Yuehao Huang took his family on a weeklong road trip through eastern Canada last month. Montreal to Mont Tremblant to Ottawa and back. Basic vacation stuff. He returned the rental to Avis with 870 extra miles on the clock, exactly what you would expect from that route. Then Avis hit him with a $4,300 bill for driving 18,000 miles over his prepaid allowance.
Do the math. To rack up 18,000 miles in seven days, Huang would have needed to average 107 mph nonstop for 168 hours straight. No gas stops, no sleep, no bathroom breaks. Just white-knuckling a rental sedan at triple-digit speeds through Quebec while his family presumably screamed in the back seat.
When Physics Meets Billing Departments
Huang knew something was wrong immediately. He had GPS tracking from his phone showing the actual route. He sent it to Avis. They said they would investigate. Then nothing happened.
He followed up weeks later. Still nothing. He submitted the dispute again. Radio silence. So he went through American Express to contest the charge. Avis told Amex the charges were valid. That is when Huang called the local news outlet City News.
One day after City News contacted Avis, the company suddenly discovered a data entry error. They apologized for the frustration and delay. They promised to process a refund and reinforce their procedures with their teams to prevent similar issues in the future.
This Is Not a New Problem
A few years back, another Avis customer got charged an extra $6,000 for allegedly driving 23,000 miles in three days. That works out to an average speed of 333 mph, which is faster than most prop planes and well beyond what any production car can sustain. Even if you strapped a turbine engine to a rental Camry, you would run out of continent before you hit that number.
The fact that this keeps happening raises questions about how rental car companies verify mileage at all. Are they checking the odometer against the contract when the car comes back? Are they asking whether the claimed distance is even physically possible? Or are they just plugging numbers into a system and hoping nobody notices when the computer spits out a bill for time travel?
What Actually Happened
Avis blamed a data entry error, which probably means someone fat-fingered the odometer reading at return. Instead of 870 miles, they logged something closer to 18,870. The system flagged the overage and auto-generated the charge. Nobody at Avis looked at it until a reporter started asking questions.
Huang got his money back, but only after going through his credit card company and the media. That should not be the required process for correcting an obvious clerical mistake.
If you rent a car and get charged for mileage that defies the laws of physics, you should not need a physics degree to prove you are right. A glance at the trip route and a basic understanding of speed limits should be enough. The fact that Avis needed outside pressure to fix this is a bigger red flag than the bogus charge itself.
