The Houck Family Tragedy

In the summer of 2004, twin sisters Raechel and Jacqueline Houck of Santa Cruz died in a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer semi truck.  Returning up the coast from visiting their mother, the sisters were unaware that the Chrysler PT Cruiser they had rented from the San Francisco-based Enterprise Rent-A-Car had an open recall.  After a five-year court battle, the jury awarded $15 million in damages to the Houck family, citing negligence on behalf of the rental car company.

This unfortunate tragedy also led to the passage of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act of 2015, which went into effect June 1, 2016.  Included in the law are clear provisions preventing a rental car agency from renting a vehicle with a known recall.

“When a family picks up a rental car on vacation, they should be able to expect it is free of any known safety defect,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement, calling the new law a “common-sense idea.”

While the rental car industry has subsequently supported the passage of the bill and pledged to implement new policies, fleet management and renter alerts for a growing list of recalled vehicles remains elusive in a competitive market, which has led to an innovative product release from Recall Masters.

The new Rental Car Fleet Monitoring Service from Recall Masters features daily alerts and instant recall discovery through Recall Masters’ API and batch processing engines. SMART Reports help rental car agencies expedite the identification and prioritization of grounding and repairing any recalled vehicles, minimizing downtime and maximizing consumer safety. The service is fully scalable. Rental car agencies of any size, from one location to major chains, now have a turnkey solution to check their entire fleet of vehicles for recalls across major brands.