Hertz Rental Agreement: Fill & Download for Free

Are you trying to say you did not read the 26-page rental agreement that bears your signature?That is both shocking and shameful! What the heck is the matter with you? :)Had you read it, you probably would have discovered some language in there that says you are responsible these types of fines and that the car rental company will pay it on your behalf and add on a nice big fat processing fee (to compensate them for their troubles). Given they have your credit card on file, it won’t be very difficult to collect what is due to them.Here’s a close-up of Hertz’ rental agreement, as an example.[1]So, the next time you need to rent a car, I would strongly advise you read the rental agreement in its entirety before signing. The 30 people in line behind certainly won’t mind you taking the time to familiarize yourself with the rules before renting (they only ‘look’ impatient, but actually, they’re in no hurry most of the time).Footnotes[1] https://images.hertz.com/pdfs/RT_FULL_EU_EN.pdf

In Germany, most rent car companies have a clause in the rental agreement that prohibit taking the car on a race-track, specifically, the Nurburgring.So we broke the rules, and took a C-Class Mercedes to a 3-day track school.There is a photographer in the grid area that takes pictures of the cars, especially the rear end and license plates. All of the car rental agencies subscribe to his database, from as far North at Koln, as far East as Frankfurt, and as far Southwest as Trier.At Hertz, it’s “banned for life”. With Sixt (Avis), it’s an automatic 2K Euros adder. I thought is was not addressed by EuroCar. But I was wrong. I learned a lot about German fine print.When we turned in the EuroCar rental where we got it, at Trier, the “dominatrix” behind the counter said, before I even handed her my papers and the keys: “Ve hof seen you auf de Nurburgring”. I said “Guilty” and leaned over to my driving patner and asked if this was the part where I get spanked, not that I didn’t deserve it.She said “Ve vill take it to de local dealer, and if there are any damages, ve vill assess your credit card for violating de agreement.”I said OK, and sweated it out for the next couple of CitiBank billing periods. No problem - there were no extra charges. But no spanking either! Damn!

When I worked at Hertz around the turn of the century, we’d find some weird stuff pretty frequently. Here is my list of the top weirdest I personally found:[live] lobsters - well, one still “alive”, and the other distinctly not - in a cooler (in July, and the cooler with lobsters had been sitting in the sun for many hours)thumb drives - sure, thumb drives are ubiquitous today, but 18 years ago? Not so muchcordless drillbongunused, premetered insulin needles (lots of them)an entire set of empty luggage~$500 cash tucked over the visor in twenty dollar bills~$40 in coins in the console of an Excursion (and a rental agreement that showed they’d only had the vehicle for a couple days)Then there’s all the stuff that isn’t so “weird” in and of itself, but it pretty “weird” when you think about what it means that the driver and/or passenger(s) left it behind:laptopsphones (including Blackberries (remember - this was nearly 20 years ago))packed suitcasesuneaten fast-food meals (I distinctly recall one time of seeing a handful of McDonald’s burritos still taped)jacketsshoesLots of stuff that gets left behind is relatively “normal”hatssunglassesphone chargers