Avis Charges Woman $6,000 After Claiming She Drove 23,000 Miles In Three Days
Image: Frank Rumpenhorst (AP)
Some of these car rental companies need to chill. Hertz isn’t the only rental company giving customers problems right now. Vancouver outlet North Shore News reports that Avis is charging a Canadian woman $6,000 after saying she drove the equivalent of over 333 miles per hour in her rental.
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It all started when one Giovanna Boniface rented a GMC Yukon from Toronto International Airport on August 13th to help her daughter move back to college. She only had the rental for three days and she only drove a total of 105 miles. But after returning the car, she noticed the rental charges as she was boarding her flight. The receipt said she had driven 22,668 miles in 68 hours for total charges of $6,150.31. All charged to her credit card.
You don’t have to be a genius or math wiz to realize that that kind of distance in that amount of time isn’t really humanly possible. But North Shore News broke it down to show that it’s not even possible for the Yukon to do:
If Boniface were to skip all washroom and fuel stops, she’d have to maintain a speed of 536.5 kilometres per hour or 148.8 metres per second to go the distance Avis’s bill claims she did. That would be roughly the top speed of the fastest drag racer and significantly more than 176 km/h the SUV is capable of.
Given the proper bridges being built, it would be enough for her to drive from Toronto to visit her family in Cape Town, South Africa and back and still have a few thousand kilometres to spare, Boniface points out.
Had she set out to drive around the circumference of the Earth at the equator, she would have made it 91 per cent of the way.
A long, math-backed way of saying that shit is impossible.
Boniface says she and her husband made attempts to get in contact with Avis’ customer service. She says it took over 90 minutes before they finally reached someone. And when she did, they didn’t seem to care and kept hanging up on her.
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“And they didn’t really care. I asked to be put through to a supervisor, because sometimes that’s what you need to do and they just hung up on me. And I don’t know if they do that purposely, but I just kept getting hung up on,” she told North Short News. She got in contact with her credit card company to dispute the charges, but that was a 45-day process, and the charges had already gone through.
Luckily, after being contacted for a comment by North Shore News, Avis was quick to contact Boniface and issue an apology and let her know a refund would be processed for her in three to five business days. At least Avis was quick about it. But you have to wonder what would have happened had this story not been in the news.
