Rented a van from Enterprise yesterday with the standard “return it like for like” fuel policy.
At pickup, both myself and the staff member agreed the van was at half a tank, based on the dashboard fuel gauge visible to both of us.
When I returned it, the staff member pulled up the vehicle telematics on their tablet and informed me I was apparently around 6 litres short based on the exact fuel quantity recorded by the vehicle.
To be clear, I do not object to paying for the missing fuel itself.
The fuel charge was about £13 for 6.6 litres of diesel, which worked out at around £2.03 per litre. Current UK diesel prices are around £1.88–£1.92 per litre, so slightly marked up, but honestly not outrageous for a rental company.
What bothered me was:
• the exact litre data was never available to me as the customer
• Enterprise then added an additional ~£8 admin fee
• their policy also states excess fuel is not refunded
So effectively:
• customer underfills slightly = charged exact litres + admin fee
• customer overfills slightly = Enterprise keeps the fuel
That naturally encourages customers to overfill vehicles just to avoid disputes.
If companies want to assess fuel returns using precise telematics data, then customers should also have access to that same data in order to reasonably comply with the “like for like” fuel policy.
Otherwise “like for like” just becomes:
“approximate for the customer, precise for the company.”
I would also recommend that anyone in a similar position disputes the admin fee element of these charges, particularly until we as customers has get access to the same fuel measurement data so we can return "like for like"