Rental car: Trunk taped shut?

[briantroutman]

Many times, I've passed vehicles on the highway with with what appears to be tamper-evident tape sealing the driver's side rear corner of the trunk. As far as I can remember, these vehicles are almost exclusively Nissans–perhaps some Hyundais, too–and they're all rental vehicles, as far as I've seen.

The tape is printed with a repeating pattern of the manufacturer emblem and seems to be placed very precisely, leading me to believe it's placed at the factory. Sometimes the tape appears to be unbroken; sometimes it looks like it's been neatly slit, and at others, it's ragged and ready to fall off.

I've seen this now several times, and a number of Google searches haven't revealed the vaguest hint of an explanation. I wasn't able to find a photo of the tape, but I was given a Sentra as a rental today, and it still has the ghost of where this tape had been (pictured below–outlined for clarity).

Has anyone noticed this or know the reason for it?

[oscar]

I haven't seen it before. My wild guess is that it might be to keep people from smuggling drugs cross-country in new-vehicle trunks, and that the tape is supposed to be completely removed by the receiving dealer (one of the things covered by the "destination charge").

[jeffandnicole]

How do you know they're all rental cars? Do they all have rental plates or frames or something?

I've never seen this myself.

[formulanone]

I haven't seen it before. My wild guess is that it might be to keep people from smuggling drugs cross-country in new-vehicle trunks, and that the tape is supposed to be completely removed by the receiving dealer (one of the things covered by the "destination charge").

It's part of the Pre-Delivery Inspection process, although sometimes they forget to remove the tape? I see about one a month in which the tape wasn't removed properly, and it's sloppy work (to be fair, I see this on lots of rental cars of all makes/models).

[briantroutman]

How do you know they're all rental cars? Do they all have rental plates or frames or something?

Rental cars are pretty easy to spot based on a combination of hints...recent model car, no dealer insignia or license plate frame, no bumper stickers or personalizations of any kind, "no smoking"  stickers on the windows... But the dead giveaway is the set of barcode stickers at the corners of front and side glass.

Jalopnik posted a field guide to spotting rentals–which pretty much confirmed everything I've learned watching the many obvious tourists in San Francisco.

My wild guess is that it might be to keep people from smuggling drugs cross-country in new-vehicle trunks...

Given that at least some Sentras and Versas are manufactured in Mexico, it would seem to make more sense in that context. Although in the case of the Sentra, the seatbacks don't appear to be lockable.

...the tape is supposed to be completely removed by the receiving dealer (one of the things covered by the "destination charge").

It's part of the Pre-Delivery Inspection process, although sometimes they forget to remove the tape?

That part all fits. Any pre-delivery housekeeping would be done by the dealer, and I believe rental agency fleet purchases are all direct transactions, meaning that Hertz, Enterprise, or whatever company bought the cars would be responsible for those tasks. And given the number of very low milage cars I've encountered with the protective clear plastic film still stuck to glossy interior trim, satellite radio not yet activated, or unused front license plate brackets laying in the trunk, the agencies would seem to be rather lax about it.

[NJRoadfan]

The barcodes are the giveaway more than anything. Enterprise also likes to put that "Enhance your ride" QR code sticker on the driver's side window too (something tells me scanning that code won't enhance that Dodge Avenger you are stuck with). Some of us remove the dealer's license plate frame the second the car leaves the lot.

[SP Cook]

Many times, I’ve passed vehicles on the highway with with what appears to be tamper-evident tape sealing the driver’s side rear corner of the trunk.

Has anyone noticed this or know the reason for it?

The trunks are taped shut with tamper evident tape at the factory.  This insures that nobody has put anything in the trunk such as drugs and when the vehicle reaches the port (or border, in the case of Mexican made ones) they can pass through w/o Customs having to open each trunk for an inspection, should they so choose to. 

Retail vehicles which are delivered to a dealer go through dealer prep and they clean this off, because they want it to look all shiny for sale.  Rental cars go straight to the rental location, where there is less incentive to do a proper prep.  Usually they just rip the plastic bags off the seats and slap on a set of tags and put it out to rent.

[cjk374]

Some of us remove the dealer's license plate frame the second the car leaves the lot.

