Renting cars has always been a bad experience. Terrible websites where you don't know what car you're going to get. You arrive and they try to upsell you on a car. The employee spends 10 minutes filling out forms on their computer before they can rent you a car. Employees multitasking, going out to the lot to do car stuff while you're standing there with your ID and credit card in hand, your paperwork half filled out. Never enough staff on hand. The auto lots are always in an awkward spot that's hard to drive out of.
So I'm not surprised that their theft entry system is something trash. It's probably an Access database running on some Windows 95 node. Or maybe Gentoo.
It's clear from stories like this that Hertz has chosen to double-down on not caring, and make it part of their business model. I mean look at this non-response:
> Hertz declined to comment for this story but has previously said the "vast majority" of cases "involve renters who were many weeks or even months overdue returning vehicles and who stopped communicating with (Hertz) well beyond the scheduled due date."
The only way a company responds like that is when they fully believe that they're a staple and CAN'T go out of business. We'll see about that...
> the "vast majority" of cases "involve renters who were many weeks or even months overdue returning vehicles and who stopped communicating with (Hertz) well beyond the scheduled due date
Even if true, that does not address those not in that "vast majority". Truly effective corporate speak for "whatever".
I was in a hurry once while renting from Hertz, I verbally declined all of the extras, but the employee at the counter put it on my bill anyway. The contract they gave me was literally 10+ pages of fine print, so I didn't check it--I didn't expect to be scammed. Later I got a second charge to my credit card which doubled the price of my rental for services I didn't request or use. I called Hertz customer service and they were hostile in tone and basically told me to piss off, so I told my credit card company to decline the charge. Hertz sent me to collections, and I explained the issue to the collections company and they basically told me Hertz didn't have any ground to stand on and left me alone. Fuck Hertz.
Last time I rented a car from Hertz, it was totally touchless with no human interaction. Walk in, find your name on the screen which shows the parking spot your car is in, and go. Perhaps things have changed.
I travel a lot for work and after some setup I have found hertz to be the most efficient. When they’re not efficient, I want to blow a gasket at the line and lack of any urgency from the staff, and another time they canceled my reservation day of without telling me (because they were overbooked) leaving me stranded in an unfamiliar city.
But when it works it does work well. I have the board down to a science: shuttle to hertz, look for my name on board, walk to car directly as indicated by board, drive away with the only human interaction being the person scanning the car as I exit.
> When they’re not efficient, I want to blow a gasket at the line and lack of any urgency from the staff
As a customer, I completely get that feeling.
As someone who has worked in auto rental (although for Budget Truck), the reality is usually along the lines of rental clerks making slightly above minimum wage, the entire city getting drastically overbooked by corporate, and customers who were due to return (and counted on for availability) not doing so. They have no urgency because it happens on a regular basis and they're the ones getting screamed at all day because of it even though they have no control over it.
This is why I always try not to get angry. The employees interfacing with the customers are usually the ones who get paid the least and have no authority to make decisions.
Pretty much. Last time I rented from Hertz, with a corporate card, they wanted to run an "identity verification" on me, which I assume was basically some kind of credit pull. They then told me that because the details from that didn't match the card (billing address, ZIP, etc., I guess), they could not rent to me.
"When can I see a refund on my card?" I asked, as I pulled up Uber to go somewhere else (because I was not about to use my personal card, on principle with their behavior).
"Sorry, prepaid reservations are nonrefundable".
Uhh, no. You're not going to accept a reservation from me using a credit card, and then decide that my photo ID matching that credit card is insufficient, deny me a rental, and deny me a refund.
That got sorted out, but took more than one call to Corporate.
During the early pandemic Singapore Airlines canceled my flight and gave me a flight credit. I went in circles with them and Orbitz saying I wanted my money back, to no avail. So I filed a chargeback with Capital One. The airline responded to the dispute saying the ticket I bought was non-refundable. I replied pointing out that means it's not refundable if I cancel, not that the airline can refuse service I paid for and not refund me. I also attached a recent notice from the DoT saying that airlines must refund customers in my situation, and that the specific practice in question was illegal.
Capital One sided with the airline and closed my case. Guess you can't depend on chargebacks like I thought you could.
> Capital One sided with the airline and closed my case. Guess you can't depend on chargebacks like I thought you could.
Yes people tend to have a slightly delusional view of how effective chargebacks can be based on limited experiences. If you're fighting with a small merchant like a local store or a non famous online merchant you're going to win basically every time.
If you're fighting with a rental car company, an airline, a hotel chain, a household name company, or similar, it's an entirely different story. The interaction has much more to do with who's more valuable to the card issuer than who's right.
It's a pull from your bank account. You give the merchant your account details and sign* an authorization and they "pull" the money from your account. Afterward you can cancel the charge without giving a reason for a few weeks, or if the charge was unauthorized for up to 2 years. The only downside compared to chargebacks is that you are not protected in case of insolvency of the merchant.**
> What are the expensive consequences you are talking about?
The system offers no security for the merchant - in fact cancelled charges cost a fee, even if the charge was completely valid.
