… there are rumored to be some good prices available from Hertz:
Lots cars for sale within 100 miles. Some are at excellent prices. Nothing too exotic. LR Evoques, Jag F-Pace, one Range Rover, Most of the Cadillac’s were XTSs (yuck). I’m not in the market anyway.
I am in the market for a smaller CUV. Most likely a Tucson. I have been looking at their inventory and pricing and the deals aren’t so good to me. The thing is, if I buy the same car from a Hyundai dealer, I get a CPO warranty through Hyundai, with Hertz, I am not sure if I can even use the transferable portion of the warranty because they won’t provide any maintenance records.
I wonder if this will be like when they sold off inventory at Builders Square? 10%, then 20%, then on to 50% if you waited long enough. But the good stuff right away went to the pros who were first in line.
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We bought my wife’s 2016 Tucson last year from a local Nissan dealer. No maintenance records that I’m aware of and the warranty transferred without a hitch. Certainly worth investigating.
I looked a while back, Hertz prices were midrange of KBB.
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I can’t speak for other states . . . but here in California a buyer isn’t entitled to receive the maintenance records, because the previous owner’s information is there. Privacy laws forbid it
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I know, but this is Hertz, not a private entity.
Buying it as a CPO from the dealer, in my case, Hyundai, resolves that worry for me.
When I sell my cars, I provide an excel spreadsheet with the dates, miles and service done. All cars are over-maintained. Buyers like that.
What’s the difference between an SUV and a rental car?
A: There’s just some places you won’t take an SUV
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Huh? I guess I am missing the punch line here .
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Rental cars get abused. The joke is that if you own a truck there are places that you might not drive it for fear of damaging it but in a rental car you just don’t care. It’s subtle humor but 100% true.
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Kind of ridiculous that a person would abuse something they don’t own
I was taught it’s not okay to do that . . .
Don’t know what kind of upbringing these other guys had 
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My Pontiac was a rental and I’ve been very happy with it for the last ten years. I’ve only gotten a couple rentals that appeared to have been abused. Maybe depends on where you rent them but most of mine were in Florida or AZ, not California.
At any rate it appears that these are leased, not owned cars. I don’t know if their whole fleet is leased or not. It would make sense to just lease them and rent them out and keep the change. But that may have some bearing on the prices they have to charge to pay off the lease. They aren’t going to sell a car rock bottom and have to cough up $5000 in the end to pay it off. But of course if they are leased, they are required to follow the maintenance and repair requirements.
I seem to remember in that movie “Days of Thunder” Tom Cruise and Michael Rooker rent some cars and bought the supplemental insurance. They literally smashed the cars to bits . . .
I purchased a 1988 Ford Taurus that had come from a rental fleet and it was a very trouble free car. It had less than 10,000 miles in the odometer when I bought it in the fall of 1988. I got the balance of the warranty. In 2006, I bought a 2006 Chevrolet Uplander. It had been a ‘program’ vehicle what ever that means. It had 15,000 miles on the odometer when I purchased it and again I got the balance of the warranty. My reasoning is that a rental car may have been driven hard by one driver, but I think most drivers are like I am and just drive normally. I bought the Uplander for about half what I paid for a new 2011 Toyota Sienna with roughly the same equipment.
I would.rather have a rental than a car driven hard by a single owner.
The one disadvantage.of purchasing a rental car is that there isn’t a choice of equipment or colour. I am not fussy about what equipment is on the vehicles I own, nor do I care about the colour. Both the Taurus and the Uplander were in s colour best described as horse manure brown.
Color is kinda important to me-musta been something in childhood. I remember my single neighbor lady traded in her 1956 Ford convert for must have been a 61 Plymouth or Dodge. The color she chose was as you described and she explained she wanted something that didn’t show the dirt, which it didn’t. You could drive it on gravel roads all day long and never know it if you cleaned the bumpers. I guess she was tired of polishing her red and white convertible. The same color seemed to be popular on Buicks out in rural South Dakota. Maybe for the same reason.
Now I know that car companies have talented color experts that come up with the color schemes for their cars. Spend a lot of time on interior colors and patterns and fabrics and so on. I always thought it would be interesting to hear some of the comments in their meetings as they are choosing the color combinations and paint colors. Some paint colors are more expensive than others so maybe it comes down to trying to save some money on paint.
This is a disadvantage of purchasing any used car, however nowadays the amount of customization offered on new cars is minimal. In the good old days, there were lots of stand-alone options, and you could have a new car ordered with just the features you want.
For example, my father special-ordered his 1993 Caprice wagon and 1998 Toyota Camry with hand-crank windows, no power door locks, no power seats, etc. and an automatic transmission. I have occasionally seen a used Caprice sedan so configured, but never a wagon, and although I have seen a used 1997/98 Camry CE without the power options, they were always stick shift.
Today, it is impossible to buy a new car without power windows, locks, mirrors, cruise control, etc. The only options are color, leather or cloth upholstery, sunroof/moonroof, and maybe a navigation system.
I agree. I work in a business that travels a lot. A group of us converge on a work place, typically all of us has a car if we are there more more than a day or two. I’ve only known one or two people in 30 years of doing this that abused their rental cars. We represent our organizations and don’t want to ruin their reputations and ours. If we do it often enough, rental companies will black list us, and then we can’t do our jobs.
Many years ago, my brother bought a Ford Fairmont from Enterprise. It turned-out to be a very problem-plagued car, but I don’t know whether that particular one was a lemon, or if most Fairmonts were problem-plagued.
Was that on a Fox-body . . . ?