A closer look
Rental car companies rarely subject their fleet vehicles to anything resembling a deep, sanitizing clean between reservations, usually settling for a painfully brief vacuuming and a suffocating blast of artificial new-car scent. Turnaround times at busy airport locations are so aggressively tight that underpaid lot attendants are only given roughly three minutes to completely erase the terrifying biological footprint of the previous driver. Consequently, the steering wheel you are tightly gripping is typically covered in an invisible, microscopic layer of dead skin cells, fast-food grease, and the dried sweat of twenty different traveling salespeople. If a visual inspection does not immediately reveal a catastrophic biohazard or a pool of unidentifiable liquid on the upholstery, the vehicle is instantly declared road-ready. Renting a compact sedan is basically paying an exorbitant daily fee to temporarily inherit a rolling garbage can completely saturated in the collective grime of the American public
