What Is This Factor That Simply Fell Out of My Rental Automobile?

I’m out of city for a number of days, which implies I’m driving a rental car. This rental certain is making me really feel proper at dwelling, although, as a result of like most of the vehicles I’ve owned through the years, it’s shedding elements. Factor is, I’m not precisely certain what this jettisoned part is for.

I imply, I’ve acquired a primary thought. That is clearly a tool that plugs into the OBDII port below the dashboard, meant to both obtain or transmit information to the automobile’s laptop. The thingy has an ordinary OBD plug on one finish and (in response to resident gear-knower Steve DaSilva) an eight-pin Molex energy plug on the opposite finish. Verify ‘em out:

The fiendish thingy fell out from below the dashboard of my rental about 10 minutes after I picked up the automobile. Fortunately, I used to be sitting at a pink gentle, and the doohickey simply clonked in opposition to my ankle. If I used to be shifting, and the machine had wedged itself behind the brake pedal, that might have been a nasty scene.

The website listed on the back of the device goes to an organization known as PowerFleet, which advertises “on-demand visibility, intelligence and insights to energy your fleet.” The corporate pitches its tools at corporations that function big fleets of automobiles — like development corporations, supply corporations, and naturally, rental automobile corporations. For the latter, PowerFleet’s website guarantees to supply your huge rental automobile company the next capabilities:

RentalFleet® helps you to dive deeper into your automobile rental operations, gaining insights that will help you streamline processes and drive fixed enchancment. Particularly constructed to automate automobile rental and return processes, RentalFleet offers the real-time visibility wanted to see the large image. Convey clever options to work on your automobile rental fleet, and put your operations on the highway to enchancment.

• Improve gas revenues and scale back gas prices
• Optimize automobile return and processing pace
• Rapidly see open slots on the prepared line
• Achieve real-time perception into your stock
• Simply set up in any make or mannequin
• Obtain future software program upgrades wirelessly
• Huge library of OBD-II code interfaces

That’s a moderately obscure listing, and it doesn’t essentially make clear what this machine was doing dangling loosely from my rental automobile’s footwell. Is it meant to be completely put in? Is it one thing that an worker plugs in to obtain/add information after a rental automobile is returned? I presume the latter, and I assume that the worker tasked with processing this specific automobile merely forgot to take away the machine.

However it’s not nice to have an enormous, clunky piece of digital {hardware} looming perilously over the motive force’s footwell, whether or not that’s by design or just by mistake. And I’m curious to know the specifics of how this machine is utilized by rental automobile corporations, and what information it collects. Is my rental firm going to obtain my telemetry after I return this automobile? Will I get an e-mail telling me the place I may have picked up a number of tenths? Am I braking too early on the interstate off-ramp?

For those who work within the rental automobile trade, otherwise you in any other case have particular information of what this machine does and the way a rental firm would possibly use it, drop your information within the feedback under.