0car0.com

So I have had a fruitless email correspondence with 1car1.com, who you may recall, shafted me over a minor graze on a rental car.

This was three months ago. This is a car they are claiming is seriously damaged. Presumably it can't be hired out while so badly smashed about (although I would be absolutely astonished, truly, if it had not been rented out several times in those three months, because the plain truth is that the damage was so minor they could just put it on the hire form). But no word. They are supposed to have repaired it, but apparently it takes several weeks to receive an invoice. Maybe they should get a new garage. Mine invoices me on the spot.

They took 500 quid of my money and have neither returned any nor let me know how much they intend to rape me for.

This is good business? Their guy in customer service whose job is to bullshit customers says that if I have a complaint I can go to the BVRLA.

Erm yeah. I should complain to a body whose members are carhire firms, whose staff's wages all come from contributions from said firms? LOL.

The customer bullshitter's line, ultimately, is "all
procedures set in place have been actioned correctly". Yes, of course they were. The procedures are in place to rape hirers in this circumstance. Why should 1car1.com have any other procedures? It takes your money and then basically, you can go fuck yourself, paying interest to your credit card company for the money they took while they invent reasons for not giving any back. (One supposes that their "procedures" take a very long time so that you have given up hope of getting any money back, and will be pathetically grateful to receive a tenner.)

I realise I should have photographed the damage. You'd never believe that it's something that needs three months to fix. My sister's boyfriend, who knows a few guys in the valeting business, said his mate P would have fixed it up in five minutes if my sister had not rung 1car1.com. It really is that small: a scratch that you simply would not bother fixing on your own car.

500 quid is about 1100 dollars in Australian money. I could buy a car for that, let alone get a graze fixed in the shop.

The problem with "procedures", I would be telling the customer bullshitter if I believed it would make any difference, which of course it would not, is that they exist to prevent human interaction, to deny human space, if you like, to people, to prevent them from being able to react reasonably to things that you do to them, and ultimately to deny natural justice.

What do I mean by "natural justice" in this context? I mean what a reasonable person would think was right in the situation. Anyone looking at the car would say, that's about a hundred quid, tops. (Just as with Import CDs, the natural thing to do--actually the dictate of sanity--would be not to send the CD to the completely wrong address, where no one lives who wants it, but to take some other course, like maybe sorting it out with Amazon.)

People do this all the time though. Their companies have invented "procedures" basically to fuck the customer, to prevent us from receiving service, while giving us "service".

After my previous post, I received an email from (someone purporting to be from) 1car1.com, asking for details of my hire, so that they could investigate. I told him I didn't care about their "customer service" because when I had written to the Brighton office about the hire, they had not even bothered responding. I suppose they don't have a procedure for that (and the guy's job is to talk down 1car1.com's bad name -- see him here not addressing the person's review, but blahblahing about it: LOL at "We do not use accident damage as a money making scheme"--yah, "Rob", it just happens that the damage costs always the amount of the excess, no matter how small the scratch). The only way to force bad businesses to give good service, real service, not a substitute invented simply to make you go away and stop bothering them, is to refuse to do business with them.

I'll never use 1car1.com again, and I hope that no one who reads this blog does. I hope this post and the other get as many hits as my post on Import CDs (at least one a day). Ultimately, these people will, I hope, lose a lot more than 500 quid by fucking me over, and somewhere down the track, someone in their business will realise that taking people's money for months and working up a huge bill so that you can get to keep it may be good business in the short term but it's bad bad bad business in the long.

As a coda, let me note that I'm not alone in being fucked by these people: check out the complaints here. A fair few people with tiny scratches that mysteriously cost the whole excess, all having the excess whipped out of their account and not a word for months. It seems I was absolutely right when I nailed this as a big scam. (The thing is, if you're going to fuck people over for tiny scratches on cars, guys, you should fuck us for half the money. 250 quid would have been VERY expensive, but it's just feasible it could cost that. Taking all 500 really just looks suspicious to us and makes us angry enough to complain.) I wish I had googled these people first! Why are people saying this all over the web if there is no scam, "Rob"?:
The costs will be 500 pounds no matter how minor the damage.

posted by Dr Zen @ 5:11 pm