By Rick Montgomery, The Kansas City Star –
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Car rental giant Enterprise Holdings has joined the rest of its industry in backing federal legislation to prohibit companies from renting out or selling vehicles under safety recalls.
The announcement Thursday brought together, for the first time, all four major U.S. car rental companies in support of new safety requirements. The long-sought agreement to ban the rental of autos that have been recalled but not yet fixed stems from a double fatality involving an Enterprise car rented in California in 2004.
Enterprise, which has its headquarters in the St. Louis area, had resisted endorsing the proposals until this year. But the mother of Raechel and Jacqueline Houck — sisters killed in the California wreck — launched an online campaign to bring public pressure on the world’s largest car rental company.
The second-largest in the industry, Hertz, had already agreed to back measures outlined in a U.S. Senate bill named in the Houck sisters’ honor.
“We started hearing, from more of our customers, a greater awareness of this issue — and we have a long history of listening to our customers,” said Enterprise spokeswoman Laura Bryant. “The customers told us they’d be more comfortable with federal oversight” of recalled vehicles available for rent.
“We now believe federal oversight will help to strengthen our industry’s safety,” Bryant said.
The companies that signed on to the federal proposals — Enterprise, Hertz, Avis, Dollar and their subsidiaries — reflect 93 percent of the U.S. auto-rental market. They pledged to fix recalled vehicles before renting or selling them even if the Raechel and Jacqueline Houck Rental Car Safety Act fails to pass.
With the industry on board, “we don’t know who would oppose this bill,” said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat. He predicted bipartisan passage of the Senate measure and a U.S. House version by the end of the year.
A Senate co-sponsor, California Democrat Barbara Boxer, said she was stunned to learn that no federal law protected car renters from driving off in a vehicle under a safety recall.
“If you asked anyone on the street about it, you’d hear, ‘Well, of course, they (rental companies) can’t do that,’ ” Boxer said.
She credited constituent Cally Houck, mother of the 2004 crash victims, for “making something positive out of what happened to her,” a tragedy Boxer called “unthinkable.”
A jury in 2010 awarded $15 million to the Houck family, of Santa Cruz, Calif., after Enterprise accepted responsibility for the sisters’ deaths.
The sisters had rented a Chrysler PT Cruiser that caught fire because of a power steering problem that the manufacturer had identified weeks earlier, prompting a recall.
Following the accident, Enterprise said it adopted in-house safeguards to ensure that recalled vehicles unsafe to drive were kept off the road until they were repaired.
But unlike most of its competition, the company balked at supporting federal oversight that would outlaw the renting or selling of all cars under safety recalls.
Among Enterprise’s concerns were the degree of urgency that had to be given to seemingly minor problems, such as faulty indicator lights or chimes, and potential complications in alerting drivers of vehicles already rented.
Since at least the late 1980s, Hertz had a policy of grounding recalled vehicles until they were fixed, said Rich Broome of the Hertz Corp., an early supporter of the federal safety proposals.
Cally Houck turned up the burners on Enterprise in February, when an online petition she posted went viral and drew national media attention. Within two days, 130,000 visitors to the petition site Change.org added their names in support of the safety legislation.
Enterprise responded with a statement indicating a willingness to “rethink our stance” because “a growing number of people … clearly want more assurance on this critical issue.”
