How Safe Is Your Rental Car?

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. (See the chart above.)

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."