How Safe Is Your Rental Car?

Safety is a big deal to Maurice Correa, which is why he drives a BMW X5 -- he likes to call it his "tank." The luxury SUV comes with side-curtain air bags and an award-winning head-protection system. But when he rented a car recently, he ended up with something a little less tank-like: a Ford Focus. While the compact car does have air bags, it earned fewer than half as many top crash-test marks as his BMW. "My wife usually makes the reservations," says the software company executive.

It's an all too familiar experience for millions of Americans: rolling their suitcase up to a rental-car counter and puzzling over that laminated list of vehicle options. Compact or convertible? Economy or hybrid? But while it's easy enough to find out which cars include satellite radio or GPS systems, safety -- or at least information on safety -- takes a definite backseat at most firms. By its own admission, the $20 billion car-rental industry will trumpet $39- a-day deals over safety features and crash-test ratings, arguing that consumers want it that way. Ask for the safest vehicle at some Avis locations and you may be handed a brochure covering a fraction of the models they carried -- in 2005. The actual vehicle information? A bulleted list of five or six features with few details about safety. Indeed, renters who make a point of finding safer cars say the big agencies offer the same message: You're on your own.

But do you have to be? At Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, CEO Gary Paxton says rental firms don't offer much information on safety because their cars are all relatively safe and people know that. Maybe so, but we did some digging to find out what kinds of cars the industry buys. Though individual companies don't disclose their purchasing patterns, we got the breakdown for the industry as a whole from 2002 to 2006. Then we looked at the safety records of its vehicles, comparing them with what the public has been buying. (For safety data, we relied on crash-test results from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, whose letter ratings we converted to numbers.

The bottom line: Since cars are generally getting safer, so are the models you're likely to see in rental lots. But your odds of finding the safer cars that many people are buying might be a little discouraging. In 2006, in the minivan category, the industry bought just one -- yes, one -- Hyundai Entourage and only 6,700 Kia Sedonas, even though both earned perfect 4.0 crash-test grades that year. The industry's most widely purchased minivan? The Dodge Caravan (industry inventory: 68,366), which had a crash-test score of just 2.33. Meanwhile, if you're wondering whether Hertz is safer than Budget or which cars are the safest to rent, we did get a few clues from the companies' Web sites.

Of course, crash-test results and fleet-buying patterns don't necessarily mean rental cars are any more likely to get you in an accident. Plaintiff lawyers, in fact, say few lawsuits against car-rental firms cross their desks. But in a world where the automotive giants have turned the once-taboo subject of safety into a major marketing tool, critics say the rental industry's position toward the subject seems oddly outdated. "I don't know of any rental-car company that makes a specialty of picking the most crash-worthy vehicles," says Clarence Ditlow, director of the consumer group Center for Auto Safety. "It may not have even crossed their minds."

Actually, it has crossed their minds. A spokesperson for Hertz, the nation's second-largest agency, says safety has "always been a big priority" for the company, a comment echoed by nearly all of the eight major firms, which control 93% of the market. Certainly, the industry has taken steps to help drivers on the road. Some, for example, have put safety pamphlets in cars to instruct drivers on unfamiliar features, while others have trained counter agents to do the same. To prevent customers from getting distracted by new GPS systems, Avis and Budget programmed the gadgets so they can't be fiddled with while the car is in motion.

But steps like these can go only so far toward ensuring a safe ride. Car models, of course, play a crucial role, and for that the car-rental industry has always been at the mercy of Detroit's Big Three. For decades they've supplied the bulk of the cars, with or without special safety features, at deep price reductions. Some of those discounts have started to fade, but that has only forced rental agencies to hold cars longer -- or to buy retail, where the pressure to keep down costs usually outweighs any interest in safer but often pricier models.

According to the Automotive Fleet Fact Book, an industry guide, only 1% of today's rental cars are the generally safer full-size models. The pickings prove almost as slim for renting luxury cars and luxury SUVs, which, despite safety boons like electronic stability control and side-curtain air bags, made up 3% of the industry's fleet of 2 million cars in 2006. By contrast, luxury cars and luxury SUVs accounted for more than 10% of the vehicles the public bought that year. In fact, industry officials say that the more popular a car is with consumers, the less likely manufacturers will make it available to rental agencies. Chris Payne, a spokesperson for Dollar Thrifty, puts it frankly: "Our model for buying cars does not play into the whole safety thing."

The industry's reliance on automakers does have one advantage; with safety standards in Detroit improving, the average crash-test scores for the car- rental industry keep rising, from 2.55 to 2.78 between 2004 and 2006 alone. But other trends are less promising: Eight out of 10 rental cars are American models, which generally have lower safety scores than their foreign counterparts. And nearly 30% are either compacts or subcompacts. The reason? Consumer demand -- and cost. In 2006 the industry bought 37,000 Ford Focuses, with prices starting at under $13,000 retail -- before the bulk discount. Small cars are "good deals," says James Tennant, an auto-rental consultant who once managed his own agency. "As a rule, you can't get enough small cars." Yet according to the Insurance Information Institute, drivers are twice as likely to die in small cars than in large ones each year.

So what can a safety-conscious renter do? Picking the right agency may make a difference. Though we were limited to the companies' Web site descriptions, our study found that Hertz had the highest percentage of cars with top crash-test scores, followed by Avis. Thrifty and Alamo came in at the bottom. "Safety is our No. 1 concern," an Alamo spokesperson says.

But if picking car-rental companies isn't an option, there are always other tactics, like those Michael Dulberger uses. Frustrated that rental agents had "no clue" about safety, the mechanical engineer from Connecticut devised his own car-safety ranking. And apparently, it worked: Recently, after rejecting every option Enterprise offered him, for safety reasons, Dulberger scored an upgrade to a top-rated SUV -- for free.
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