There is a joke that the fastest car you’ll ever drive is a rental, and there is a grain of truth to it. While lots of folks just use rentals to get to their local conference or whatever, a lot of other people get their rentals into trouble. Look, I know how it is. I got one Nissan Rogue rental stuck on a sketchy beach in Florida.
Thomas wrote about a Kia Telluride that got stuck on the road to Telluride. Squirrelmaster makes an astute observation:
Like others have said, red “FLT” license plate with no company logos means it is a rental car, and this happens all the time across trails around Colorado. I have passed dozens and dozens of stuck rentals when I am out in my Jeep, and more often than not they are stuck in spots where it was clearly the driver skill coming up short, not the vehicle. This appears to be yet another one of those scenarios.
I can see why folks might not want to buy a former rental car!
David Tracy wrote about how someone hacked the screens at Ford’s headquarters to protest the company’s Return To Office policy. The NSX Was Only in Development for 4 Years gets a COTD win, too:
There are some jobs where WFH is not really feasible, but my hot take is that if your job can be done remotely, then it should be done remotely. The trouble is that widespread WFH became a thing too late – companies have already invested billions in tacky office buildings that they need to fill and as usual, the little people are the ones who have to pay for their bosses’ short-sighted decision-making.
Thomas wrote about how two people bought Fiat 500Ls this year. Amazingly, Dodge managed to sell eight Caravans, six Darts, and 13 Journeys. NC Miata NA:
Imagine being manager of a Dodge dealer, coffee cup in hand as you look out over a sea of unsold Hornets, reading these sales numbers and wishing you still had some Darts and Journeys on the lot.
Spikedlemon:
Six Dodge Darts?
Is that not more headline?A near-decade old zombie.
Echo Stellar:
They are a key part of the strategic zombie car reserve, doled out to the American public in periods of extreme buffoonery.
Have a great evening, everyone!
Top graphic image: San Miguel County Sheriff
With a rental car, drive it like you stole it. Hertz is going to report it as such anyway.
I may be partly responsible for Nissan having such a bad rep when it comes to their CVT’s due to some rentals I’ve had. Don’t tell me a Sentra is a full size car, charge me as so, and not expect me to get my money back somehow….Turns out the CVT’s don’t like getting moved to reverse without a full stop involved when moving foward…oooops!
I was in line at Dollar one time (the other companies were out of cars) and the guy ahead of me was complaining that he couldn’t fit his cello into the car. He’d paid extra for a mid-size upgrade. They’d issued him a Smart Car and called it a mid-size. Literally the smallest legal car in the country, and it was, according to them, a mid-size.
I currently own a 2000 Taurus that was owned by Budget until my aunt bought it in 2001 with 30k miles on it. Fortunately it’s been rock solid, even now at 160k miles.
“Yes. I want the insurance. Because I am gonna beat the hell out of this thing.”
Jerry Seinfeld
When I was in high school, a friends first car was a former rental Focus. On Hawaii plates. How it ended up in Kentucky, I have no idea. Also, he could never fully get rid of the sand, especially in the trunk.
This reminds me of a time in the early 80’s: My parents had rented a cabin in Estes Park, Colorado in the summer. The cabin was accessible via a reliable dirt road, but there was some hilly terrain. My dad rented a 1983 Oldsmobile Omega. By the time the four of us piled in, with a week of luggage with hiking and camaping gear, the car was more than full. After a week of driving to and from the cabin, the muffler was bent and dented and the underside was scraped up in places it shouldn’t have been. I heard scraping noises from under the car that were not natural. It was not a disaster, but an example of the abuse the rental cars take.
+1 for Estes Park. Grew up there.
Rental specific license plates shouldn’t exist. Basically putting a sign on every car near an airport to break into me, there’s probably a bunch of stuff in here.
Florida car rentals had ‘lease’ plates back in the 80s maybe 90s. They eventually dropped them since tourists were being targeted for a variety crimes.
When I travel and rent a car I always make sure to grab a car with the same state registration as where I landed and am traveling too, avoiding the rentals with out of state tags. Best to blend in as much as possible.
Most of the rentals I’ve had in Europe have a sticker prominently featuring the name of the rental company slapped on the outside of the car somewhere. It always struck me as a less-than-stellar idea.
Even without rental specific plates, rental cars are easy to spot.
No dealer plate frames and barcode stickers haphazardly slapped on various windows.
Easy, yes, but not nearly as easy as a different colored license plate like Colorado does.
That Fiat article summoned one from the depths of the universe to me yesterday. I think in their entire existence I’ve seen maybe three examples of a Fiat 500L in person. I genuinely forgot they existed. Then on my scooter ride home from work yesterday, a perfect looking robin’s egg blue one crosses my path. How does that happen!?!?
Yeah, funny how that happens. A few years ago (in 2018!) my kid was driving while we were on a road trip (in our home state of Tennessee) and I was telling him about having just recently read about Chevy discontinuing their rebadged Nissan NV200 after selling less than 30k over some 4 years but I was blanking on the name Chevy used; right then and there a very rusty Chevy City Express with Ohio plates blasted by in the right lane. We had a good laugh about that.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a1702461/chevrolet-city-express-dead/
About a week after we got back from our road trip I was walking to work and noticed a small cleaning business had just opened up in the similarly small office building a couple blocks from my house; they had a fleet of, you guessed it, Chevy City Express cargo vans.
