The car stole my pants: Petty tyrants and rental cars

At a deserted, minimal-service campground in the Washington Cascades a jet-lagged Czech tourist pulls to a stop in a rented Nissan.

When he cuts the lights, the night is black. He spent longer than he meant to hiking before finding a cheap campground.

The air is surprisingly cold for late summer when he opens the door. It’s the altitude. He turns off the ignition and leans the driver’s side seat all the way back in preparation for sleep.

Then he gets out, stretches in the crisp night air and walks around to the back of the car. He pops the hatchback to take out a sleeping bag and tosses it into the reclined seat. Then he strips off his jeans and socks and lays them out across the backs of the rear seats to air out.

Creative Commons image by Ninian Reid

He just came from the Seattle airport after an 18-hour flight. He rented the car from the Alamo desk. And tomorrow night will see him to Northeastern Oregon where his children are visiting their American grandmother. This is his only night on the road alone, so his “camp” will be basic. The back door bumps his head and he shuts it.

It must have been the rocking of the car when he shut the back hatch. In the light coming from inside the car, he watches the driver’s side door, which he left open, swing shut on its own. The sound of the radio he left on is muffled as it clicks closed. While he makes his way back to open the door again, the lights in the car go out.

Now the night is blacker then black. He fumbles for a door handle and pulls. Nothing. It’s locked hard and fast.

Worry niggles at him as he reaches for the adjacent door handle. Still nothing. Frantically, he feels his way around to the far side of the car in the dark and tries the other two doors.

“Kurva!” he yells into the night. No one in hundreds of miles could possibly know his Eastern European curse words. And his bare feet are burning from the cold by now. It is 35 degrees Fahrenheit.

Barefoot and in his underwear, he has no protection and the temperature of the high mountain night is still dropping. He curses himself for a fool and the out-of-date car for its archaic locking mechanism that went out of style twenty years ago in most places. He thinks wistfully of the phone stuck to his dashboard, but it wouldn’t matter that much. He noticed that it lost signal twenty minutes ago, as he wound his way up this mountain canyon on.a lonely little road.

Now this is the end of the road and it’s 9 pm. It’s unlikely anyone else will be up here tonight. He is in for a very bad time of it.

Unless of course, he can get into the car.

I have debated this in my head. I think a wealthy person would be more likely to break a window of the rental car than a non-wealthy Eastern European, because a relatively wealthy person would know they could technically afford the cost. In this case, he is a professional, confident man, a senior surveyor at the Czech National Highway Administration, but he still makes only around $15,000 a year. (Not a typo. Per year. Not per month. That’s just how Eastern European salaries are.)

I know all this, of course, because the man caught out in the night far from home in his underwear was my husband. He was on his way to my mother's house to pick up the children after I left them there for a visit a few weeks earlier. He had a little experience with rental cars, having rented a handful of times in Europe but I was the one who put in the initial order in English and it was my first time ever. It felt momentous, but then there was this and I wasn’t there to help or to suffer with him.

Of course, I didn’t know about it until days later. My husband, being frugal but unaware of auto parts pricing, used a rock to carefully break the smallest window at the far back of the car. He cleared the broken glass from the edges and then put his arm through to open the back door from inside. He hoped—erroneously as it turned out—that this small window would be cheaper to replace than a larger one.

Being an Eastern European, he also did not think immediately about insurance. He assumed he would have to take the hit for this one way or another. But the choice was between that or freezing or possibly attempting to walk more than ten miles barefoot and in his underwear to the last sign of civilization he had passed.

Why didn’t he realize the door might lock automatically and take precautions? Well, no modern car has been equipped that way for a long time, either in the US or in Europe. This was the kind of thing funky old cars used to do, but he hadn’t encounter anything like it in many years. It simply never occurred to him that the car would automatically lock with the keys still in the ignition, though turned off.

When he made it to my mother’s house the next day with the small back window taped up, her reaction was much more typically American.

“That’s terrible! The car company is responsible for this! They endangered you! They had better provide you with a new car. It is unbelievable that they didn’t warn you about those dangerous locks!” She called the company and gave them a piece of her mind. The representative immediately agreed that the company would cover the cost and exchange the car.

My husband then drove an hour an a half to another city to pick up a promised new car, only to find that it wasn’t there as the company representative had assured my mother it would be. That was a warning sign of things to come.

It wasn’t until a month and a half later though, that we got the mildly threatening letter in the mail at home, saying that Alamo had determined the incident was in fact my husband’s fault and that he would be billed for the damages.

We tried everything we could think of to get them to see reason. But someone at the company had decided to use their little bit of power in life to deny him insurance coverage, despite the fact that we had paid extra for an upgraded insurance policy.

The company never did answer my most basic question, “What precisely did the company expect him to do?” I wonder if becoming seriously ill from exposure is actually on their options list?

They. had not warned him about the strange and out-dated locking mechanism, which made this a malfunction of the vehicle. The car’s malfunction endangered him with serious physical harm. In such a case, the damage to the car does not appear to fall under the categories of “voluntary” or “willful” by any stretch of the imagination.

But apparently the Alamo rental company would rather my husband suffered grievous physical harm and later sued the company, rather than take reasonable steps, which in the end caused less than $400 in damage.

This is the kind of absurdity that plagues the modern human world. We often complain about it, as if no one is really responsible. But in truth human beings make these kinds of decisions. It is on us to use common sense and basic empathy, whenever we are put in a position with a small amount of power over another.

The people at Alamo didn’t use either common sense or empathy in handing over a car with this odd and dangerous malfunction or in assessing the damage claim. I wish I could say that I’ll find a better company next time, but the best I can do is to find a different company. This is why so many of us dislike corporations in general, and will choose any small business in favor of a corporation. The size and impersonal nature of corporations make common sense or empathy much less likely.