17 Rental Car Horror Stories

Every now and then, there’s a story so unbelievably cartoonish that you can’t help but imagine it happening to a Looney Tunes character instead of an actual human being. Like the guy who rented a U-Haul to stock his restaurant. He whipped on over to Costco and loaded up the truck with 5-gallon buckets of soy sauce and 50-pound bags of rice. As he was turning out of the parking lot, one of the wheels went up on the sidewalk, and the rear axle broke. The buckets of soy sauce tipped over and spilled throughout the back of the truck, completely dousing the bags of rice. The rice got so wet, in fact, that it expanded, wedged the door shut and the fire department had to cut the back door off. 

All of which is to say, every rental vehicle has a past. From fish guts on the dash to a car full of dead bees, here are rental-car scenes that people wish they could forget…