A few weeks ago, we wrote about a Hertz customer in Atlanta who rented their vehicle from a location that used an AI-powered scanner for inspections. Their story of being charged $440 for a small scratch on a wheel gained some attention, and we’re already seeing similar accounts bear out. One case from another customer strikes us as even more egregious.
Adam Foley went to LinkedIn to share his story, saying that a few hours after returning his vehicle, he received a notification that the system found two areas of damage of similar size. One was on the car’s roof, while the other was on the driver’s side front fender. Foley shared the fender damage in a comment to his initial post, and it does appear to be slight, seemingly smaller than a dime in diameter and not very deep. He told the Daily Mail that Hertz charged him a total of $350 in response—$80 for each dent, plus another $190 in processing and administration fees.
If you followed our last story involving the wheel scuff, you know that UVeye—the firm that produces and operates the scanners—and Hertz like to secure payment of these fees as quickly as possible. They do this by discounting the charge if the customer admits fault and pays within seven days. Foley said that Hertz offered to knock $65 off the bill if he paid immediately. Furthermore, we’ve heard that contacting a human agent at Hertz to discuss or contest the charges is very difficult, and not possible within the web portal where customers can view and pay for damages. You have to call a separate customer service line instead, but not everyone knows this.
“To protest this fee, it is an automated AI chat experience that does not break to go to a human interaction no matter what choices you make,” Foley wrote on LinkedIn. “You are only given explanations for why you still owe $190.”
Foley says he won’t be renting from Hertz again so long as the current policy is in place. And the ironic thing is, the public might be content with AI-inspected rentals, if Hertz went about this more reasonably. When I wrote my previous story on the subject, there were multiple comments from readers saying that the quick determination of damage, the presentation of visual evidence, and the ease of payment were fair to them and removed some of the opacity that rental car companies might engage in during a return, leading to a time-consuming dispute.
Hertz knows this, too. When we reached out to the company upon our last story, a spokesperson told us that “the vast majority of rentals are incident-free. When damage does occur, our goal is to enhance the rental experience by bringing greater transparency, precision, and speed to the process.”
Transparency and speed are great, but the key issue here is about the kinds of flaws the machine is catching, which Hertz turns around and posts triple-digit charges for. A minor bump like the one on the fender of Foley’s car could very well slip by a human inspector, and it certainly wouldn’t register to a customer. It’s not going to aggravate the next renter who’s getting into that vehicle for the first time. And it’s also not the sort of damage that the average car owner would drop everything and hire a paintless dent removal tech to fix.
These are the sorts of minor, inconsequential wear-and-tear incidents that naturally happen when a vehicle is passed between hundreds of drivers and passengers over the course of a month. Hell—that ding could’ve been caused by gravel on the highway that took a bad hop, or someone who wasn’t watching when they opened their car door next to the rental in a parking lot. The question is why Hertz is charging for it, and the reason could be very simple: Because it can.
“I want to be clear that I think this use of AI is kind of compelling—use cameras and AI to assess damages and communicate the expectation of payment,” Foley wrote. “It makes sense.”
“What does not make sense is the granularity they have resorted to by going down to negligible ‘damages’ and created [sic] a human-less system,” he continued. “A similar process that is focused on checking for true damages like a broken mirror would probably make customers shrug and go, ‘you got me—yeah I broke it parking in a garage, ‘ and they would pay the fee. I suspect the math of investing in such expensive technology indicated they needed to go to extortive levels to get a [return on investment].”
We don’t know how much UVeye’s technology is costing Hertz. When I last spoke to the company, I asked their personnel if the locations that are rolling out the AI scanners (which are exclusively at airports) were pricier to rent from than other Hertz stores. They didn’t answer that question, but what I’m realizing now is that the AI-scanned rentals wouldn’t need to be more expensive—they just would need to catch something and charge for it, whether Hertz ultimately goes to the trouble to repair the “damage” or not. And finding something very small clearly isn’t very hard for these high-powered scanners to do.
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