* yes - physical signature on paper, except when paying online
** this is a topic for a full comment on it's own, but here's the gist: Under German law you can't "take back" your money from an company that has filed for bankruptcy - in fact even payments made to you before the filing might be clawed back by the administrator - which means that you will receive (and customers from insolvent airlines have received) an angry letter demanding the money back. With chargebacks this is less likely to happen as the chargeback will be paid for by the merchant's bank, not the merchant directly, but the legal situation is unclear.
Technically it was not the airline refusing service, there was a force majeure, and many insurances have explicit exceptions for stuff like pandemics, wars, etc.
If I was tdeck, I would contact US Dept of Transportation.
There was specifically a special directive by US Dept of Transportation directing airlines to refund customers for any flights that were modified or canceled after pandemic restrictions started in Mar 2020.
> Non-refundable tickets - Passengers who purchase non-refundable tickets are not entitled to a refund unless the airline makes a promise to provide a refund or the airline cancels a flight or makes a significant schedule change.
I am also confused how Orbitz would be involved in tdeck’s situation. Either they paid Orbitz, or they paid Singapore Airlines, but either way only one of them would be able to refund them.
In fact this is how it got resolved, I filed a complaint with some agency (I can't recall which) and SQ coincidentally changed their policy and refunded me. The very notice you linked is the one I sent with my chargeback.
As for Orbitz, I used them to book the ticket, and SQ's customer service told me they couldn't refund me because they had a policy that only the agent could modify the reservation. When I tried to contact Orbitz they just told me I would need to talk to the airline.
The flight (to Japan) wasn't actually banned, it just became unprofitable to run that day. But flights are a time-sensitive thing! Imagine if you ordered a pizza and the restaurant called you back and said it wasn't convenient that night because of car trouble, but they'd keep your money and in a few months when it made more sense they'd deliver your pizza. That's ridiculous and you'd have a right to demand your money back.
First time I was late paying AMEX they raised my interest rate north of 25%. They could legally do so, but they were the only card I had that did it so quickly; just one day late.
Discover was my favorite. They had a forgiveness policy and wouldn't raise your rate just because another card did. And their website was very friendly to use.
Their app is blasted easy to use for payments & viewing account information as well. I despise the Chase app where my auto loan sits, as it never loads correctly on my iPhone, or takes drastically longer. Whereas the Discover app and pages load without problem.
I guess that's how they make money and can afford great customer service, which is also something I'm fine with: I couldn't care less what their interest rate is since I'll never ever pay interest. If that's on the agenda, then I'd look somewhere else as you say.
It’s probably the flip side to allowing late no-fee cancellations.
If it’s easy to book then not turn up, people will. Then if you know a significant percentage on average doesn’t turn up, it would be lost profit to not overbook.
Fully paid non-refundable services should, I agree, very conservative in overbooking.
The flip side is you can choose to extend your rental without giving them any advance notice. And you can cancel your reservation without penalty (at least before these new pay-in-advance deals). Hence they are never quite certiain they will have cars. I have had to wait around for someone to return a car before I could get my rental a few times before.
Also I believe one of them (Hertz or maybe Enterprise) told me if I did the pay-in-advance deal they would guarantee a car was there because they'd bring one in from the airport if needed. Some locations have very few cars and can be hit-or-miss.
Cars break down, people don't return their cars in time, some of the staff processing cars call out sick, there's a wide variety of reasons your inventory day of might be less than predicted. Either you need to have a lot of extra vehicles sitting idle to make up the deficit or you need to screw over your customers, and car rentals are too low margin for the former to be a viable option.
>When they’re not efficient, I want to blow a gasket
Can confirm that getting off the shuttle, looking up at the Hertz Gold board expecting to see either a parking space number or a section listed by your name, and instead seeing "See Agent" is absolutely rage inducing.
I mean if it works smoothly with no human interaction required (including both upselling and forced cheerfulness, maybe even an Expectation for tipping? I don't even know), where do I sign? As long as I get a written proof of renting and returning.
We were just ripped of by Booking.com Transport Limited two weeks ago. Basically if anything goes wrong it's your fault and they will not give you a refund. I have to report them to the European Consumer Centers Network but since they're not registered in the EU they might get away with it. Other people had their deposits blocked for months before the rental companies released their funds after numerous complaints. Big companies like Hertz, Sixt etc are almost always the worst offenders. Sixt has five people at the reception desk but you were required to book online. They could have as well put a chimpanzee in charge of the whole reception desk.
I tried but bank sided with them, since they don't want to get into legal issues. Booking.com claims the reservation is a "non refundable time limited special offer" in order to rip you off. This is anti consumer behaviour that should just be illegal. Just avoid them at all costs. Neither Booking.com nor Sixt would resolve the issue. I called support, they just fed me social engineering mumbo jumbo.
Your bank sided with the merchant? Normally they would at least try to argue the case and maybe lose it if the merchant's bank has better arguments or evidence, but straight up refusing to try? I'd just drop the bank and get a one that knows what the hell they are doing.
