“I am so ready…”
Getting in a car accident creates a chain reaction of hassles. One woman should’ve had one of the biggest headaches taken off her plate—getting a replacement ride while hers was in the shop. Instead she says the Enterprise rental wound up being yet another problem.
TiKTok Joyia (@only1joyia) posted a video that shows the vehicle she got from Enterprise. She found its condition shocking. It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to see what she’s referring to: There are obvious stains on the driver’s seat and one of the backseats.
“So somebody rear ended me and I had to go get a rental car from Enterprise while they make the repairs to my vehicle,” she says. “And this is the condition of the car. This is absolutely terrible.”
Joyia assures viewers that the staff at Enterprise was not the issue. “They were so friendly when I came to pick up the vehicle, but the condition of this vehicle is just terrible,” she says. “I don’t understand how they’re renting cars to people in this condition.”
She concludes the video with a final complaint. “It also smelled like a cigarette, so I had to get these car freshener thingies,” she says. “I am so ready to get back in my vehicle.”
In the caption, Joyia wrote, “I really don’t like to complain, and I am only in it for a week, but this is crazy.”
In the comments section of the video, several viewers claiming to be associated with Enterprise tried to explain the situation.
“I work at Enterprise and the Hyundais that Enterprise buys have cloth seats that we cannot steam clean at the location,” one person wrote. “We know this sucks, but we’re doing the best that we can.”
A second person wrote, “Every time a light interior vehicle one-ways to my branch, I cry. It’s SO hard to get those stains out. I scrubbed one for an hour one day and it still looked horrible.”
“Most of the time, we only have maybe 20 minutes to flip a car,” a third person wrote. “Unfortunately, that car would have been sidelined for at least two days to do proper seat extraction, and, unfortunately, corporate wants to push rentals. So we just don’t have time.”
According to Enterprise, the best-case scenario is that you return the car in a reasonably clean condition. However, if the company gets an “excessively dirty” car back, it reserves the right to charge you an additional cleaning fee. A Reddit user reported being charged a $900 fee due to spilled beer and smoking in the vehicle.
In the thread of that post, several people weighed in. “The cleaning fee we can charge is $150 unless the car comes back in horrible condition,” one person wrote. “The worst I had ever seen was some guy who rented a Jetta and brought it back with weed residue, cigarette smoke, empty bottles of booze, and the seats and the leather was in disrepair. We charged him $700 because the alternative was a claim on his insurance.”
A second person said, “Sounds like you broke the terms of your rental agreement a few times.”
Motor1 contacted Joyia via TikTok comment and direct message for comment. We also contacted Enterprise Fleet Services via press email for comment. This will be updated if either responds.
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