Rental Car Company Charges Customer With $10K ‘Unlimited Miles’ Rate For Driving 25,000 Miles In One Month
Does "unlimited miles" mean "unlimited" or not? Not at Hertz, apparently.
Jonathan Weiss | Shutterstock It's really starting to feel like absolutely everything is a scam these days. Everything you buy breaks in a week; multiple grocery and retail chains have admitted to price-gouging and calling it "inflation," felons aren't allowed to vote, but they are allowed to become president. Truly, everything just feels like a giant farce.
Then there's the viral story of a man getting charged an astonishing fee for a Hertz rental car after taking its "unlimited mileage" very literally. The story has some speculating that it will be at the center of yet another lawsuit against Hertz for its notoriously deceptive business practices.
Hertz charged a customer with an 'unlimited miles' rate $10,000 for driving the rental car 25,000 miles.
There's no denying that 25,000 miles in a month on a rental car is pretty wild — that's more than 800 miles a day for a month straight. How you even do that without putting the car up on blocks with a brick on the accelerator like in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" is a mystery.
But Logan, known as @lifeisfun3000 on TikTok, somehow managed to do it. A simple, "wow, 25,000 miles!" when he turned the car back into Hertz would have sufficed, as his reservation had unlimited miles, as rental cars often do these days.
That's not at all how it went down, however. Instead, the manager told him he'd be charged a $10,000 fee to his credit card for excessive mileage, despite the man's contract explicitly saying his miles were unlimited. It only got more absurd from there.
When the man insisted this was a breach of his Hertz contract, the manager called the police on him.
The argument between the man and the manager will be familiar to anyone who's had to deal with basically any kind of customer service issue in recent years. After being told his credit card was going to be charged $10,000, the obviously distressed man protested that this was a breach of contract.
The manager responded by demanding, "Show me where it says I can’t charge it." The man then read from his contract and told the manager, "Right here, it literally says I won’t get charged anything… it literally says to refer to this if there’s anything extra."
"I’ve never signed anything saying I can only go 100 miles a day, or anything like that, or that I would have to pay more," the customer continued.
To that, the manager replied, "But you also never signed anything saying you were going to be allowed to drive 25,000 miles in a month."
That is, of course, not how contracts work in even the broadest sense. However, according to travel industry experts, rental car contracts do sometimes have clauses about "reasonable use" or provisions stipulating that "excessive use" will result in additional fees. Unsurprisingly, however, these policies are rarely transparent — and they're certainly not trumpeted all over travel websites when you're shopping for rental cars like unlimited mileage" is.
In the end, there was no reasoning with the Hertz manager — he called the police on the man because he refused to simply accept the $10,000 charge and leave. It's unknown what happened from there.
Hertz is notorious for shady business practices, including having customers falsely charged for grand theft auto.
Deceptive business practices and contract "gotchas" are as American as apple pie at this point, but it's doubly unsurprising that this incident happened at Hertz, which has become notorious for business practices that are not just deceptive but borderline diabolical.
Most infamous is a $168 million class action lawsuit against Hertz after it accused multiple customers of stealing cars and pressed criminal charges against them. One customer was arrested four times for false accusations over the same car. She ended up in jail over the charges and suffered a miscarriage while there.
The company repeatedly refused to drop the charges against customers even after discovering the errors, which seemed to arise after customers either extended a rental or returned a car late, and the company failed to account for these changes correctly.
In a 2020 statement to the press, a Hertz spokesperson admitted they refused to drop the charges because "if you report a crime, and you later say it didn’t happen, then law enforcement tends not to believe you if you retract it or say you were mistaken,” as if that justifies falsely charging and sending customers to jail for grand theft auto.
Hertz has also been repeatedly accused of charging customers for damage to cars they didn't do, in some cases to cars they never even rented. (Full disclosure: this happened to a close friend of mine, whose credit has now been downgraded after Hertz sent her to collections for not paying damage fees on a car she was able to prove she did not rent.)
The company was also the subject of a federal investigation in 2022 after it was reported to have been renting scores of cars that were under safety recalls without performing the necessary repairs.
The company is currently embroiled in yet another class action lawsuit in which it is accused of making deceptive claims in 2023 about its business practices and future prospects to mislead investors into buying its stock. The price of said stock then tanked a year later when those rosy prospects proved to be grim.
Logan has since gone silent on social media after his video went insanely viral, which has led to speculation that he will be the next high-profile plaintiff in the next high-profile lawsuit against Hertz. Here's hoping so — the company clearly needs some clarity from a judge on what the word "unlimited" actually means.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.