That said, I don't know that I would buy a car that used to be a rental... regardless of what type of car it was.

My old car was a rental and I didn't know it. Bought it from a car dealer, with about 20000 km on the meter. It had broken suspension that I found slightly after but could be fixed while under the 3 months warranty.

The funny thing is how I found out. One day it was a very special type of frost outside. The frost crystals formed in a pattern on the back window, spelling out the name of a local gas station. Some residual of a removed sticker. It must have been a rental from that gas station.

Still, apart from the suspension problem that was fixed for free it has been very reliable.

In my view, with a rental car you can at least know they got regular maintenance. I know they're driven harder, but the fact that they're getting oil changes puts them above the average mystery car for me, even if they're not ideal.

My brother and a cousin both worked at different rental car companies, and I can assure you - they are not well maintained. My cousin worked at Enterprise, and he said they'd buy fleets of cars, run them until they had any failure, then sell them at auction. He was a mechanic, and I remember being gobsmacked when he said "the only fluid I ever put in a vehicle was windshield wiper fluid."

My brother has told me similar stories, though I can't recall specifics at the moment. Most were similar to my cousin's stories, the theme being "as mechanics, we didn't do anything except make sure there was air in tires and wiper fluid."

I think the companies they worked for probably knew what they were doing too. Most cars made within the last 20 years can go a hell of a long way without an oil change and still function (which isn't me saying that "function" means the same thing as "work well long term"). Rental car companies know when to sell them before they stop functioning.

I don't even know if that's true, i've had a couple times where i was given vehicles with check engine lights on. Fortunately they swapped them for another vehicle that was .. possibly better?

That's not true.

My wife and I had to exchange a rental because it was producing excessive exhaust, the alignment was so bad it pulled, and an engine service indicator was on.

Rentals are frequently driven hard and may not get basic routine service (that should happen more frequently due to being driven hard).

Are you sure they get oil changes. I've ran into a few rental cars that didn't even get basic things like windshield wipers. I can't imagine a lot of those companies would take them out of service to change the oil on time.

I donno about the US. But rentals in Europe aren’t always treated well from my experience.

I haven't worked in the rental car world but I used to work for a place that rented moving trucks and RVs (and was also the area maintenance provider for them) and... No. They did not get regular maintenance, at least not on time.

Here is one more anecdata point: we bought a used Hertz rental eightish years ago and it's been great. Nissan Versa Note 2014. There was a scratch on the dash and faint cigarette smoke smell that made it a particularly good deal.

This definitely feels like a case of buyer beware.

From the article: "quarter-sized hole."

If you're buying a former rental car and aren't giving it an intense enough inspection to spot a quarter-sized hole, you're rolling dice.

If you take the time to methodically go over one... and reject a few... I'm sure you can find a pretty great deal.

Yeah, they’re very intensively used, so almost certainly they need more work than your average used car.

Not necessarily, folks are incentivied to keep the cars clean and undamaged.

Cosmetically maybe, but Hertz has very good incentives to do minimal maintenance and only fix things when very broken. The renter has little incentive to report issues like weird noises or anything mechanically broken, especially if it may have been caused by them.

Sure but there's no incentive not to be hard on the powertrain. Probably less of a problem now with so much drive-by-wire preventing you from drag racing a Camry.