RENTAL CAR PHOTOS

Cartoon of a woman photographing the front of a rental car with her phone in a parking lot, a Turo sign behind her.

Turo charged me $2,338 for damage I didn’t cause. Can I get a refund?

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Georgina Montalvan rented a car through Turo in Los Angeles and dropped it off a day early so she could catch an earlier flight home. The next day a text arrived: the owner said she had damaged it. Turo sent photos showing a scratch on the fender and a small hole in the bumper. But Montalvan had done the one thing that should end an argument like this. She had photographed the car when she picked it up, and her pictures showed the scratch was already there. She sent them in, Turo reviewed the evidence, and the claim was dropped as normal wear and tear. That should have been the end of it. A week later Turo reopened the claim and charged her credit card $660, with no itemized bill. Then came a second invoice, this one for $1,678, for what the company described as hidden damage, illustrated with a photo of a larger hole she says she had never laid eyes on.

Illustration of a man with a camera on a neck strap crouching to photograph the rear of a white rental car in a parking area, documenting its condition.

Do I still need to take photos of my rental car?

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When Matt Murray rented an Audi A4 in Tampa recently, the lot already had at least four cameras recording the car as it rolled out the gate. An attendant assured him he did not need to take his own photos. He took them anyway, and then started to wonder: in an age of automated inspections, does a renter still need to document the car at all? It is a fair question, because the industry is changing fast. Car rental companies are rolling out AI-powered imaging systems that photograph a vehicle before and after every rental and compare the two sets side by side to flag new damage, with automated systems arriving at roughly 100 large U.S. airport locations. The promise is fewer disputes and the right renter billed for the right ding. The worry, as one industry expert puts it, is that it is too early to tell whether this protects renters or simply becomes a new source of revenue for rental agencies. Damage claims can already stack repair costs on top of service fees and loss-of-use charges, and rental companies do not always get it right.