Yes indeed...and peel off the sticker with the dealership's name on the back glass or back bumper.  The way I look at it, they didn't pay for the space on my car to advertise themselves.

[formulanone]

Some of us remove the dealer's license plate frame the second the car leaves the lot.

Yes indeed...and peel off the sticker with the dealership's name on the back glass or back bumper.  The way I look at it, they didn't pay for the space on my car to advertise themselves.

The only time I've kept the license plate frame is when I worked for the said dealership.

[jeffandnicole]

Some of us remove the dealer's license plate frame the second the car leaves the lot.

Yes indeed...and peel off the sticker with the dealership's name on the back glass or back bumper.  The way I look at it, they didn't pay for the space on my car to advertise themselves.

Are you paying for Nissan to advertise, or do you take away their logo and other words they have on their vehicle also?  And do you rub away the tire manufacturer on the side of the tire?

[NE2]

Is your silent partner Nicole paying you to use her name?

[jeffandnicole]

Is your silent partner Nicole paying you to use her name?

You really are screwed up in the head, aren't you?

[DaBigE]

Some of us remove the dealer's license plate frame the second the car leaves the lot.

Yes indeed...and peel off the sticker with the dealership's name on the back glass or back bumper.  The way I look at it, they didn't pay for the space on my car to advertise themselves.

Are you paying for Nissan to advertise, or do you take away their logo and other words they have on their vehicle also?  And do you rub away the tire manufacturer on the side of the tire?

At least in my book, a logo or nameplate for a manufacturer is not the same as advertising for a $ealership...err dealership. My favorite part of buying a car is attempting to negotiate my mobile advertising fee.

[J N Winkler]

I don't have a problem with the marque and model identification appearing on a car I own.  Similarly, I won't seek to remove the manufacturer's branding from any stock component.  However, I will never agree to dealer identification being applied to any car I buy, and I will remove any such identification if I can do so without damaging the paint.  Unfortunately, some dealers make this virtually impossible to do by spray-painting it on.

I don't think it is uncommon for customers not to want dealer identification on their cars.  It is much more the norm to choose cars by marque and model than was the case decades ago, when cars did not last as long and were much less reliable, and developing a relationship of trust with a particular dealer was a way of steering clear of lemons.  Dealers also enjoy substantial market protection through state laws that make it impossible for automakers to sell directly to the public, and that often serves to promote rent-seeking behavior.

The last two cars we purchased came from dealers.  The more recent of the two, a 2009 Honda Fit, has a painted-on dealer mark, which we could not prevent being put on the car since it was pre-owned.  The older, a 2005 Toyota Camry, was purchased new from the Toyota dealer in town, which has a poor reputation and tried several variations of bait-and-switch during the purchase negotiations (e.g., special-ordered car was asked for, a search was conducted and a model with equivalent specs was found in Kansas City, and the starting offer was to have someone drive it down to Wichita).  It would have been galling to have that dealer's name on the trunk lid.

[jeffandnicole]

Some of us remove the dealer's license plate frame the second the car leaves the lot.

Yes indeed...and peel off the sticker with the dealership's name on the back glass or back bumper.  The way I look at it, they didn't pay for the space on my car to advertise themselves.

Are you paying for Nissan to advertise, or do you take away their logo and other words they have on their vehicle also?  And do you rub away the tire manufacturer on the side of the tire?

At least in my book, a logo or nameplate for a manufacturer is not the same as advertising for a $ealership...err dealership. My favorite part of buying a car is attempting to negotiate my mobile advertising fee.

On a wider scale, I look at it this way: There's a lot of focus on buying local. Someone buys from a local dealership. That salesperson probably lives in the area. They add on their label or a license plate frame to show that you purchased a car from the dealership, with the intent to encourage others to buy from them also. The new car owner gets home and takes it off, but leaves on everything else.  Now they're advertising for an international company who headquarters may be in Michigan or Japan. Much like someone who says they support small businesses, but will walk around with bags from national chains.

It's hardly the first time I heard of someone doing this. While it's fine if someone doesn't want the info on their vehicles and they can do whatever they want, I think the reasoning is misplaced.

[hbelkins]

I'm not a fan of having the dealer's name on the car.

After all, you don't buy a pair of Levi's jeans and have the Levi's tag on one pocket and J.C. Penney on the other pocket, do you?