The algorithm is stalking you…
Well, you have to realize there is like this life lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. For example, suppose you are thinking of a plate of shrimp, and all of a sudden somebody will say “plate” or “shrimp” or “plate of shrimp” out of the blue, no explanation, no point in looking for one either. It’s all part of the cosmic unconsciousness. So reading an article about Fiat 500Ls will undoubtedly cause the universe to open up and spawn one in front of you. It’s how the world works.
My unpopular take on WFH
Many roles were permitted to be WFH that should never have been or for more often than should have been, and people have abused the system. It’s been overdue for a correction, but the pendulum will swing further than it needs.
The many times have I been on holiday with the family, sitting at a pool or on the beach, and one of the other parents, with a cocky smile, spouts out that they’re “working from home today” whilst drinking their n-th beer and just barely watching their kids splash around for the day.
Unless those people are hourly what difference does it make as long as deadlines are met and the boss is happy with the quality of the work?
In my corporation, the majority of our engineering & software staff worldwide are either hourly or “sourly” (base salarty plus overtime).
One of the counter-arguments I’ve heard is the lack of being able to respond appropriately & quickly to others who do need details to continue their own work – that, inherently, with people who aren’t available (or take significant time to respond) that it affects other people’s work. But that’s also a performance issue that should be dealt with at the employee level.
That’s what company provided cell phones and WiFi hotspots are for.
Yes, that’s taking away the excuses.
But, again, it’s those that abuse it that leave a taint.
I doubt WFH workers do worse than time in-office workers lose commuting, going out to lunch, yapping nonsense in the break room, watching cat videos in the cubicle and generally pretending to look busy.
100% this. You’re either meeting the expectations of your higher-up(s) or not.
Not sure why anyone should care FROM WHERE that is happening.
If you’re not meeting expectations that’s on you.
If you’re getting everything done and have time to screw around, either good for you on being efficient or your manager(s) aren’t doing their job.
Either way, the problem isn’t with you.
Office or WFH doesn’t make as much of a difference as the people involved (in most cases), plenty of people are actually less productive in the office because of all the BS that happens there.
OTOH, I’ve done it for 10 years and I’ve been busier and more useful than I ever was in the office (plus lunch breaks to mow the lawn!).
Unfortunately, the “anti-WFH groundswell” somehow caught me a couple years ago and I have to report to an office 3x/week even though I didn’t even know we had offices in my city. And it’ll be 4x/week in January. But they found an unrelated local office for me, so I’m doing the “theatre of attendance” for the foreseeable future, even though I know I’ll be laid off in 6-12 months. Now my attendance compliance is just a matter of not losing my severance. That’s great motivation /s
good luck.
VERY much agree with the take on WFH. It should be incentivized to the largest extent possible. But yeah, so many companies are just stupidly run. And so many managers just have no clue at all how to actually manage people and judge results.
Thankfully I work for a very smart company. We were 50% WFH pre-pandemic (I have been for nearly 19yrs now, and was the first non-sales resource to be hired as a remote employee). We are 95%+ today, and they took advantage of that to downsize our very expensive suburban Boston office space. Less people space, waaaay more datacenter space to accommodate our HPC lab projects.
I have to think the zombie cars that get sold were just service loaners and whatnot that were never titled, not cars that have been collecting dust at the back corner of the lot. They are still “new cars” until they are titled. Still – I too would love to know the whole story of this sort of thing.
Wow, my last trip to CO, I thought we were being bold driving a Pacifica with 7 people up Old Fall River Road (the steep gravel 1930s backroad to the top of RMNP). We bottomed out a few times, but nothing crazy like this. I think someone temporarily forgot that just because it looks like an SUV, it’s still just a minivan at its core. Probably with cheap all-season highway tires. And also going the wrong way, against gravity.I mentioned on Oppo that I think I would have gotten out and then found a way to destroy the car so the media would have a cool video clip, and probably commend me on the heroic escape. The fact that I got myself into a dumb situation would then be a distant second to the miracle that I’m alive!
Love that road. Probably have been up it 200 times since the early 1960’s.
Never gets old, except when a tourist screws up and blocks it for hours while you wait for the wrecker…
The Telluride story reminds me of when Clarkson raced a sailboat with the Fastest Car – Pause – In The World.
I believe that he needed 2 of those to finish, didn’t he?
Of course not, it simply went so fast that it changed color.
Don’t be gentle, it’s a rental
Sure, but that doesn’t mean you can forget “no driving glove, no driving love “
Rentals are the fastest car you’ll ever drive.
I rent Camaros, you’re preaching to the choir. I averaged around 10 MPG when I had an SS for a week.
I have not-so-fond memories of a Ford Focus rental with the 1.0 that read 45mpg UK (37mpg US) when I picked it up ages ago, and, without resetting it, I returned it in the mid-20’s (~20mpg US) after a week-and-a-half. I hated that engine with a passion.
You’re telling me. I worked for Hertz in New York City for twenty three years as a transporter. You people have no idea. A co-worker liked to make them bleed.
Not mine, never will be!
*foot mashed to the floor*
My rule for rental vehicles is that they came with WAY too much rubber on the tires from the factory so I would do my best to burn as much of it off that I could. 🙂