> Renting cars has always been a bad experience. Terrible websites where you don't know what car you're going to get. You arrive and they try to upsell you on a car. The employee spends 10 minutes filling out forms...
Join their frequent renter programs (no need to be a frequent renter). Then you can generally just walk to the lot, pick a car and go.
I've used Hertz a lot in the past, and to avoid that sort of experience all you have to do is join the gold club (free), make your booking through that, then go to the special gold desk on arrival. Usually everything's ready for you and you just need to pick up the keys.
You forgot the whole "lets walk around this can and look for scratches and pretend we've never seen this car in our life" thing. And that's before you even exit the lot. Then you do the same god damn dance when you get back.
Enterprise does this and I just find it completely unfathomable.
You did a thorough cataloging of the car when you received it from the last renter. Just give me that fucking report instead of acting like an oblivious idiot.
But between you and the previous renter it may have been driven by an employee or transported across the country by truck, or just damaged in the lot by the person renting the car next to it five minutes earlier.
I found the walkaround off-putting initially (years ago). Especially when you get it wet from washing and this it hides all the minor damage. But they have pretty lax rules about what counts as damage.
The best though, is those airport lots with cameras that record the condition of the car as you drive out.
One time we did the walk-around and neither of us noticed a scratch. When I returned the car they did notice this scratch. The agent offered to look on the computer to see if it had been logged from a previous rental. Nothing in the computer, but since we were using paper forms I got them to grab the form from the last rental and it did log the scratch.
I try to avoid rentals because their business model seems to rely on billing the same scratch to as many customers as they can.
I generally distrust UHaul, but I have to give them credit for the stickers they put on existing damage. It gives some reassurance that I won’t get into an argument over whether that scratch was there before.
I always film the car I’m about to rent, as well as the employee. I get them to state their name and the date, and all and any damage on the vehicle.
It makes them really uncomfortable, as they know that they won’t be able to charge me €4000 after the rental for whatever arbitrary damage they decide I caused - although it doesn’t stop them trying - I had sixt earlier this year claim that I had stolen the passenger side door. Fortunately I had filmed the car at the unmanned drop-off, along with an airport sign with the time and date - otherwise I would have been on the hook for an entire new car, as they said it was irreparable.
They only dropped the matter after I filed a complaint with the business regulator in the country they were operating in - and that came with a lifetime ban from renting from them. Good riddance.
Sixt is the absolute pits. They are structurally engaging in fraud and it absolutely disgusts me that this company is still in business. I've dealt with a lot of car rental company bs in my life but Sixt is on another level. For months after returning a rental van (which I'd used for an hour) they came up with other damage that I supposedly had caused. Good I kept pre and post images. If they were to be believed I had swapped out the alternator and done a whole pile of other hard to believe tricks to their vehicle. It also magically kept acquiring new dents, even days after returning the rental. What a joke that company is. Never, ever, use Sixt, even if is your last option, just don't, it isn't worth the hassle and the price they show you is never the price you will be paying.
I believe this is a European thing, as I haven't had such problems with renting cars in the US. Buchbinder was the worst, to the extent that everyone I know who is about to rent a car gets a lecture from me about them. It's worth it to have the full coverage insurance every time and just treat it as part of the rental cost. The alternative is lots of headaches to deal with the scammer companies.
Yep, had the same experience renting in Germany. With Sixt, Enterprise and Buchbinder. Always trying to sneak something up on you.
I like Enterprise cause they're affordable, but they really take it to the next level. I had a full insurance (0% OOP) and they still made me do the handover dance twice.
In Australia some are one way (eg. Europcar, which does the "bill every millimetre-long scuff" thing) and some are the other (eg. Avis, who don't seem to care as long as you return it with four wheels and a windscreen).
Funny you mention Europcar, I've had nothing but pleasure with them.
Including one time where I hit a kangaroo and damaged the left front quarter pannel, only charged me a few hundred dollars to repair said damages which was a lot less than I expected. Though I have been almost using Car Next Door exclusively for two years so perhaps things have changed.
The first (and only!) time I used Europcar, I'd been using Avis for years and was used to their way of doing business, to the point where I didn't even bother to do a cursory handover walk-around anymore, because I knew they weren't going to be hardasses. It is absolutely essential with Europcar though (and I think Hertz too), to do a very thorough documentation of every tiny pre-existing scuff, scratch and ding.
Car Next Door is the same, but I'm willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience there to get a service I can't get at a reasonable price from the big rentals (light commercial vehicle available close by and for short periods).
Yeah it's a waste of time, and they should do it while you're doing the paperwork. But again, they're perpetually understaffed, so the same employee has to greet you, manage your place in line, do your paperwork, check your ID, ready the car, do the inspection, push the upsell to a higher-price model, do the insurance upsell, etc. etc.
They did, but you weren't there. Do you really want to trust their honesty on that one, since if they forgot (intentionally or by mistake) to record previous damage, now you become liable for paying for it.
