Car appreciation... the aesthetics, the engineering, etc

You can buy 3rd party excess insurance for pennies, but it still has its pitfalls.

For instance, when a Land Cruiser Amazon ran me off the tiny road in my rental Twingo in Morocco, and I hit a rock so hard it fucked the rim, the rental company wouldn't give me a cost, they just fobbed me off saying they'd refund the £1,500 deposit I'd paid minus the cost of one wheel and tyre (no way was that worth £1,500). I shrugged it off as I was insured for the £1,500 by a 3rd party for a cost of £7.50 or something stupid.

When I got home I tried to claim but of course, the rental company hadn't given me any sort of receipt. They kept the original £1,500 receipt - it was supposed to be returned when I returned the car un-damaged - and then because they didn't bother working out how much the wheel and tyre would cost while I was there, they didn't give me a receipt of the actual cost.

I thought, no bother, I'll just contact them, get the info, and then send it off to the excess insurance company. They wouldn't answer emails or even pick up the phone, I tried multiple times but there was no way of getting through to them. I felt quite hard done by because £1,500 is not an insubstantial amount of money, so I resorted to trickery. I contacted Barclaycard and said that the £1,500 was fraud and I didn't know why I'd been charged it. I didn't want to get out of paying it, I just wanted some sort of receipt so I could claim from my excess insurance, but the rental company didn't even bother replying to Barclaycard, even after 2 months of contact attempts, so I just got my £1,500 back.

Bit of a dick move, yes, but I didn't feel bad about it because they had ample opportunity to rectify this situation, and on top of that, here's a comedy of errors:

1. The car broke down within 20 minutes of picking it up
   
2. They didn't answer the 24/7 phone number on the rental agreement that was there
   in case of breakdowns
   
3. They didn't answer any of the other phone numbers I found online
   
4. I eventually bump started it but we wasted an hour
   
5. When I needed to change the fucked wheel, the wheel bolts had a plastic cover, which was held on by a small plastic bolt that was removed using a gas meter box style key on the car keys keyring... except for the one wheel that was fucked which was held on by an allen key bolt, which of course wasn't in the car toolkit, and nobody we could flag down had ever seen an allen key bolt before. We eventually used a screwdriver to snap it off.
   
6. When I returned the car, I explained everything that had gone wrong, how they hadn't answered the phone when I needed help that was supposed to be included in the rental price TWICE, and the whole allen key debacle - one of the men said I was an idiot in French to one of the other guys in the office and said the key was there the whole time, not knowing I'm OK at French so I called him out in French so he stormed out to the car to show me I was wrong. I said go on then, pull the wheel out, show me, which he eventually did, when he saw the allen key bolt he just went quiet, put the wheel back in the spare wheel compartment and went back inside, didn't apologise once, I had to follow him back inside and force him to tell the other guy I was right, but I didn't get a single apology.
   
   

So all in all, fuck them, rent cars, know what you're doing, and insure up to the fucking eyeballs.

In USA I was uhmming and aaahing about CDW and a lady returned a car with the front stoved in and no windscreen, she drove it back like that and just handed in the keys and walked off. Seemed worth it after that.