Real Kato Blog: Consumer Report: U-Haul

They're the cheapest guys out there, but sometimes you get what you pay for.

My previous experiences with U-Haul have been spotty but not disastrous. Once I had reserved a ten-foot truck from them, but they didn't have one when I got there. (I almost launched into the Seinfeld bit, questioning whether they knew the meaning of the word "reservation".) They offered me a fourteen-foot truck, but at the fourteen-foot price. It took ten minutes of arguing to get them to give me the ten-foot price.

Another time, I had rented a truck, presumably for the day. At 8:30 a.m., they called me asking why I hadn't picked up the truck yet. Apparently, they had rented the truck to someone else for that afternoon, so they needed me to get cracking with my move. They grumbled at me when I picked up the truck at 10:00 a.m., and grumbled at me some more when I returned it at 2:00. But there was nothing they could do about it. I felt bad for the poor sap who came to pick up his truck at noon; they probably "upgraded" him to the twenty-footer.

There have been a few other little things, like a wheel so out-of-balance that the truck sounded like a jackhammer driving down the freeway, or blankets that were promised but not provided. But this last trip was really the worst.

It wasn't my rental, actually. It was my friend Erika's. (I'm sure she'll be writing about this too.) I was just helping her move. We got a one-way rental from Raleigh to New York. At first things went pretty smoothly, though they didn't give her any blankets. (What's with the great blanket shortage at U-Haul?) It was an old truck; it had 250,000 miles on it. Oh wait: it's a Canadian truck. It had 250,000 kilometers on it. But still, it was in pretty decent shape.

The trip itself was pretty good. At our first fillup, we seemed to be getting good gas mileage: 390 miles on 23 gallons of gas makes for 17 mpg. Oh wait: that's 390 kilometers. So we were actually only getting 10 mpg. 600 miles at 10 mpg at $2/gallon means $120 in gas. Ouch.

The really bad thing was the return. We went to the U-Haul place on 23rd St. in Manhattan. The guy there, a short swarthy guy with a perpetual frown etched into his face, informed us that they had no more room for trucks, and that we should drive to 230th St. (He was the U-Haul Nazi. "No room for you... you drive to 230th St.") Yes, that would be 200 blocks away... in the Bronx.

Of course, the rental agreement made no mention of this possibility, and we really didn't want to drive to the Bronx when we were about to eat dinner on 24th St. Erika tried to call customer service, but no one was answering the phones there. At this point, we noticed other people who were apparently in the same predicament: they had gotten one-way rentals, and were now being told that U-Haul wouldn't accept their return. This made no sense to me: didn't the U-Haul corporate office inform them that these one-way rentals were coming? Don't they need to handle this sort of thing? Isn't that the reason we pay $200 for this one-way thing, so that they take care of the truck on the receiving end?

There was no way to legally park the trucks there overnight. It was a "no standing" zone from 11:00 p.m. until morning. But in a show of solidarity, we decided to just leave our four trucks there anyway.

When Erika and I walked back at 11:30, two of the four trucks had $110 parking tickets on them. Ours did not. When Erika got the bill, there was no parking ticket charge. I guess we lucked out.

There was a charge, though, for being 300 miles over our mileage limit. Apparently, we had traveled 945 miles, well over our limit of 619.

Oh wait: that's 945 kilometers.

Sheesh.

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