I recently rented a car from a similarly well-known company. When I went to return it, the location was completely abandoned. No attendant in the lot, no staff in the office. I waited with other customers for 30 minutes before I finally found a staff member walking through the parking lot, who said I could just leave the keys on the dashboard and go. I had assumed there’d be some sort of more official checkout process, but was tired enough after driving all day to just accept it.
Sure enough, I got an email two days later saying the car had never been returned. I explained the situation to customer service on the phone, who mostly chided me on not getting a receipt after returning (difficult to do when no one is working there).
At the time I joked with friends that the rental company was going to have me arrested for car theft. Luckily I just got an email receipt from them over a week later without comment. Guess it could have gone a lot worse.
I have a similar story. Once I rented a car from a budget but fairly popular local rental company. They were cheap because rather than renting from the airport, you had to take a 15 minute bus ride to a business park.
When returning, I arrive 5 mins before closing (traffic) to find the entire business park locked up. My phone is dead as the drive took much longer than expected so I couldn't call their head office or anything. While waiting outside thinking what to do, the gates opened and a car came out. I tried to signal them down to ask for them to hold open the gate for me but they just drove off when I got close, so I got back in the car and quickly drove back in as the gate was closing and very nearly scratched the side of the car on the closing gate.
Inside, the business park was completely deserted so I just parked the car beside the rental company's portakabin and posted the keys through their letterbox.
I walked back to the gate and realised there didn't seem to be any kind of button to exit the business park without a key or fob, so I was stuck. I wait about 45 minutes to see if anyone turns up, while looking for some kind of pedestrian exit, but find nothing. Without a phone, I realise the only way I'm getting out tonight is to climb onto the roof of one of the portakabins and try to climb out using one of the overhanging trees. Somehow I manage this without injuring myself too badly.
Obviously no rental company means no shuttle bus, and no phone means no cab, so I just had to trek the several miles back to the airport, using the light pollution for direction.
Next day I get a return receipt emailed through from the rental company, so it all worked out in the end.
In the UK, there is no chance they'd just have guard dogs roaming around without a handler. It is illegal, and even if it wasn't the liability would be insane.
In any case a security dog has to be trained not to inflict any serious injury.
If someone called the police, that would have been a good thing as they'd have let me out. Trespass on non-residential land here is usually not a crime provided you don't do any damage.
Besides, I was in my mid 20s so such risk taking behaviour was par for the course. I was much more worried about getting a fine for a late return. Even now I still do a little bit of urbex from time to time.
No McDonald’s or anything to beg for a phone charger? This sounds like a nightmare scenario when you are already dead tired from traveling, let alone have luggage to drag back to the airport.
Glad you made it back safe. I can’t imagine my significant other going through this BS in a seedy part of an unfamiliar town.
It was at an airport outside of the city so it was mostly walking through unlit roads, countryside and fields until I got close to the airport.
Honestly, it was kind of fun. I was very tired and a bit muddy by the time I got back to the city, having been carrying my luggage. I had also hurt my ankle a little bit when getting out of the business park - but nothing really hurts in your 20s. Girlfriend at the time had fallen asleep while waiting for me so she didn't even notice I was many hours late.
I guess one thing is it's the UK, so you don't ever really feel too unsafe outside of a handful of areas in a few major cities (speaking as a male). No dangerous animals, roads are relatively safe and people are nearly always helpful and friendly. Felt a bit like when I would get lost alone in the forest as a kid, only to eventually find my way back to civilization after a few hours.
It's so hard to get lost now that I almost miss it. Can't believe I'm getting nostalgic for the time I got trapped in a car rental place...
This is a common scam for stealing cars... Get car rental returns to be misdirected to a nearby lot, for example by turning around a sign, taking a few cars over a few hours, and then vanishing.
It nearly happened to me... I only took my car away again because I got suspicious about the staff saying the other site was "only for pick ups", and decided to go fill up with fuel (it wasn't quite full, and I didn't want to be charged for returning it not full) and on the way back check the other site the opposite side of the road... Spoke to the staff there and they had no idea someone else was accepting returns of their cars!
The people doing the returns often don't even know their doing anything criminal. They're normally hired from craigslist and asked to wear a yellow vest and put up a few "Hertz car return area" signs, then take return of a bunch of cars, while a car transporter is hired to pick up all the cars and take them to a port to leave the country. The whole lot is organised by the mastermind by phone, who is probably located in a foreign country and is using a VoIP number to be nearly untraceable.
If you get falsely arrested, and lose your realestate license because some huge company did something really wrong, I was under a steretypical impression that lawyers would be calling you 24/7 to take your case and sue them for huge amount of money (and then take a huge cut out of that)... especially for the mother and 40days jail time. Is there more to these stories, or are we just waiting for "Hertz pays X millions to falsly arrested mother" to appear in the newspapers?
That's exactly what this story is about -- people who have sued Hertz for wrongdoing.
