I personally wouldn’t be that worried about reliability. Most modern cars will rack up 100,000 miles (assuming half-decent maintenance) without giving any mechanical trouble at all. My daily driver is a 200,000-mile Toyota that I wouldn’t hesitate to jump into right now and drive non-stop to New York (from San Francisco).

But even at 200K, my car is well taken care of and looks and runs great. The bigger problem with Hertz is that they don’t seem to give cars even the most cursory once over—“…just hose it off and get it back out on the lot.”

I’ve gotten cars where the dashboard was still sticky and spattered from the previous renter’s Big Gulp. I’ve gotten cars with the previous renter’s rental agreement still laying across the passenger seat! Cars where the info display read “OIL CHANGE REQUIRED” from the moment I first started the engine. Cars missing all of their valve stem caps—the list goes on. It’s laughable that I have, on occasion, spent a half hour cleaning out a Hertz rental because I would have been embarrassed to have others see the state of the car I was given.

And I think that renters are, in part, encouraged to treat the cars like disposable junk because that’s the standard of care Hertz has set.

I would be fine with Hertz keeping cars for 70, 80, even 100,000 miles—if they actually took care of them. I would certainly rather a 70K car that had been meticulously maintained and thoroughly cleaned than a 20K car coated in McFlurry residue.


Right—at the end of the day, the bottom line is this. Where would you go?