[DaBigE]

On a wider scale, I look at it this way: There's a lot of focus on buying local. Someone buys from a local dealership. That salesperson probably lives in the area. They add on their label or a license plate frame to show that you purchased a car from the dealership, with the intent to encourage others to buy from them also.

I'd love to see a study to see how effective the stickers and plate frames really are.

As for buying "local", that's getting harder to do as larger dealerships keep swallowing up the locals/independents. For me, buying fruits and vegetables local is one thing, a car is another. If I had the kind of disposable income to spend hundreds more on a car just to "buy local" I would. Until then, I'm shopping for the best deal within a reasonable radius of my home.

The new car owner gets home and takes it off, but leaves on everything else.  Now they're advertising for an international company who headquarters may be in Michigan or Japan.

Again, just me, but I don't mind that, as I only by from companies I want to support buy purchasing their products. I'm buying the item how it came from the factory.

If you buy a tv or other appliance, do you ask the store to put their sticker on the front of it?

[Pete from Boston]

I'd love to see a study to see how effective the stickers and plate frames really are.

I would bet they are pretty effective in building brand awareness.  These things are in people's line of sight all the time–every time you're sitting behind someone with a dealer name in traffic, you're seeing that name.

Obviously it's not going to convince you to buy, but it is going to make you familiar with the existence of the dealer, which is really the point.

[Alps]

This happened with a Nissan I rented. I broke the tape even though I didn't use the trunk. A couple of years and tens of thousands of miles later, I ended up with the same car again. I knew it because of the tape remnants left on the trunk. Yeah, it's pretty dumb.

[Scott5114]

The marque stickers are acceptable in my opinion because they are useful for identifying a car. At my work, you frequently hear stuff on the intercom like "this is a customer page for the owner of a red GMC Safari, Oklahoma tag AAA000, your lights are on". I doubt our security officers are familiar enough with every make of vehicle out there to not have to look at the emblems. It's like any other item like a vacuum or toaster or something.

The dealer information is not useful for anyone but the dealer. Not to mention that the same car might pass through 3 or 4 dealers over its lifespan...

I peeled off the dealer sticker the week I got my current car. I left the part under the logo that says "NORMAN, OK" though. I probably wouldn't buy from a dealer that ruined the paint job with their logo. If they are willing to damage the product to put their name on it I would be concerned about their other business practices.

[The Nature Boy]

My car still has a dealership sticker on it.

The dealership is now out of business so I'm not really advertising anything.

[J N Winkler]

On a wider scale, I look at it this way: There's a lot of focus on buying local. Someone buys from a local dealership. That salesperson probably lives in the area. They add on their label or a license plate frame to show that you purchased a car from the dealership, with the intent to encourage others to buy from them also. The new car owner gets home and takes it off, but leaves on everything else.  Now they're advertising for an international company who headquarters may be in Michigan or Japan. Much like someone who says they support small businesses, but will walk around with bags from national chains.

I don't think car dealers offer a good analogy to the costermongers who support a locavorist lifestyle and are one mechanism by which locally based truck farmers can obtain a higher gate price for their produce than they can from the supermarkets.

The products have different quality dimensions and different associated supply structures.  Cars are a global product, normally experience no loss of quality in transit, and have no real seasonality.  The smallest non-boutique automaker is quite large, because returns to scale in the auto industry are intrinsically quite high.  By buying a new car at all, you are already sending money to a distant headquarters as profit--the best you can hope to do is to support workers at an auto factory close to you if and only if that factory is designated as a production point for the particular model you buy.

Fresh produce, on the other hand, usually tastes better when in season and eaten close to where it is grown, and truck farming brings in many small locally based players as well as the majors that haul in fruit and vegetables from Mexico to maintain year-round availability of certain salad staples like lettuce, tomato, spring onion, and so on.

In a medium-sized city like Wichita, even the locally based new-car dealerships are all large operations that advertise heavily in newspapers and on TV.  (Although print media is in terminal decline in Wichita as elsewhere, there is still a large fraction of the city that takes home delivery of the Wichita Eagle on the days that the ads appear.)  Therefore, they get advertising benefit at the margin from having their names on cars only when those cars are taken outside the local media market.  There may be some value in letting a person from Hutchinson know that a Chevy Malibu can be bought from Joe Self in Wichita or Don Hattan in Park City, but that goes away once the car is driven much further away, say to New York or the Colorado Front Range.