Hertz is going through bankruptcy proceedings. During this process, a court will prioritize which debts Hertz is going to be paying off, and in what priority. Some of these debts are people who have sued Hertz for these issues. The court will be determining who gets paid and whose debts are written off under bankruptcy law.
if a person fucks up, massive consequences. A company? I'm pretty sure the CEO and board got plenty of cash, and lots of protections against all their wrongdoings
That's not necessarily true. The vast majority of individual people that file chapter 7 don't give up a penny. US bankruptcy law is surprisingly progressive for the little guy -- even compared to other progressive countries.
You but we aren't discussing bankruptcy. If you call the police and give them false information to get someone else arrested. I'll bet that when they find out, you'll be the one getting arrested. These CEOs and board members don't even get fined personally, the company usually pays
There is no claim that a CEO or board member made any false statements to police in this story. Furthermore, no matter who at Hertz called it in, the crime of "making false statements" generally requires that the statements be knowingly and willfully wrong.
If Hertz reports a car stolen because front desk staff made a mistake, that's simply not criminal. This also applies to you as an individual too. If you report your car stolen when you forgot where you parked it, that is also not criminal. Hertz is being treated the same as you would be.
I don't see anything in this story that describes a crime. (except for the people who may have actually stolen cars) These are descriptions of civil wrongdoings.
You're completely ignoring the point of the comment that you're responding to. Someone at Hertz is culpable for not taking steps to prevent this from happening.
> Someone at Hertz is culpable for not taking steps to prevent this from happening.
Of course, this is what the 191 lawsuits are about. They are to determine Hertz's culpability in -- with what the article describes -- are the civil wrongdoings I mentioned in my above comment.
Organizations are good at diffusing responsibility. Even when crime is egregious, like the pfas leak, and would be enough to sentence everyone in the organization to life in prison, justice can't find anyone who is directly liable, so nobody is punished.
> Someone at Hertz is culpable for not taking steps to prevent this from happening.
It's far from clear that anybody at Hertz is criminally culpable, which is what was suggested upthread, with talk of people making false statements being arrested.
I think, that to suggest that people should be held criminally responsible for the mistakes of others (assuming that these are mistakes), is a pretty extreme position. Over-criminalization of everything a much more problematic situation that had led to larger problems with mass incarceration that underlies many of the most significant problems that the US has.
The solution to everything isn't "lock 'em up and throw away the key". We have functional civil courts, and they are more than capable of remediating wrongs.
No. They should be held responsible for their own mistakes. I'm not sure who else but the CEO and board you think have the ability and responsibility to make sure their company is acting appropriately.
> We have functional civil courts, and they are more than capable of remediating wrongs
Perhaps for the first, or second, or tenth instance - but surely at some point, if certain senior people at Hertz know, or ought to know, that their system has a track record of making incorrect accusations, and they continue to use it anyway, it must rise to at least a standard of wilful indifference to whether or not the statements are correct.
It doesn't work like that. It's not graded on a percentage scale, it's pass/fail.
"Knowingly" and "willfully" have legally significant meanings with their own standards of the mental state that qualifies. It is then up to the court to determine whether or not your actions have met those conditions.
I think you are correct on this, this is indeed a civil matter, it's called voluntary parting, in other cases that made it to this site where people have tried to report to the police that the camera they rented out or something was never returned were told it's not theft. I think what happens is that they report the vehicles to the police as stolen, as they would if they found a car missing from the lot, instead of telling them someone did not return it.
I don't disagree. Let me slightly backtrack on my previous statement: I think some states explicitly spell out penalties for failure to return a rental car, while in others, it may be up to the specific circumstances to determine whether a crime has taken place or whether it is a civil disagreement or misunderstanding on terms, etc.
If they make a pattern of it they're likely to get smacked with punitive damages or a similarly large class action, see McDonalds coffee for a good example. If you write off the punitive damages as a cost of doing business the judgements are going to go up exponentially from there (assuming the next claimant's lawyer is smart enough to find and read the last judgement).
I think if you make one individual accountable for every mistake a company makes, then you change the nature of business. In this case, you want the CEO and board to go to prison because some low-level employee made a mistake on some paperwork. That could be avoided; simply don't report car thefts to the police. Charge people $20,000 up front to rent a $20,000 car, and say "if you return it and we feel like it, we'll give you $19,000" back. If the car gets stolen, not their problem anymore. If they mis-file some paperwork and don't give you $19,000 when you return it, well the contract you signed said "if we feel like it" and they didn't feel like it, so I guess keep the car if you want to. But, this business model would never work, so there simply wouldn't be car rental companies anymore.
There has to be some abstraction layer between a company and its officers, or companies can't take the risk of delegating anything to employees. The reality of society is that sometimes something is going to get fucked up, and the dispute resolution process is expensive and messy. That's the legal system, and it exists for a reason. Ideally, most people don't have to use it very often, and the 0.001% of the time when something fails catastrophically, the pain of that one individual that it didn't work for makes society less painful for everyone else longer term. This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably.
To some extent, you can always reduce the risk of anything to as low as you want. It's just that at some point, the cost of that makes the entire endeavor not worthwhile financially. Risk aversion is a tax on innovation, so you don't want to become too risk averse. I think society has found a decent balance here.
I get where you are coming from, but I had a job a few years ago where this type of incident would be pretty devastating.
