This doesn’t prove anything about autonomy / agency vs being an employee / owner operator.Big Homey Urb wrote: ↑Wed Oct 21, 2026 8:55 pmExactly so…Fairy Liquid wrote:Simple answerBig Homey Urb wrote: ↑Wed Oct 21, 2026 8:06 pm :funny:
Simple question: If three renters wreck vehicles back-to-back and your insurance carrier threatens to pull your fleet policy, who are you answering to?
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Most people use their own insurance on their CC, or buy online insurance. Out of 3 maybe 1 will use our insurance, and 9/10 chances that all vehicles won’t be a total loss.. it’ll be like a bumper smash/scrape, side swipe or chip on the windshield.
So not a single soul, that’s the damage department problem to make sure insurance pays up![]()
If a renter fucks up a vehicle and you need their credit card company or online insurer to pay up, you are at the mercy of their claim approval. If they deny the claim or stall payment, your shit sits on the lot not making you any bread while eating carrying costs, right?
Having a damage department deal with that doesn't mean you have absolute autonomy. It means your entire business model is tethered to outside financial institutions and risk management.
Just because you delegated the task does not mean you ain’t answering to someone. The insurance company gets to decide whether that car gets paid out and put back on the road, not you.
And even if they are just bumps and scrapes, when you decide to sell them off, now you gotta sell them for less than you would if they didn’t have those bumps and scrapes right? That’s more revenue being impacted downstream due to elements you’ll never be able to fully control. That’s the point I’m making.
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“Being at the mercy”, as you describe, would be us being unable to operate, live, pay ourselves etc because a car is scraped or has a chipped windshield.
Which is absolutely false, there are 100s of claims pending, and our daily operations and overhead doesn’t depend on an insurance company approving a cheque. Multiple cheques get approved daily. That’s just amateur talk.
In this particular business, there are certain costs you swallow, you have safety nets for that, and to the gen pop who haven’t never operated something on such a large scale personally, it seems like the end of the world and “being” at the mercy of insurance companies.
Because it’s a rotation circle with revenue coming from every which way, it’s just part of the operating cost, and not devastating. Waiting is not being at the mercy, it’s just part of the game, especially while you’re making bank in multiple other ways.
It’s just the extremely high risk business we are in.
We don’t have to ask a random 23 yr old HR associate to go on vacation, and then come back with a pile of work.
Thats the difference here