In no way related to The Boxcar Children, The Box Car Rentals are the genre of cars that I hope on a weekly basis will not be given to me. I became intimately familiar with the Chevy HHR when Avis “randomly” assigned them to me for three straight weeks. In actuality they probably had me flagged in their system as “our only customer who will not refuse the HHR.” I simply didn’t have time and found it funny how much my coworkers loathed my rental. Do rental car companies get some sort of industry discount on these undesirable cars? Literally all of the cars below are very common among the mid-size SUV category. Coming in with the most Street Cred in this group is probably the Kia Soul (at least their commercials are cool – this one too).
 Chevy HHR |
 Kia Soul |
 Nissan Cube |
 PT Cruiser |
 Scion Xb |
 Cardboard Box |
To be honest, the PT Cruiser (and all of these cars I suppose) has always reminded me of this:
I may have rented cars about 10 times in my life, and I’ve been given the PT Cruiser roughly six of those times.
Why wouldn’t you want a PT Cruiser…I think it suits you perfectly Matthew…jk. But I do agree, its pretty hard to look and feel awesome driving around in a box car rental. I used to work for Enterprise Rent-A-Car and can tell you that they, at least at Enterprise, do not flag customers to receive specific cars. As for the reason that you keep getting the PT Cruiser or other box car rentals; I would say that they understand your awesomeness and hope that in renting you the car, others will see how awesome you look in it and will be driven to seek out their own sweet sweet PT Cruiser or other box car model. Many of the car manufacturers use rental car companies to gain interest in either new or unpopular models of their cars. This is because it is sometimes the only way for the manufacturer to get more of the new or undesirable models on the road for consumers to see and/or try. So they provide the rental car companies a discounted price to purchase the cars in hopes that renting these models will help to gain consumer interest. So you will often see rental car companies receive base models of new cars that have either just come out or will be coming out shortly. For example, Enterprise was renting the Toyota Prius like crazy when it first came out in the early 2000’s. It was a great way for Toyota to gain interest because people could rent the car and try it out to see if they liked it. At the same time, others would see the Prius rental driving around town and this would spur further interest. I think this made sense for the Prius because it was new technology and was fairly expensive so consumers were weary about the new model. The marketing tactic seemed to work great for the prius, but maybe not so much for the PT Cruiser.
After providing that long explanation, I realize that this probably doesn’t apply to you at all and that you likely just got the PT Cruiser 3 weeks in a row because you were unlucky. Maybe you can have them put a note in the system stating that you DO NOT want this car in the future. Good luck!
Maybe our family’s just matched with PT Cruisers. It could be an algorithm in the database. Ryan, you’re lucky (at least from that standpoint) you didn’t take our name.