The Truth About Rental Cars - YouTube

Rev up your engines, today I'm going to talk about the secrets

of how to rent cars correctly, since I do a lot of traveling around the world

to learn more about cars, and my wife's retired and she like traveling period, I do a lot

of car rentals all over the place, I've had good experiences, bad experiences,

medium experiences, but I'm going to show you how you can have

the best experience possible and spend the least amount of money doing it,

and my first advice is, stay away from really cheap rental places, because when I moved

to Houston in 1979, I used to be a mechanic working at this place called, rent a heap

cheap, I'm not making this up, truth is stranger than fiction, the guy had a fleet of really

junky cars the average price he paid for these cars was about $300 but he was the only guy

in town that would rent you a car without a credit card,

he a $100 deposit that you had to give him cash when you rented a car, so you can image,

if the deposit on renting the car was $100, those cars weren't worth much,

he was actually lucky he wasn't being sued all the time because he sent cars out they

had bald tires and stuff, and I was a mechanic there and we had to fix

them with a tow truck, and if they broke down and had a flat, he's say now go over there

but if it has a nail in the tire, that's their fault and they have to pay to fix the tire,

so really you want to stay away from fly by night places, use regular rental car places,

and when you either go to one, or plan it ahead of time,

check prices in the area you're going to, because if you fly a lot like me, you'll find

that the airports generally rip you off, here's a perfect example, I recently went

to Boston, Logan airport, they wanted $800 to rent a car for 5 days, of that $800, $200

were taxes and airport consignment fees, so I got out my phone, checked around, turns

out that the same company budget rental car, would rent me the same car for half that,

instead of $800 is was $400, it was in Cambridge it wasn't at the airport, so what did I do,

I Ubered it, I found out that it costs me $16 to go from the airport to Cambridge which

was just across the bay in Boston and then I rented the car for $400 instead of $800

and it only cost me $15 to get there, always check the prices in the area you're

going to, you would be amazed, sometimes 5-8 miles away you're going to pay a ton less,

especially if you're starting at an airport, there's plenty of guys that will Uber you

to a car rental place, then when you do rent the car, I use my Chase

business card, because it covers the insurance, you have to check with your own card, but

I have a Chase Corporate card and it gives you very good coverage, don't even buy that

crap the try selling you at the place for $15-20 a day, you got a good credit card it

covers insurance on the car, and of course when it comes to gasoline, don't

buy the tank, one they say we charge $8 a hour to refill it if you don't, hey you can

always fill it up on the way back and realize if you buy the tank, hey you might bring it

back half full, then you got what 10 gallons that you paid for that you never get to use,

just bring it back full it's not that hard to do,

and if you're modern and have a good phone, use Google maps or any app that you like,

don't waste your money getting navigation for the car,

these things, half of them have better software than what they got in the car,

and speaking of phones, use your camera before you take off,

take a picture of the whole car, first the back,

then each side, then the front, because generally they give you some piece

of paper that says, oh the car is ok and doesn't have any dents on it, I've been screwed over

by those sometimes in the past, where they'd say, oh there's a crack in your

windshield now and there didn't used to be one and it wasn't on their list,

you take a picture with your phone with the date and the place,

and then they can't argue, especially with a good phone like this it's got a lot of clarity,

you can zoom in on the picture and show look, the windshield already had that crack, the

bumper already had paint off of it, you want proof and with proof, there's nothing they

can do about it, so a picture is worth a 1000 words, or a 1000

contacts or pieces of paper that that thing is written on, but it's not good if you don't

have the picture, so do that before you take off in that rental car,

now all these pain in the butt things aside, you can have fun with rental cars,

personally what do I do, I rent cars that I normally won't use, like I'll rent a Crysler

or I'll rent a Fiat, I'll rent something that I would never buy just to see how their doing

these days, I mean their all pretty new cars so they shouldn't

break and strand you somewhere you know, and I get to give more people information

that way to if I say, oh here's this new Fiat what's it like, and I get it and I drive it

around and I say, wow that transmission is horrible, slippin and sliding and you feel

every bump on the road, then you know, hey I certainly never want

to buy one of these cars, a lot of places now rent European luxury cars,

I certainly would never buy one their endless money pits as they age, but they are fun to

drive so, if you want to drive one around for a weekend that the heck why not,

now the last thing I'm going to talk about for rental cars are the keys,

normally these days their going to give you two sets of keys and I've had it where I've

lost one set because I'm always losing keys, so if they do give you two sets of keys and

it's one of those modern cars that has the keyless ignition system, they might charge

you $350-400 if you lose one key, so do like I do, give one of the keys to your

wife to put in her purse that's she's never going to lose, and then you got to drive around

with yours, so you have to find it to get around places,

because if you got two and you lose one, it might cost you, $350-400 because you lost

it, so make sure that second key is in a secure location and if it is one of those keyless

ignition system, hey don't throw it in the glove box, because then when you walk away

the car will still be able to start and someone could be able to come in, push the start button

and drive away, so put that in a secure place away from the car,

so now hopefully you learned a little bit from my experience with rental cars, so the

next time you rent one you can have a fun experience and not waste too much of your

money, so if you never want to miss another one of

my new car repair videos, remember to ring that bell!