Enterprise Holdings announced that, through its regional subsidiaries, it has now removed approximately 83 percent of the approximately 35,000 recalled Toyota and Pontiac Vibe vehicles from its North American rental fleet on behalf of its Alamo Rent A Car, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and National Car Rental brands.

The company said its network of more than 5,000 Enterprise Rent-A-Car neighborhood locations — located within 15 miles of 90 percent of the U.S. population — enabled it to respond quickly and smoothly to the recall.

These vehicles, which were identified for recall and suspension of sales due to potential problems with sticking accelerator pedals, represent about 4 percent of the company’s entire North American fleet.

“We’ve been able to move so quickly to pull almost 30,000 cars from our fleet because of our coast-to-coast network of neighborhood and airport locations,” said Matt Darrah, executive vice president-North American Operations for Enterprise Holdings, which owns and operates the Alamo, Enterprise and National brands.

“I also have to give tremendous credit to our team,” Darrah noted. “Our employees have worked hard to ensure that, in the process of protecting our customers’ safety, we’ve also minimized their inconvenience.

“The other factor that’s worked in our favor is that the affected vehicles represent such a small percentage of our total fleet,” Darrah said. “That’s added to our speed and efficiency in moving vehicles from city to city, or back and forth between airports and nearby neighborhood branches, to minimize delays in getting customers into a replacement vehicle. That same flexibility, combined with new cars coming into our fleet and our plans to keep some existing cars a bit longer than planned, makes us confident that we can continue meeting customer demand.”

Enterprise Holdings will continue to remove all affected cars from its fleet. Meanwhile, the company has suspended sales of the affected models and will not sell or put any affected Toyota vehicles into service under the Alamo, Enterprise or National car rental brands until the situation is corrected.

Further, Enterprise Fleet Management, working with Toyota, is continuing to contact its leasing customers who have leased a vehicle subject to the recall and is keeping them informed of the latest developments.

None of the vehicles in the company’s car sharing fleet, operated under the WeCar brand, is affected by the manufacturer’s safety recall concerning potentially sticking accelerator pedals.

 

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