Best and Worst Rental Cars You Have Had in 2016?

Rental cars are one of the low spots of traveling for a motor head. What were your best and worst in 2016?

Me first. My best and worst occurred within a month of each other.

Best: Bright orange Mustang GT 5.0, 435 hp, 400 ft/lbs torque, stiff handling package suspension, 6 speed auto. Rented during a Labor Day race weekend at Miller. Best onramp runs ever in a rental car, best trips up and down Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, best runs out Highway 80, generally just the best rental car I have ever had. Wife, unfortunately, hated it, or at least how I was using it. And perhaps the best part of this is, we had reserved some cheap rentacar hatchback, and the counter man upgraded us for free. My cup runneth over.

Worst: Fiat Punto we rented in Italy in October. They don't import this for a reason. Unbelievably slow and gutless (claimed 69 hp, less than 1/6 of the Mustang, but probably less), ill-handling, bouncy eyeball jiggling ride. Since the autostrada speed limit is 130 km/hr (81 mph) I felt like a rock in a river as traffic flowed around us. Most of the time I was flat on the gas in 5th gear with one eye in the mirror on the lookout for low flying incoming Mercedes and Audi missiles.

 

Jeep Patriot. Built like a cheap toy. Should be stripped of its Jeep name.

 

Had the same and what a pos that this was. No idea why anybody would own one.

 

I could put up with a lot of things, but I could only find ONE power outlet on it.

 

Best: BMW 520d or Hyundai Genesis (I love Hertz gold)

Worst: Hyundai santa something or a rav 4. Really, if you want a smaller suv either didn't totally suck.

 

Nissan 370Z. Damn.

 

Rode all the way across Upstate NY (buffalo to albany) in one those 'fine Chrysler products' in the spring. Haven't climbed into a dodge since.

 

I would take a Santa Fe or Tucson over the ford explorer I drove in WA and Canadia a couple weeks ago. That steering on that POS was horrible. it did have a decent amount of pickup.

Oh and National Exec Elite. Just sounds better

 

the worst car I have ever been in. It shook and was a terribly slow piece of shit. I almost felt bad for blowing it up...

 

Man, so many rentals....

best. I'd have to go with a mustang convertible 2.3t with the titanum package or what not. I rent a lot of fords and even then i was blown away but how well it rode on the highway, total lack of any additional wind or road noise.

Worst? Nissan Frontier. I had to check the door marking to make sure this bitch was a 2016 and not a 2000 nissan with odometer rolled over.

WTF Nissan, this thing had literally the same interior as my 2001 Maxima. No onboard computer, none of the standard stuff thats found on todays cars. I mean, the dash had Odometer and trip meter besides the tach/speedo/coolant/fuel. Thats it.

It takes balls to ask that much for that.

Just checked my profile. 2016 - 33 rentals, 108 days....

 

I always rent low end 4-cyl econoboxes. Whichever car gets the best fuel mileage is generally what I go with. Granted that's pretty much always for work miles. Shit, last time I got a rental for pleasure was probably like 12 years ago. At that time it was convertible Mustang when I was in SoBe.

 

Gots to sign up for the rental rewards. The mustang rental was on free rental days and we went to NY. Rented a Camaro for 3 days in Vegas and a full week of Opel Astra diesel goodness in Spain.

 

Um, Jeep. That's why.

See also: Wrangler junk. I can't imagine why the Jeep name has any prestige in 2016 .

 

I drove a Hyundai something full size from Daytona to Ft. Lauderdale recently. If it was a Jeep thing, I would have drove it into the ocean. I can't think of a single thing a Jeep anything does right. I begged them not to give me a suckbox .

 

I've got both Avis Preferred and National Emerald, I just choose to go with the best fuel economy car when I'm doing work miles. Might as well stretch the reimbursement rate per mile.

 

I don't rent that often, and for the most part I stay with the same car so I don't have to try to learn the controls all the time. I started out with Cadillac Sedan de Villes and moved on to Chevy HHR's. Lately I stick to the Nissan Altima. I don't like Mopars.
When I fly into Birmingham, AL, I usually don't get a choice. They've given me a Dodge Challenger, Kia Optima Hybrid, Mustang, etc. This year they put me into a Ford Focus. I didn't really have a good feeling for this car. When driving to Barber, the transmission seemed mushy and would rev up between gears. The corners of the rear view mirrors had those fish eye inserts that really annoyed me. When I got to the track, I realized that the driver's door was out of adjustment and that the check rod was ripped off the body. I made an irate phone call to the rental company and they told me to bring it back when convenient.
Back at the airport Donald, the agent, told me he held a special car for me. It was a Buick Regal Turbo. Everything was nice about the car, but that motor really had some nutz to it, just like the Challenger and Mustang. Unlike those two cars, it was a sedan and there were no nasty blind spots. So in one trip I had the best and the worst rental ever.

 

Gotta go with the worst being a damn Jeep Compass that thing sucked and was tiny as hell.

Best was a surprise by far but it was the top end Hyuandi don't remember the name but it was like driving a top end BMW or Mercedes

 

We seem to usually get a 4 cylinder econobox too. Last year for Austin MotoGP, I ended up with a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I was surprised I actually liked it. Like Metric Mike, I had always thought of Jeeps and big piles of junk.

My wife ended up with a Chevy Cruz last year while going to visit the kids in Texas. She said that is the nicest econobox she had ever been in. Since then she/we have probably been in 5-8 more rentals and every-time she looks for a Cruz. We've had Fords, Nissans, Hyundai and Kia's, but she still said the Cruz was better. Since she has always disliked most american cars, I've been pretty surprised.

 

Ha. The last time I got a Cruz as a rental, the previous renter didn't clear their phone from the sync thing to the radio and it was still paired to "Low Down Brown". I still have no idea what that meant, but it was funny.

 

Cruze.

I rented it once. The Focus blows it away.