Some people’s employers would be aware of a pending arrest warrant within hours, likely before they are. People get immediately suspended without pay and need to hire an attorney, etc to figure out wtf is going on. Depending on what happened, it could take months to restore everything.
I manage risk for a living. If a consumer needs to be worried about felony arrest when renting a fricking car, something is very wrong. I would assert that if the company’s incompetence in implementing, administrating, and signing off on controls is such that customers are being arrested because they can’t figure out wth their rental cars are, the executives should have Sarbanes-Oxley exposure and potential criminal liability.
> If a consumer needs to be worried about felony arrest when renting a fricking car, something is very wrong.
Indeed, but it is not surprising. Despite all copaganda, police has always never been "your friend", but the armed enforcers of capitalism.
When a company files a police report, police are not going to question it. They will bash your door in, shoot your dog and/or yourself and/or your neighbors, ask questions later, and only pay for damages when ordered to do so by a lengthy court process.
And no, I'm not just polemic here, this is reality. There have been countless house "search and seizure" operations on people who had committed the "crime" of having their wifi hotspot unsecured, who have downloaded stuff from university libraries (R.I.P. Aaron Swartz), for running TOR exit nodes, or for exposing government or corporate "secrets" that caused scandals.
They only care about capital, they care about maximizing their KPIs (which tend to have far more to do with protecting the state and/or generating revenue) and getting paid. Their KPIs only reflect protecting capital as much as trickles down from the elected executives who are ultimately at the top of the accountability (or lack thereof) pyramid.
If enforcement cared directly about capital dangers to the public and crimes of possession would be taken a lot less seriously than they are and property crimes would be taken a lot more seriously.
> In this case, you want the CEO and board to go to prison because some low-level employee made a mistake on some paperwork.
Yes. If the CEO and board want the responsibility of owning a company then yes they should also own-up to fuck-ups by their employees.
If big companies don't want to be responsible for thousands of employees then perhaps it's time to split up the responsibilities -- and the compensations too.
Right? Isn't that the excuse for paying them 1000x what their employees make (while going through bankruptcy no less)? They're the ones with the responsibility and personal risk?
Maybe let's try rephrasing it. Knowingly making a false report to the police is a crime. If it happens once or twice or even a few times over several years, that's not such a big deal, mistakes happen.
But in this case, it seems like there are several hundred false reports over several years. It's so much, that Hertz was able to hand over a database of data related to it. This is negligence, they clearly know they are doing something wrong and they know it's harming other people.
If tens or hundreds of your employees are making false reports consistently over many years and you're not doing something to resolve it? I suppose the answer to your question is yes.
Knowing the your employees are making mistakes is not the same as knowingly making a false statement. And making statements that are found to be untrue is also not the same as making a false statement.
For it to be a crime, a single person must willingly make a statement that they know is false. Making a statement and being incorrect about it is not criminal. Knowing that other people have made incorrect statements is not criminal.
That being said, making mistakes that harms other people is a civil tort. And that’s why these cases are going to a judge now as mentioned in the article. It also worth noting that the article is about allegedly untrue reports of car theft. Whether or not those claims are accurate still remains to be tested in court.
> You want a CEO to go to jail if an employee decides to do their job wrong?
If a single employee's actions can cause an innocent person to be arrested, the company procedures were clearly inadequate - in this case, a lack of a "four eyes" principle at car checkin/checkout and insufficient record-keeping and quality assurance of these records.
It is the job of the employees to do their tasks correctly... and the job of management to provide the necessary resources for employees to do their tasks and to implement procedures to catch and prevent (inevitable) human or machine error.
Mark Fields (the CEO) could put in a process to make it difficult or impossible to accidentally get your customers arrested, but he doesn't give a shit if that happens right now
The idea is that Mark would feel some sort of inconvenience if something was screwed up this badly, ideally, in light of the fact that he's receiving $16,000,000/year
> This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably.
"Thank you for your patriotic sacrifice, comrade customer."
>"This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably."
If said person get immediately compensated to full extent and a lot more on top. If any record of being criminally charged and any trace of arrest / interaction with police in regards to criminal matter gets wiped out. Then maybe.
Otherwise fuck those vacationers. They're free to go and buy car or vote for the system that does not jail people for hint of offence.
> This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably.
Also European. My indignation is at the police's use of force.
Even if I wasn't arrested or jailed, being dragged out of a car at gunpoint is such an inappropriate response to a nonviolent theft report. It's dangerous. It's scary.
I live in europe, too. That kind of lawyers can be very expensive for common people. Most of us don't dream to sue companies/cops and even less so with famous lawyers as legal advice. The closest we have is consumers associations who will take complaint and in some cases start legal actions.
In this case it's even more complicated, because the company is at fault for making an administrative error in declaring stolen vehicles, but the heart of the scandal is that the police followed through on baseless claims and abused their power on random people. As always, the cops are the real criminals here, but where i come from (France) there's close to zero chance to get any form of justice against cops even in the most egregious cases of murder and rape.
