The economy of desperation can result in some crazy behavior. This might just have been an accident. Or, it may be just the start of the cray cray craziness.
On Friday evening near the Southwest Florida International Airport in Ft Myers, a fire started in a grassy area where excess rental cars were being parked. The fire initially involved about 20 cars. By the time the fire department arrived about 100 cars had been engulfed. Before the fire could be extinguished, more than 3500 cars were destroyed www.cnn.com/....
The vast number of cars were temporarily parked in this grassy overflow area near the airport because of the dearth of renters. In normal times these would have been rented to air travelers and would have been dispersed across the state under contract to visitors and vacationers. But with the disruption in normal travel patterns, there is (or was) a huge surplus of rental cars with nobody to rent them, so all those extra cars had to be parked somewhere.
Now grass fires can start for any number of reasons. Careless smoking or a faulty overheated catalytic converter, lightning strikes or spontaneous combustion are possibilities. The cause of the fire remains under investigation. Someday we may learn how the fire started, but doesn’t it seem a little odd.
If you find yourself suddenly unemployed and are justifiably worried about how you will pay your car loan or mortgage, think about the prospect of paying for thousands of cars that nobody was going to rent any time soon. That sudden new reality must have caused the rental car companies some angst. They were going to have to pay the leases on those cars with no income to offset those payments. That’s a lot of red ink on the balance sheet. Now that those thousands of cars have gone up in smoke though, it is a pretty sure thing that they were insured for all sorts of potential losses, including fire.
So, it seems suspiciously convenient that thousands of rental cars that were going to go unrented for the next couple of months and were going to be a heavy financial burden on their owners are now a total loss, covered by insurance.
Some people have all the luck.
Seems like this will be a really tough year for insurance companies