Car Rental Places Are Using A.I. to Detect Every Little Imperfection — And Charging You for Each One
If you’re gonna do that, I’m not refilling it with gas.
Published 3 months ago in Wtf
Back in the day — as in, literally like three months ago — renting a car required a lot of trust. You would, of course, take pictures of the car after you rented it, but when it came time to return it, there was a mutual understanding between renter and rentee that, so long as the car didn’t have any major new flaws, everything was fine.
Well, now, that’s all changing. Hertz has announced they’re using artificial intelligence to see the damage drivers have done to their car — even the minor imperfections that the driver can’t see themselves.
Here’s how it works: The car gets taken through a gate that takes numerous photos of it. From there, those photos are fed into an A.I., which compares the photos to ones taken before the car was rented. Any difference, even a minor one, will then be charged to your account — in addition to a processing fee, of course.
Needless to say, this stinks, I hate it, and everyone involved with proposing and developing it should be banished to the forest.