When you rent a vehicle, you want for that vehicle to have some type of quality that makes it worth your money and worth your time. What you don’t want is to drive it off the lot rattling and squeaking and making strange vibrations as you go on to whatever destination you are going to. The cause of these annoying yet not usually serious problems can be anything so the first thing you need to try to do is isolate the problem.

Figure out first which section of the vehicle it is coming from, once you know its much easier to find the specific issue that the car is having. Vehicle vibrations can come from all sorts of places in the vehicle and can feel like they are coming from anywhere. Unfortunately there are many specific issues that vibrations can hint at ranging from steering issues to drive train problems.

As I drove off the lot in a car rental in Atlanta I started feeling a vibration through the floor of the car almost immediately. It would have been easier if I was with my family in a van rental in Atlanta, because the sound was only being made as the vehicle was driving.

The way I finally located the noise was just patience, I figured out how it changed as I would go around turn etc… and was able to identify that it was coming from the front right side of the car. I immediately called the rental company that I got the vehicle from and they were happy that I had found the problem because they knew that my finding it meant that someone else who wouldn't find it wasn’t going to get hurt. When I took the vehicle back they were happy to give me one of their spare truck rentals in Atlanta, it had no problems and ran perfectly.

The moral of the story, is that if you are having these issues with the vehicle in the interest of safety and comfort you are absolutely entitled to exchange the vehicle to get something that feels much more comfortable. The other important reason why you should notify the rental facility is that the vehicle itself could be damaged in a way that could be very expensive and that they could try to blame on how you drove the car for the time you rented it, meaning you could end up being blamed for the problems with the car and then have to pay for it.