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Brits On An American Road Trip: A Dud Car Nightmare

Planning a road trip? HotelChatter contributor London Town is on one from LA to New York at the moment. Some top tips from a week on the road…

If there’s one thing we Europeans know about Americans, it’s that you love your cars. We also know that your customer service is second to none (tell us to have a nice day when we’re over here, and our cold little British hearts will melt all over you).

So we were pretty confident about hiring a car for our road trip in the land of the free. We’ve done it before—we drove from Chicago to Nashville earlier in the year with Avis, and that worked out just fine. This time we were going further, though—LA to New York, to be precise. National came through with the least extortionate one-way fees, so we went with them.

Big mistake. We arrived at LAX late on a Wednesday night, jetlagged and extra cranky as United had managed to mislay our bag for a whole two hours, and at first we were pleasantly surprised at the ease of the pick up service. We literally signed the contract, and were told to choose a car and drive off. We chose a nice red Chevy and headed off. It wasn’t until we reached the interstate that we noticed it kept pulling to the right, trying to drive us off the road.

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