Our new home is in Vancouver’s suburbs and I work in downtown Vancouver. That means we need at least 2 cars to get around, but of the cars that we ordered only our family car could be delivered before we moved to Canada. My new car has a production and delivery time of 4-5 months, so I need to rent a car for the next couple of months.

So today I got a small Volvo (a C30 T5) from Hertz as a temporary car to drive to the office. They gave me 2 keys with it on a key chain, and when I was back at my desk I wanted to put one key in my drawer in case I would lose the other one. I tried to open the key chain, but I could not figure out how to do that. Some of XPCP’s portfolio companies are in our office as well and most of the people working there are technical guys, so I asked one of them. To my surprise he also did not manage to open it, so eventually I decided to Google it.

And guess what? These rental car key chains can’t be opened, you have to destroy them in order to get the keys off! I am obviously not the first one who has this problem, and I probably would not care too much if it would be a rental car for just a few days. But carrying both of these huge keys with me for the next couple of months does not seem like a good prospect.

But it made me wonder, who came up with the stupid idea to put both car keys on one key chain that can’t be opened? Either give the customer one key or give him/her 2 separate keys. If I should lose my key now, I will lose both keys. Where is the logic in this? It not only doesn’t make sense but it’s also customer unfriendly.

I am considering to just cut the key chain, but I will likely get into trouble with the car rental company for this. I never take car insurance with my rental cars, so I will probably have to pay for a new key chain myself and that price will be about 20 times higher than what you would pay for this piece of metal yourself. A small dilemma…