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Undisputed car rental dings | |||||||||||||||||
I've rented cars a few times. Each time, before getting the car, the agency does a walk-about with me to point out existing defects in the vehicle. But it's sure not easy for anyone to spot every single dent or ding with just a short review. One time, when returning a car, they discovered a new dent. Yet, I honestly didn't know how it got there. Fortunately, I had the insurance, so it didn't turn out so bad. But, what if this was a dent that already existed and no one had seen before? Why not use a special scanner that can reliably identify ALL the defects, big and small. Then when the car is returned, the same scanning process is repeated, and the two scanning records are compared by a computer. Any significant differences are shown, and both the driver and agency can review the findings on the car itself. This way, there's no doubt about the before and after dents. Of course there are scanners of all types out there, but I haven't heard of one applicable in this situation. And I would assume there already exists image-comparison technology that could find the differences between the 2 scans. While I imagine it would be difficult for the software to reliably identify only the "significant" differences, I figure there's probably a way to do this too. Well, how about it Hertz or Enterprise or ?? Why not develop something like this and give yourselves an edge over the competition. Given my past experience, I'd definitely prefer going with an agency that could offer something like this.
orygreg, Dec 30 2007
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I agree with there is a need. I sometimes rent cars more than drive my own, and while insurance is always there, I could be on the hook for deductibles. I also check the cars before I get into them, and make sure the damage is noted.
Am considering starting to take photos of the cars I rent, with a high resolution camera, and make sure the dings are verifyable.
You would think that the agencies would have a good video camera taking photos as you drive away, but they are generally too low of resolution for any dispute resolution.
The system you've proposed is a good idea, but very expensive and not completely do-able at this time.
My company designs structures that container trucks transit and the entire truck gets a series of line-scan photos made of them, pasted together to make one huge .jpg. Ostensively, the photos are for character recognition (to read the containers and chassis) but we also do context recognition comparison for some customers where we try to recognize changes in the photos that amount to damage.
The systems work well with clean containers, but with changes in road-grime, the context-recognition software fails.
We've spent some effort to do a two-camera 3-d scan that could actually recognize 3-d differences such as dents or holes, but the processing times were too large for our customers to have continous use, even with parallel computing.
Thanks for the comnents. I should have done some homework on this before posting. A google search came up with a bunch of hits for 3D surface scanning. Here are a few:
The nitty gritty details are over my head, but from what I can tell by these and other links, the technology seems to be there, but as 'hrench' said, very expensive.
On the software side, there were a lot less hits. But I did find one that describes a "Change Detection System" application (that's only 350KB, runs on a PC, and a child can use): who's job is to identify very small difference between two images (MRI brain scans, in this example).
It all seems to be within reach... hmmm, if only (Hertz) a big car rental (Hertz) company could fund (Hertz) this project. A lot of the work has been done for them already. They just need to put the pieces together.
(grrrr.... sorry about that... no links showed up?!?)
Scanning links:http://www.central-scanning.co.uk/Steinbichler-Surface-inspection-systems.htmhttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PIL/is_2005_April_12/ai_n13600427http://www.3dscanco.com/about/3d-scanning/faq.cfm
Software link:http://www.inl.gov/featurestories/2003-08-06.shtml
1.) Pay the extra few dollars for insurance. 2.) Be sure the car is clean (washed) before you pick it up.3.) Invest in a good digital camera; take pictures before you take custody of the car, have the photos printed out at the car rental office before you leave, have them keep copies attached to the rental contract.4.) Wash the car before you return it. 5.) Have the rental company inspector compare the photos you took when you rented the car with the clean car when you return.