If you are moving DO NOT use Universal Truck Rental. They want you to spend your time maintaining their vehicles, and pay for the privilege.

The deal with these guys is that rather than having the overhead of a full truck depot, they have single trucks sprinkled across self storage facilities across Canada. Universal does all it’s business through the net and controls the trucks through satellites. The storage facilities just manage the keys.

The point is: no one is maintaining these vehicles between uses. They leave that for the poor sucker who picks it up.

4 weeks ago we moved to our new home in Kelowna. I picked up the vehicle and it was already broken (half the electrical was gone). I then had to drive into the city and have it repaired, losing 4 hours of valuable moving time. While I was driving to Vancouver the air conditioning unit broke, and two of the three welds on the moving ramp broke off! I limped into Vancouver and had to take it to another repair place. They couldn’t fix the aircon and only bandaided the ramp so I could get to moving. Another 3 hours gone. There were a ton of other reasons this trip was terrible, but anyways, once I got back I complained, of course. (In fact, I complained during the ordeal). They asked if I purchased the $25 insurance which offsets the rate when a truck is “out of service due to a safety item for greater than 12 hours.” I was only out 7 hours. No refund… no cut rate… no apology… no nothing.

It is a bit suspicious to me that vehicles breaking down is a common problem if they offer insurance for it. Talk about not standing behind your product. Not to mention the safety concerns. If that ramp had’ve broken off it’s last weld while I was driving, it could’ve killed somebody.

Anyways, don’t do business with these guys and tell everyone you know. I should’ve clued in when I realized that he was doing all his business using a Hotmail (!?) account. I didn’t check the universally negative reviews either. My bad. I have learned my lesson, and paid for it. Now I want to make sure that you and/or your friends don’t have to go through what me and a bunch of other people have gone through.

DO NOT use Universal Truck Rental. Retweet and reblog.

Thanks for listening.