This much is true. Enterprise's computers (and those of every other agency) are programmed to flag the car as due for maintenance (LOFR, in Enterprise parlance, meaning "Lube, Oil, Filter, Rotation). The oil is changed per manufacturer specifications (generally every 6,000 miles), regardless of any in-vehicle lights or indicators.

The mechanic who performs the service should reset the light, but it's easy to forget to reset the warning system if the light isn't on, which is often the case.

I understand that it's concerning to most people, but it really isn't that big of a deal. Still, the detailer ("car prep" in Enterprise lingo) should have noticed this when cleaning the vehicle and either fixed it or brought it to a manager's attention.

That definitely should have been noticed by the detailer and addressed.

In years past, Enterprise used a painfully-annoyingly-slow text-based system called RALPH. A few years ago, Enterprise's IT department finally heard the complaints of tens of thousands of employees around the country and pushed out their graphical-based system, ECARS (aka 2.0), which was slightly more intuitive but still almost as slow as RALPH. (It was slow not due to a technological limitation but rather because the screens were designed to gather information from infrequent renters and deal with insurance split bills and all of that--Enterprise's historical core market.)

When Enterprise bought National/Alamo, they bought National/Alamo's Odyssey system along with it--which, while being an older text-based system, was insanely fast--all of the information was gathered over the course of just a few screens, and the layout was intuitive. A fast typist could process a rental from scratch in about 30 seconds; if one's Emerald Club number had been entered in the reservation, it could be done even faster.

Enterprise decided to adopt Odyssey at their on-airport locations in order to speed up their average transaction (which, prior to this, was averaging almost 10 minutes per customer). It did speed things up, but it also cut off the airport Enterprise branches from the in-town branches, which continued to use ECARS as they continued to focus on insurance billing rentals.

This wasn't a tremendous issue as Enterprise historically did not engage in one-way rentals (their business model entailed assigning the cars to specific branches, and each branch's profitability was based on the income versus expenses of the cars that branch "owned"), and one-ways were never approved in advance and always assessed significant drop fees if done unplanned, since the car had to be physically transported back to the owning branch. However, a couple of years ago, in order to remain competitive with what the remainder of the rental market was doing, as well as new traditions that were ingested in the now-massive Enterprise organization with the acquisition of National and Alamo, Enterprise decided to start allowing limited one-ways, generally within a single metropolitan area (although some long-distance markets were activated as well). They moved to a "floating fleet" model, where the cars were accounted to the corporation rather than individual branches, which allowed a car that was returned to a different branch to then be re-rented out of that branch. The technology to support those one-way rentals, though, remained (and remains to this day) a hurdle, given the airport branches' reliance on Odyssey and the in-town branches' reliance on ECARS.

Just a bit of a historical explanation as to why you experienced what you did. If you ask me, Enterprise just needs to get their IT act together and fix it all, but that ain't likely to happen anytime soon ("rental company" and "cutting-edge IT" don't typically go together--and that's true among all of the major brands, not just EHI).

In any case, if you play your cards right, you can probably get the entire rental cost waived--when you write to the email address you received, just make sure to use these two key words: "I was not completely satisfied." Those words will strike fear into the heart of any Enterprise employee:

Bonuses and promotions are tied heavily to ESQi, and if an employee thinks you're going to rate them negatively in the follow-up phone survey many Enterprise customers get, they'll do anything--including giving you your rental for free--to get you to say you're completely satisfied.