If a rental car has a defect, it shouldn't be rented out to a customer, right?
Well, not necessarily, according to the U.S. Senate.
A U.S. Senate panel, led by Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican and chairman of the Commerce Committee, introduced a bill Thursday (July 9) to allow rental-car companies to offer vehicles with unresolved defects, as long as they put those issues in writing to the renter, as reported by Bloomberg.
Essentially, the Senate wants to scale down the protections that consumers get when renting cars with potentially-deadly safety issues...as long as the renter is notified about those defects ahead of time.
In an email to Bloomberg, Commerce Committee spokesperson Frederick Hill said the Senate's bill wouldn't preempt stronger state laws nor rigid rules regarding defective vehicles that rental companies are currently practicing. However, he referred to the bill as "pro-consumer."
"This provision would establish a new pro-consumer requirement that the recall status of a vehicle must be disclosed before renting," Hill said.
Needless to say, consumer groups are irate.
"This is going backward," Rosemary Shahan, president of the safety group Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, told Bloomberg. "This would be worse than existing practices for 95 percent of the industry."
Shahan says that the Senate's plan could cause car-rental giants such as Hertz, Avis and Enterprise to dangerously drop their respective policies of finishing recall repairs, before renting out vehicles. Smaller companies would essentially do the same, paving the way for dangerous vehicles to hit the streets.
If this bill becomes a law, renters beware.