In contradistinction, passive advertising is of more benefit at the margin to locally based produce farmers (or their cooperatives) since it not only draws business to the specific entity shown, but also raises general awareness of the benefits of eating local.

License plate frames make it hard to apply tax stickers (which we have in Kansas), stuck-on dealer nameplates gather grime, and painted-on dealer marks ruin the clean appearance of the paint.  The buyer typically never receives any benefit (such as money off the purchase price) to offset the inconvenience, and application of the mark is often a matter of customer inertia.

On the other hand, when you bring home produce in Farmer X's or Grower Cooperative Y's reusable bag, the benefit is in the eating!

Sometimes the advertising benefit of dealer marks is completely nugatory--for example, there are quite a few Saturns rolling around Wichita with painted-on Saturn of Wichita marks even though all of the Saturn franchises nationwide are long gone.

It's hardly the first time I heard of someone doing this. While it's fine if someone doesn't want the info on their vehicles and they can do whatever they want, I think the reasoning is misplaced.

I think the distinction is solid.  In the one case, passive advertising helps a small local producer stay in business while raising consciousness of the health, taste, and environmental benefits of eating local.  In the other case, the business identified through the passive advertising is the mere local agent of a multinational conglomerate.  As such, his or her function is to furnish a convenient local outlet to the distribution chain, and in that capacity he or she is essentially interchangeable.  There will always be local salespeople for a given car brand, regardless of who employs them--the true controlling variable is the popularity of that brand's models, which is largely dependent on design, manufacturing, and pricing decisions made at a remote HQ.

[jakeroot]

How do you know they're all rental cars? Do they all have rental plates or frames or something?

Rental cars are pretty easy to spot based on a combination of hints...recent model car, no dealer insignia or license plate frame, no bumper stickers or personalizations of any kind, "no smoking"  stickers on the windows... But the dead giveaway is the set of barcode stickers at the corners of front and side glass.

Jalopnik posted a field guide to spotting rentals–which pretty much confirmed everything I've learned watching the many obvious tourists in San Francisco.

The other giveaway is that the licence plates are usually recent variants. This is harder in some states but easier in others (Washington has just started ascending from AAA0000 down to ZZZ9999, so obviously the farther away from the former, the newer the plate). My dad drives a pure white Toyota Camry with no dealer info at all (no licence plate frame or stickers). Two giveways that he's not a renter: his licence plate is 2 years old, and he has a DOD sticker in the window (which most people miss).

Also, car color. Rental cars are very often monochromatic (grey, black, white, silver). I see red on occasion, sometimes dark blue (I drive rentals for a living).

[spooky]

Two identifying factors I use for rental cars:

(1) Is it a Chevy Captiva? The Captiva is a fleet only car in the US, and while you could buy a used one off rental (like my aunt and uncle did), the vast majority of Captivas on the road today are rentals.

(2) Does it have a Blount County TN plate? I notice the counties on TN plates because I look to see if it matches the county that my folks live in. What I've noticed is that in New England, almost every TN plate I see is a Blount County plate. I also notice other identifying rental marks like those referenced in the Jalopnik article.

Further research reveals that those Blount County plates are most likely a Hertz rental: https://countytrip.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/the-mystery-of-the-blount-county-plates/

[US81]

Some of us remove the dealer's license plate frame the second the car leaves the lot.

Yes indeed...and peel off the sticker with the dealership's name on the back glass or back bumper.  The way I look at it, they didn't pay for the space on my car to advertise themselves.

The only time I've kept the license plate frame is when I worked for the said dealership.

Some areas in Texas over-enforce the "nothing shall obstruct the license plate" law to mean that all license plate frames are forbidden. The last car I bought, about four different people in the finalizing process offered to remove the frame for me. They said they are required to have them on all cars sold, but have had enough dissatisfaction from new car purchasers having been ticketed and fined that they are trying to find the right balance between following the corporate mandate and (the local interpretation of) the law.

I have seen several modifications of the badges and markings, too. It's fairly common to see "OMG" tacked just in front of "AWD"  or to see the "X" peeled away from the Carmax logo.