Should you ever accept a vehicle with windscreen damage?

[The real Swiss Tony]

Picked up a car from Avis yesterday in Glasgow for a few hours. It wasn’t in the best condition with a litany of dings and scrapes, 66,000 miles on the clock and two bits of damage to the windscreen.

Neither impaired visibility, but obviously the risk of the chip becoming a full blown crack was significant. Presumably had that happened, Avis would have deemed me as liable. Left me thinking if I did the right thing in accepting the car – and also whether Avis should even be renting them out in that condition?

[Richie]

Avis should have had the car in the needing maintenace car park.

[NorthernLass]

I had a Kia Ceed from there a few weeks ago on a BAH – it had several dings, including where it had clearly been reversed into a bollard or similar at speed at some point! I was only using it as a run around for a few days but if I’d been intending to do more than 100 miles or so I would definitely have kicked up a fuss! Clearly not a one-off, then.

I don’t think I’d be happy with the windscreen situation as that’s something that can worsen while you have the car, and while you can argue that the damage was already there (I must admit the damage was all very clearly logged on my agreement), it would obviously be very inconvenient to have to change cars mid-rental.