I saw an interesting thing that in general, rental cars were pretty good buys, since most people treat them better than their own cars. They also reliably get maintenance.
Based on my statistically significant sample size or driving rental cars year after year, rental cars are treated like sh*t. Both by the drivers, and the car rental companies. Every rental with more than 20K miles on the clock that I got from Hertz / Avis / National has had some problems. Everything from loose interior bits, to check engine lights, post-due oil service lights, bent wheels, crocked alignments (indicative of suspension damage), and ABS that would fail to work properly and would randomly lock up the wheels into a slide.
Rental companies are incentivized to put bodies into cars at the lowest price point. Usually, that means at the expense of excessively-aggressively maintaining the fleet. Coupled with super extended service intervals from most car brands (who now compete to show lowest "cost of ownership" over 100K miles), I would NEVER buy a used rental fleet vehicle. At least not in this lifetime.
Nor would I buy any used car that merely followed "manufacture's recommended" service intervals, with oil changes dragged out into 15+K mile intervals on turbocharged motors that can easily boil oil if you don't cool them down before parking.
What you want is to find an owner that maintained his/her car following an "old school" Lifetime Maintenance Schedule, like this one:
https://www.dslreports.com/r0/downl...2b06/Lifetime Maintenance Schedule v03.13.pdf
For EVs, the potential for excessive (and expensive) battery degradation stems from charging them to 100%, and then discharging them to near-0%. Which is exactly what I would do if I rented one. 'Cause - why not!
Just curious , do not Teslas monitor that on the internal self checks you can look up on the touch screen at anytime just like my laptop will tell me my current battery health ?
They do.
Anyone can enter "service" mode, and initiate battery health test.
It's not a quick exercise, and requires the starting SOC to be below 50%, car plugged into an L2 charger, and allowed to charge/dis-charge the battery overnight.
This is not something you can do during a casual PPI or tire-kicking inspection.
HTH,
a