> are we just waiting for "Hertz pays X millions to falsly arrested mother" to appear in the newspapers?
Now that a big newspaper has covered the story and revealed there's hundreds of cases, that's probably what's gonna happen.
In the US, we have clear distinction between local/state and federal jurisdictions. So false arrest will be a local charge, not a federal one. Further local prosecutors are paid with local taxes, so won't have the resources that the federal prosecutors have. Further, 20 wrongful arrests are each 1 count in 20 different localities.
I wish more courts would allow rocket dockets to plow through the cases. Very rarely in these cases are there questions of law actually involved. Mostly it's procedural delays. The longer you can delay the better your chance the other side gives up -- so you don't actually have to argue the merits of your case.
I live in the US, and there are plenty of billboards for lawyers all over the place. I find it hard that a lawyer wouldn't be all over it here... Unless there was more to the story than the 1 side that journalists usually give. I've learned to pretty much just ignore all the stories that seem unbelievable because they probably are. There's almost always more to them.
The statement from Hertz at the end implies that they were not false reports after all. It's a pretty confident thing for a company to say. If true, then there will not be large payouts.
I mean what else are they going to say? To say that there are no false reports is provably incorrect, to say either that there are many false reports or they don't know how common false reports are is to admit guilt. This is just the corporate version of the narcissist's creed.
I'm at the point, unfortunately, that I would believe the statement of a retail corporation over a journalist's report. It just seems more plausible to me that this journalist is spinning sordid, dreary car thefts into a tale of monstrous corporate incompetence; than that Hertz representatives consistently and callously make false police reports.
>I was under a stereotypical[sic] impression that lawyers...
Hertz may want to settle out-of-court in the mothers case, but even then these stories don't have the legs they used to. The attack on truth since Trump has been ongoing and severe, and I think most people are either a) in a head-space where everything seems to be falling apart, and so anything shy of video-taped murder is ignored, or b) in a head-space where nothing is real or true and the lamestream media is just manipulating everyone all the time with everything. In both cases, the public has been severed from it's own interest.
It's funny because I grew up watching movies where the good guy was often trying to get some proof to expose the bad guy, who was willing to do anything to stop the leak. But now? What happens in a world where no proof is believable? The entire equation goes out of balance, and politicians, ever the practical ones, respond to different incentives, and avoid issues like this one that don't play to anyone's base and antagonize money.
OT: when you insert "[sic]" after something you quote that was misspelled in the original you are supposed to leave it misspelled. "[sic]" means "this spelling error is in the source".
When you want to fix the error in the quote, the way to denote it is to replace the misspelled word with the correctly spelled word in square brackets, like this:
> I was under a [stereotypical] impression that lawyers...
This raises a question. In addition to "sic" in brackets meaning "this error is in the source" it also can be a verb meaning "set an animal to attack". What happens if someone misspells that, and you want to correct it when you quote them? Just putting it in brackets might be interpreted as you saying that the word before it is misspelled.
Wealthy business or person calls cops to report a crime: cops immediately act upon it (usually despite a lack of any legal cause for arrest such as an officer witnessing the commission of a crime or getting an arrest warrant), presuming guilt.
Anyone else calls cops to report a crime: cops will come out to take a report in a few days, at which point they will ... do nothing. Hope you have insurance that covers theft.
About 5 years ago I flew in to SFO for a work trip. A few hours after I picked up my Hertz rental car I got a message stating that I hadn't picked up my car yet. Checking the rental paperwork, I saw that I had somehow rented this car as someone else. This, despite I did the normal gold service process that involves providing my license to an attendant at the gate.
I was happy then that I didn't have a run in withe the police, thinking it would be a minor inconvenience at most. I guess it can get a lot worse.
Hertz screwed up applying my earned rewards points on a rental and charged me $400.
I was on chat with their customer support while booking the rental and specifically mentioned that I wanted to use my rewards points for the rental and followed their guidance. Their booking system was crap and would not show rewards being applied half the time. I took screenshots and saved all chat transcripts.
When I saw that they finally charged me full amount upon returning the car, I sent them all the proofs I had that this rental was supposed to come out of my rewards points. Upon my escalation they reviewed it twice and they refused to reverse the charge and said I should consider their response "final".
I gave up and ate the $400 charge. Wish I had more patience and time to fight it.
Card chargebacks are the way to deal with scum like this. Any time a company fobs you off go to your bank. They pay fees for every chargeback (including if they win), and too many chargebacks will threaten their ability to accept payments at all.
I once watched a video about exotic car rental business, where they mentioned that if you rent a car and fail to return it, it's technically not theft, but conversion. As a result it's difficult to get the cops involved.
Very interesting. When reading this I was wondering how/why Hertz managed to make this a criminal rather than civil matter. It feels to me like the ideal way to handle it would be indeed treat it as a "conversion". Contract says if you keep it past X date you agree to pay Y price for it, they charge your payment method, that fails, they forward your account to a debt collection agency. Worst case you sell the car at a loss compared to what you paid Hertz and learn a valuable lesson. This is not a violent crime, they have all your details and know who you are already! No need to put out an APB.
