Enterprise rented and sold vehicles without side curtain air bags

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the nation’s largest private buyer of new cars and seller of used vehicles deleted the standard side curtain airbags when it ordered 66,000 Chevrolet Impalas and Cobalts in order to save money. By removing the safety feature, Enterprise saved over $11 million. When they resold the cars to consumers, however, they failed to disclose the air-bag omission. Ads for some of the cars on the Enterprise Web site mistakenly claimed they had side curtain air bags.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), side impacts are the second most common type of fatal crash. More than 8,000 people were killed in side impacts in 2007 and side airbags can reduce driver death by 37 percent.

For more on this story see our safety blog.

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—Liza Barth 

Comments

[Mike D]

Quite simply, I will never do business with Enterprise again. I trust these companies to not deliberately put my safety at risk. Fire the execs who made this stupid decision which will cost Enterprise tens of millions in lost sales.

[CyCarConsulting]

What about all those years people drove without side curtains. Even today not every new car has them. Would anyone really not rent a car if they knew the side curtains were not there? I'll bet most people don't even know where a side curtain air bag is located. I think that's a pretty good bet, since most people don't know where the dipstick is.

[Cathy H]

I do not believe that Enterprise intentionally sold cars to their customers knowing that they did not have the side airbags. Enterprise has a much better reputation than that. The cars that did not have the airbags were fleet rental vehicles that did not require them and when they got transferred to the car sales division there was just a mix up with which ones had the airbags and which ones did not. The rental vehicles are always equipped with all of the optional safety features. I will continue to give them my business as they have always treated me with nothing but kindness and gratitude.