue this was not a near minimum wage employee or a small step up “manager”.This had to be the franchise owner and Hertz is down playing that their managers would behave like this.
There’s got to be more to this story but we’ll never know without before and after pictures of the odometer. There are plenty of rental car scams that are clichés and common knowledge (like renting a car with the same wheels and tires as your own). Did the renter use it for deliveries/uber/Cannonball Run? (He’d probably have to share it with one or two people to rack up those kinds of miles.) Nooooobody knows except the guy who rented it.
The rental car companies might want to get smart about their unlimited mileage plans, rewrite them as “unlimited, but actually limited to ___” like some cell phone “unlimited, but” data plans. Or maybe this will all be moot as cars get more and more computerized- seems to me a real time tracker would easily establish commercial use and thus void the rental agreement… something inside the car beeps to warn the renter, maybe a robotext or robo email saying we know what you’re doing, call us immediately or else
lol
Renter dude got one over on them this time, partly because Hertz shot themselves in the foot from prior customer (dis)service. I bet they close the loophole soon.
Easy enough fix to prevent abuses. $25k in a month is extreme. Just pick a number – like 10k for a month, or about 3x the typical 100 miles/day limit when there is a limit. For shorter periods, raise the multiplier slightly.
Believe it or not this is a situation where Hertz is almost certainly right on the facts but wrong on the execution.
The renter didn’t deny that the car was driven the miles. Since its highly unlikely that the renter was able to do those miles by themself it highly likely that people other than them used the car. If so and unless the rental agreement allowed for additional drivers then they violated the terms of their contract with Hertz.
Whether this happened or if there was any or a different breach of contract on the part of the renter isn’t clear and if there was whether Hertz would be entitled to any compensation beyond what was called for in the agrement and if so how much is an open questions. Therefore Hertz procedures should have called for the agent to politely enquire as to how the renter managed to drive so many miles (get the facts) with the agent having been trained that they were simply to note their answer even if it was to refuse to answer.
The agent then refers the matter to someone trained and charged with deciding how to proceed. Should Hertz discover that the renter did violate the agreement then additional money is due, amount to be determined in accordance with the contract’s provisions. If a good faith enquiry reveals no breach by the renter then that’s the end of it.
The customer is not always right but in this case Hertz was wrong because as with their habit of reporting cars as stolen that were not, they have non existent or poor procedures for the situation at hand. They can’t just assume the renter broke the rental agreement but that doesn’t mean the renter didn’t and isn’t in the wrong in here. Quite the reverse. The facts as presented seem to indicate that are that they were.
I believed it! I sent it off to John Oliver, Last Week Tonight (HBO/MAX). I hope he does a skit on it.
@Steve: Well said. You reasoned very well. I completely agreed.
I say what travellers should now do is majorly Boycott the Hertz car rental that way they’ll learn a major lesson and that is don’t screw over your car renters