I personally detail all rental and loaner cars I come across. It's great fun and you learn a lot about the quality of the car when going hands on.

 

I can tell us members are an older and more mature crowd, plus we have some class.

Makes me wonder if there should be a minimum age to rent cars.

In my young and dumb years I was way too hard on vehicles and they'd have a good chance of getting their car back with a check engine light.

Might have to shampoo the interior too. Haha 😂

 

There is, most car rental agencies wont rent you a car until you are 21 and sometimes 25.

 

I’m in Tampa right now and rented a car. I know a lot here care about what cars they rent on vacation but I just don’t care. I just need a car to get from A to B. I just got a Malibu and it’s pretty rough. 17k miles on it and it vibrates like crazy (didn’t know it until after I got on the interstate going 70mph) and there are two cigarette burn holes in the drivers seat. It’s had a rough early life.

Me personally, I don’t drive rentals as hard because the ones I rent are slow economy cars that aren’t fun to drive so why bother flogging them, no reason to.

 

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I drive and treat a rental ANYTHING as if it were my own. Never mistreat. It's called "integrity". Sometimes the item goes back better than when it was taken.

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Most of the cars I rent for business are generic and boring NPC cars so I drive them as such.

 

I've only had a few rentals in the last few years, but I treat them pretty much as I would my own vehicle. My philosophy is not to be selfish......I figure that someone else may have to depend on this vehicle after I turn it back in, and I would not want some careless jack-*** trashing a vehicle that I myself was going to use.

 

I rent quite a bit and I treat them as if they were mine. It's just not in me to abuse anything even though it's not mine.
I live along, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

I'm also leading by example, teaching my kids to be respectful of others and their properties.

 

True and at 21, there’s guaranteed to be a surcharge for drivers 21-25 and there still may be a surcharge after that depending on the company.

I admit to having some fun in rental cars when I was young. I did return the cars with no damage and took one through a wash due to tons of unexpected mud. When I was a management trainee at Dollar 30 years ago, we as employees were sometimes hard on the cars. We had to turn them over quickly with wash and vac. Both were offsite, so we flogged the cars a bit.

We got a lot of returns with an SCCA Autocross number still grease penciled on a window. We got a few back with impound lot numbers on the windshields. I was amused when people told me they buy used rental cars as DDs because all the service was done at factory intervals. Maybe sometimes, but it would pop up as out of service (OS) with service required. We would just override it.

Most rental cars don’t sit still for long. We had pressure to get customers in a car and if we had 3 cars and 2 are OS, we would remove the OS to get the customer on the way.