I had multiple bad experiences with Hertz and no longer rent from them. The final straw was when I had to switch out a car mid rental because of mechanical issues. They over double charged me acting like it was a whole new (one way) rental.
It took weeks of phone calls with no resolution before I initiated a charge back to fix their issue. Horrible and incompetent customer service.
The only reason to file a police report years after a car went “missing” would be as a legally required prelude to making a claim against an insurance policy for the value of the car
I would not be shocked to find out there was a pattern here of reporting cars “stolen” that had become worth more “dead than alive” via insurance fraud.
Also speaking to culpability, someone at hertz had to swear under penalty of perjury that these vehicles were stolen. They may have acted “on orders” from above but they can be held criminally liable by the courts if they choose to actually pursue it.
On the other hand, with Teslas being able to log & report their location in real-time it seems like it would already collect all the evidence you need to prove your innocence at the first sign of trouble.
I'm always a little skeptical about these articles... But it brought back to mind the last time I rented a car. After verifying my driver's license, and confirming my insurance, they asked me to give them a number for someone I was staying with. I was pretty frustrated, but even more frustrated that I gave up and told them.
I'm not sure why you're skeptical, it seems pretty easy enough to track down: arrest records, court papers, etc, and reports are as old as two years ago.
I can guarantee a company the size of Hertz has the means to track the car via GPS or other means. If they really need to track the car (or me) down, they can find it (us). Having the contact info of the person I'm staying with is completely unnecessary. It's an invasion of privacy of a completely unrelated third party to our agreement.
Why would they need to reach me? If they really need to, they can ping the OnStar system, or whatever proprietary system is built into basically every new vehicle. This is assuming they don't add their own tracking system after taking delivery. A company the size of Hertz can absolutely know where every car they own is at any point in time. It doesn't mean that every employee can just look it up for fun but the info is available to those who need it.
Both of my cars have that feature and I didn't even ask for it. Car rental companies are absolutely asking for it. It might add $20 to the price of the car.
I really hope that as self driving cars get better all of these car rental scammers are going to go bankrupt and something like Uber or the car manufacturers themselves take over that market.
What are they going to be replaced with? Car "sharing" companies? Are people going to miraculously not going to require car rentals (eg. for trips) anymore?
It certainly seems that way... in the long run. In the beginning, in 1997, Netflix was a company that sent DVDs by mail. Fast forward, they're an internet video-on-demand company. The writing was on the wall for Blockbuster way back in 1997 but it took over a decade for their model to go bust. The not-so-well known fact is that Blockbuster was already losing money and going bankrupt even before Netflix finished them off.
Similarly, Hertz has declared bankruptcy and the other car rental companies are not far behind. Uber and Lyft are certainly not the cause of their demise in the same way that 1997-era Netflix couldn't be blamed for Blockbuster's demise. But the writing was on the wall, and the writing is certainly on the wall here.
This comment thread on HN from 2008 is quite an interesting read if you see some of the comments denying Blockbuster's precarious position: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280425
Hertz declared bankruptcy because a global pandemic shut down travel worldwide overnight and they were highly extended in credit that up to that moment made sense in a normally functioning society and low interest rates.
When you're living life on the edge, every short-term problem can turn into a life-threatening disaster. If it wasn't the pandemic, it would be something else. The rental car industry is living paycheck to paycheck. Hertz (and Avis and Enterprise and Dollar Thrifty and ...) have endemic and structural problems.
"... this interferes with the ability to develop a moat around their products and/or services. And on a practical level, it impedes margins and profitability. Avis and Hertz, for instance, have been profitable in only one and two of the last five years, respectively."
> Car "sharing" companies? Are people going to miraculously not going to require car rentals (eg. for trips) anymore?
Indeed. Stuff like DriveNow (which is BMW's service) or public transport are eating up car rentals, and Uber plus videoconferences are eating up the "executive wants to drive from the airport to their destination" market... and anyway, the financial situation of Hertz and friends was dire even before corona hit, because they all have leased their cars for "cashflow/capex vs opex optimization" instead of outright buying them for cash.
There will absolutely be specialists remaining - UHaul etc. for moving trucks, or stretch limo and camper rentals - but the days of point-of-sale rental companies are over.
They're being replaced by people taking fewer trips, and fewer people taking trips at all. By people taking road trips instead of plane/etc trips and having their own car at their destination, or by choosing to visit friends/family and being able to use that person's car. And then of course there is uber, to mop up the remainder.
So I'm not surprised that their theft entry system is something trash. It's probably an Access database running on some Windows 95 node. Or maybe Gentoo.
It's clear from stories like this that Hertz has chosen to double-down on not caring, and make it part of their business model. I mean look at this non-response:
> Hertz declined to comment for this story but has previously said the "vast majority" of cases "involve renters who were many weeks or even months overdue returning vehicles and who stopped communicating with (Hertz) well beyond the scheduled due date."
The only way a company responds like that is when they fully believe that they're a staple and CAN'T go out of business. We'll see about that...