FTC Petition Seeks to Ban Rental of Recalled Cars before Repairs

Jacqueline Houck would have turned 26 yesterday. Instead, Monday was the day that Jackie’s mother, Carol Houck, teamed up with two car-safety organizations in trying to prohibit car rental companies’ practice of renting unrepaired recalled vehicles--the very practice Houck’s family members blame for Jackie’s death in 2004.

Twenty-year-old Jacqueline and her 24-year-old sister, Raechel, died in a PT Cruiser they rented from Enterprise Rent-a-Car to visit relatives in the Los Angeles area. Jacqueline was an artist looking forward to an upcoming trip to Costa Rica. Raechel had worked in Italy as a teacher and au pair and planned on becoming a translator.

The two sisters visited their parents and then drove back to Santa Cruz on October 10, 2004. At 3 AM the next day, their mother received the call that is every parent’s worst nightmare. Raechel and Jackie were dead, killed in a fiery car accident.

Going beyond Liability

In June of 2010, a jury in Alameda County forced Enterprise, which accepted full liability for the incident in May, to pay $15 million in damages to Ms. Houck and her ex-husband, Chuck Houck.

But Carol Houck, a small-town attorney, wanted a bigger legacy for her daughters, who she claims died an unnecessary death because Enterprise prioritized “profits before safety.”

Yesterday, Houck joined two organizations, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety and the Center for Auto Safety, to petition the Federal Trade Commission in a request to prohibit Enterprise from renting recalled cars that have not yet been repaired.

The executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, Clarence Ditlow, claimed records from the Houcks’ litigation indicate Enterprise had no procedures or policies in place to keep renters from driving recalled vehicles.

Even after the jury’s verdict, Ditlow said, Enterprise insisted it would examine recalls on a case-by-case basis. The parent company of Enterprise—Enterprise Holdings, the country’s biggest rental-car agency—also owns the Alamo and National rental-car companies.

“To us, if it’s a safety recall, it should be parked until it’s fixed,” said Ditlow. “It’s just black and white.”

Enterprise Responds

A spokesperson for Enterprise, Laura Bryant, claimed the company stands behind a July 7 statement made by executive VP Greg Stubblefield. The statement claimed the company had implemented stricter procedures since the Houck incident but did not rule out the possibility of renting recalled vehicles.

Stubblefield said the deaths of the Houck sisters “deeply sadden all of us at Enterprise,” and added that until the liability claims were dropped in its bankruptcy, Chrysler was a codefendant in the lawsuit. The Houcks argued that a faulty power-steering hose on the PT Cruiser—called a fire hazard in the recall one month before the accident—caused a fire under the hood and a loss of control that caused the Houcks’ deaths.