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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>> 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."<p>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...
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.<p>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).<p>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 live in europe.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>I gave up and ate the $400 charge. Wish I had more patience and time to fight it.
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.<p>Not sure how Hertz managed to do it.
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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.
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 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.