A.I. Is Making Sure You Pay for That Ding on Your Rental Car

This is being framed all dystopian, but I'm not so pessimistic.

The current process is ridiculous - a random teenager in a vest with 15 minutes of training inspects the car when you check it out, and then you get a former drill sergeant when you check it back in. The current process is no less fair and Hertz is no less evil - but in this case its at least impartial and the scans are transparently available.

> The current process is no less fair and Hertz is no less evil - but in this case its at least impartial and the scans are transparently available.

I don't think it's impartial: the implication here is that the same technology is not available to the renter, so Hertz can easily claim damage that was already present at checkout that an ordinary customer picture can't refute. That asymmetry seems bad to me.

> in this case its at least impartial and the scans are transparently available.

Whenever I rent a car, after getting the keys I walk around the car and take photos of it on my phone from every angle. If I notice any scratches or dents, I tell them. But I still keep the photos, just in case. Then I do the same when I return it. That way if - at any point - they say I damaged the car, I have timestamped photos.

It feels like an obvious, easy way to cover my arse if there's a dispute. Otherwise you're basically screwed if they claim you got the car scratched up.

I'm really surprised other people don't do that. Its what my family has done from before we even had digital cameras.

That's weird, because when I rent a car, I take photos and videos and I make sure to have a attendant write down the damage on the rental paper before I drive away.

Is basic ass covering weird?

I've never had that happen. In most cases, the rental company "eats" the cost of normal wear and tear. This is what causes a car to depreciate after all.

Is the rental company actually getting the repairs done? If not, then they're double dipping: Depreciating the car, and charging the customer.

And I know they're not getting the repairs done, because when I rent a car, they show me a list of the dings that it's already sustained.

I do the same, but it didn't help me - Hertz charged me for several hundred dollars while I was flying back home, the same day after dropping off the car.

Turns out, you can send them all the pictures you like - all they did was send me a work order for scratches + repaint in a poorly specified location, with no comment on the pictures. No amount of emails or phone calls asking them to indicate where on the car was supposedly scratched led to anything - I just got passed around and around...

If my credit card insurance didn't cover it (Chase reimbursed me in full relatively easily), I would have taken the next step and did a chargeback. Maybe it would have been helpful if I needed to press the issue. But the presence of some tens of pictures between me and my wife didn't seem to accomplish much

> Is basic ass covering weird?

The point was that basic ass covering isn't good enough; my visual scan and phone photos aren't going to match what a machine designed to find defects can do.

(I think everyone does - or at least should do - what you do. I certainly do.)

Your mistake was renting with Hertz. This is the same company that literally got their customers arrested for grand theft auto due to negligently reporting cars stolen that had in fact not been stolen.

I would need examples of the defects that this machine would find that a) would matter enough to bother with and b) not be something a human could bring up arbitrarily too if they happened to not like me.

It's always good to have that paper trail for if it indeed does end up as a real dispute. Not car rental but a similar experience with eBay where a scammer shipped an item to an address in my city but not mine, apparently a common technique. I had DHL's email confirming this, and if thinking I doctored it it isn't a difficult call to DHL to verify, but all claims to both ebay and Paypal were denied despite definite proof. More than half a year later I finally got the charge back presumably thanks to having the paper trail for the credit card company.

Naturally I closed both accounts after this experience (the whole point of PayPal was to have protection in these cases...) but I suspect almost all companies are optimized for reducing support costs even if it means just a few lost customers.

In theory if the success rate is high enough, it will find more than most humans will.

Edit: And as another poster said, this means they get to double dip by depreciating the asset and charging the customer for that wear.

All rental car companies devolve into poorly-run scams. My pet theory is they're actually renting the cars at a loss to stay competitive, and then they need to con the money back to stay afloat.

This is a lot more complicated than assuming that a machine will find things more consistently than a ~minimum wage employee, especially if the latter isn't motivated to screw you.

(It's also far from the original point, which is purely about symmetry.)

If it went to arbitration, the photos would have helped. At the end of the day, it’s not really up to hertz whether hertz is breaking the law. It’s up to the small claims court. (Or whatever it’s called in your part of the world).

Whether you can be bothered or not is of course another question.

Yeah but only Hertz mistakenly put many their customers in Jail. That’s a whole other level of incompetence.