Renting a Personality for the Road
In the auto racing movie “Days of Thunder,” Tom Cruise takes a rental car for a high-speed spin, banging it up along the way and leaving it smashed in a restaurant parking lot.
While most car renters treat their vehicles with a little more respect, the generic rental fleets of Chevy Luminas and Ford Tempos are nonetheless often regarded as the automotive equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield.
Who among us has not parked a rental in a space where we would never park our own car? Or braked a little too hard? Or seen just how well a Mustang 5.0 handles on Pacific Coast Highway with the top down?
UCLA professor and psychologist Irene Goldenberg compares renting a car to renting a personality. “It’s kind of like kids getting in the cars at Disneyland,” she said. “You get to play at being someone else.”
For instance, Goldenberg recalled “somebody once renting a car to drive their kid to private school because their own car was not good enough.” But for every person who rents a car to appear as a Rothschild, there are thousands for whom the transformation is more subtle and less intentional.
There are those who slip behind the wheel of a three-cylinder Geo Metro and drive as if it were a Shelby Cobra. A few frequent renters, none of whom wanted to be identified for obvious reasons, admitted in interviews to participating in what one called the “Rental Car Olympics,” a series of maneuvers none would dream of performing in their own cars.
Like the West Hollywood woman who, traveling the Grapevine, discovered that her rented Mustang could hit 115 m.p.h. Or the Sherman Oaks couple who took a Mazda Miata on an off-road trek.
Most are little indiscretions, such as not slowing down over a speed bump or backing out of parking spaces a little faster than usual. Those sorts of activities, Goldenberg said, occur because the driver has no connection to the car and a diminished sense of responsibility for it.
“It’s like the girlfriend you only date once,” Goldenberg said.
But rental car companies want the first date to be a good one and maybe even blossom into a responsible--and they hope monogamous--relationship. In other words, they don’t want customers to have a drive-’em-and-leave-’em attitude.
“We don’t encourage people to be Starsky and Hutch when they rent a car if for no other reason than their own safety,” said Sandy Richards, the manager of strategic communications for Alamo Rent A Car.
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To head off bad driving, most rental agencies do quick scans of the driving records of customers. In a few seconds, their computers can dig through driving histories to determine if someone is a risk worth taking.
That weeds out most people who are overtly reckless. Even so, about 40% of all rental cars end up with some sort of damage by the time they finish their service. During that time, usually six to nine months, an average car will travel between 12,000 and 18,000 miles.
Most of the damage is minor--broken tail lights, dents in the door. Most of it is unintentional. And a lot of it is an unavoidable cost of doing business.
“We really don’t see too many people being reckless in our cars,” said Avis spokesman Terry Gordon. “We’ve got people who are Middle America folks renting them for business purposes or with their families.”
Drivers unfamiliar with a particular car are more likely to bump poles or brake too hard simply because they are unused to the vehicle, Gordon and others said.
Hertz spokesman Joe Russo said vacationers are more likely than business travelers to have a mishap in a rental car or drive a little less carefully than usual. “For business travelers, a rental car might be like their home away from home,” he said. “They travel the same routes, go to the same meetings and stay in the same hotels.”
Leisure travelers, however, have things other than driving on their mind, may be unfamiliar with the roads and may have a brood of screaming children in the back seat.
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To keep drivers on the straight and narrow road, most companies have a list of forbidden activities. “You can’t take our cars on the Indy 500 to see if they will really go 180,” Russo said.
So how do rental car company employees drive the cars in their charge? “I drive them with a great deal of respect,” said Russo, adding quickly, “as you might expect me to respond.”
And Tom Cruise? His publicist said he was in Europe for a movie shoot. She said that Cruise likes to drive, but she had no idea how he drives his own car, let alone a rental car.
