Honestly, with or without identification on the plates, I can usually tell if a car is a rental on the street judging by its age, make, model and the windshield stickers/no smoking stickers. ANother increasing giveaway is if it is a sedan and doesn't have the Uber sticker as virtually all new looking sedans without an Uber sticker in my city are likely rentals. Virtually every new Charger, Chrysler 300, Malibu are going to be rentals too.

It's hard to describe, but there's something about certain cars even if it is not a Charger, 300, Malibu that yells rental car. I think another give away is if the car is either really clean looking or really dirty looking. Like earlier today, I saw a red Mazda CX30 that is often owned by individuals in my city, but something from a distance told me it was probably a rental car, and as I walked up I saw the Enterprise Clean Pledge hand out left on the passenger seat. I think it was because it looked unusually clean that stood out in the parking lot.

The ones that are harder to tell are the luxury cars like BMW, Mercedes etc as sometimes there is no obvious give away it is a rental car.

I think stereotyping car makes also plays a role. I would never really suspect a Subaru Forester is a rental car on the street even if it was completely clean unless I saw the barcode stickers, but if its a Ford Escape I would think rental car.

Something I have never understood though in Canada is that the National franchise puts a large "National" sticker on the rear bumper (the franchise owns the cars and does not share it with EHI) while the corporate National fleet does not put such a sticker. If anything I would have thought the opposite if there was going to be one group that puts a large marketing sticker is going to be corporate. Granted, of course National corporate shares the fleet with Enterprise/Alamo, but even then there is no master Enterprise sticker either for marketing.


National Sticker when its a franchise car. I took this picture some time last year when I saw it at a parking lot. I thought EHI started doing this but EHI corporate cars do not have the sticker.