A few years ago, I was driving a Hertz rental car at about 25 mph in a residential neighborhood when the rear-view mirror suddenly flew off and hit me in the face. I came within inches of hitting a parked car. I mentioned this when I returned the car and they graciously discounted my bill.
Today I am driving a Hertz rental car with a big clump of wires dangling down between the accelerator and the brake, so that moving your foot from the accelerator to the brake is a great tangly adventure. This strikes me as equally unsafe. I am on my way back to the car with a roll of duct tape in my hand. I plan to mention this for the benefit of the next guy, but I do wonder if Hertz keeps records of “wildly implausible complaints that were probably manufactured for the purpose of getting a discount” and whether I am about to be flagged as a repeat offender.
Hertz arranged for many renters to be arrested when Hertz’s own car-tracking systems failed, https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/05/business/hertz-lawsuit-settlement/index.html
If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by a street criminal, perhaps a pro-regulation progressive is just a conservative who has been mugged by a corporation.
All they have to do is watch your Boar’s Head speech to label you as a fabulist.
So next time, rent from someone else?
Bennett Haselton (#2): Until the moment I saw your response, it never entered my head that anyone would see this as a regulatory failure.
Surely the threat of a bad Yelp review is a more efficient deterrent than the threat of a fine from an administrative agency. For one thing, the cost to Hertz of a bad Yelp review depends on how much other renters care about these particular things, as it should.
Well I’m not sure if you’re serious about being worried about entered in their “crank repeat offender” database, but I would be worried. (Actually, I’m sure there is such a database — as there should be — the only question is whether you can get added to it by filing two complaints, with good documentation in both cases!) That’s not the kind of thing that can be prevented with a Yelp review. You’d probably never find out.
But more generally I think Yelp reviews would probably not be an effective deterrent against things that have a very low percent chance of happening, but are catastrophic when they do happen. Anyone reading Yelp reviews discounts a certain small percentage of negative reviews as coming from chronically dissatisfied customers, so a very rare catastrophic occurrence would not have a noticeable impact on percent of bad Yelp reviews. But your rental car could have killed someone due to the badly attached rear view mirror or the wires dangling between the accelerator and the brake.
Great anecdotes! And your concern seems justified.
I am curious – Did the mirror fly directly from its mounting location to your face? If so, I am guessing you ran over something (speed bump, pothole) which jolted it loose from an already-compromised mounting. All other scenarios I can imagine for getting it from its mounting to your face seem much more implausible. Can you shed any further light?
Also, did the 2nd (tangly-adventure) incident result in another discount?