Gizmosmith

Trucks (and the fluid dynamics thereof (with ideas for internet startups))

This was all written in 2008, so the prices will have gone up. The truck rental user experience is still garbage, though.

I’m renting a truck, and since I’m not in a hurry, I decided to check every service that showed up on the front page of a Google search. Truck rental seems like the sort of business where there would not be a lot to distinguish competitors aside from price and service. From what I’ve seen of U-Haul’s customer service, that is not where they distinguish themselves, so truck rental companies must be competing on price.

Ryder wants $45 for a day of use of a truck, and that includes 1000 (yes, a thousand) miles.

U-haul wants ~$100 for one day of use, with 59 miles for a one-way rental. A round-trip rental is $29.95, plus $0.99/mile, which is something of a concern when the round trip is 100 miles or so.

Budget wants $112.85 for one day and 85 miles one-way. For a round-trip, the cost is the same as U-haul, so a 100 mile round trip ends up costing around $130.

Penske wants $180 for a one-way trip, and offers unlimited mileage. The round trip cost is $70, which is a lot more reasonable but still doesn’t beat Ryder.

I’ll have to make a round-trip anyway, because I’ll probably have to drive to the truck pick-up location, and then leave my car there. If the trip were any shorter, the prices for U-haul and Budget would be better,
but on this particular route, Ryder manages to beat all other rental companies by a pretty good margin. The heuristic seems to be that for any round trip under ten miles, go for U-haul or Budget, Ryder for trips
beyond that, and Penske if you are doing something like going across the country, which makes the “unlimited mileage” actually significant.

Ryder can offer the better deal for this distance because they don’t offer one-way rentals. Companies that do offer one-way rentals have the issue that trucks will accumulate at places people want to move to, and
run out at places that people don’t want to be. Every fall, college towns would have too many trucks and towns in the suburbs would run out.

The solution is to hire some people to drive the trucks to where they are needed. That’s a sure way to lose money, because those people have to be paid, the gas for those trips comes out of the company’s pocket,
and the drivers don’t pay for the rental. The only way to make money on this situation is to either restrict one-way rentals (Ryder), or charge more to cover the losses (everyone else).

Cutting out one-way rentals is not the most optimal solution for the company, though, just the simplest. Given a bit of information about where the trucks tend to flow over the course of a year, or where they
are and where they are needed, it should be possible to do things like offering one-way rentals only to the places trucks are needed. This gets paying customers to move the trucks and pay for the gas, but it requires a good deal of tracking and trend analysis to work well. It also could become an issue if something unexpected happens, like an unpopular place suddenly becoming wildly popular, and everyone moving there.

Another way to improve truck rental with computers would be to figure out the pricing algorithms used by each of the major truck rental companies, and then use that information to calculate which rental
company is best for a given route. If someone wanted to make a business out of doing this, they could get the rental companies to give them a cut of the referrals, and offer business intelligence on where people are moving and how they want to use the rental. Heck, if I found the idea of starting a business interesting, I could probably handle the software end of this. Fortunately for me, I don’t find it interesting,
because if I did, I’d start a business, and I wouldn’t like that because I’m not interested in starting a business.