I took a car rental in Goa, A car on the highway stopped abruptly, I tried stopping but the front grill got damaged slightly and side metal is slightly protruding, What should i do now?
Now, the baton is in their hand, they'll try to charge you a huge amount of money, take some time and explain it to them properly what happened and in the end quote 50% of their ask, negotiate and leave the place.
Been there, done that, they had asked us to pay 15k for smg like this, we ended up paying 3k after 4 hours of discussion.
Should I inform the owner or wait for him to notice the damages himself
Go to any garage which is a Lil far from the car rental place, and enquire about the cost for the fix, if it is less than what you expect, get it fixed( we made a blunder by not doing this), if it's a major damage, then inform the owner
Is it a proper rental company like Zoomcar? You should be covered by insurance then. If you have rented from a roadside rental agency, you will need to settle. Thats their revenue model.
Try getting it fixed enough for it to be not noticeable at a local garage
Local rentals will try to bill you for the downtime too. They will say that it will take 10 days to repair and ask you for 10 days rental on top of their highly inflated repair estimates.
Try to negotiate, but don't believe anything the rental owner says, being in the same situation the owner took me to the maruti showroom and they quoted 40k, but the damage was far less, after 6 hours of negotiating he settled for 10k.