Want a spare tire with that? Be careful where you rent a truck

We've complained before about the prevalence of new cars coming without spare tires. Now even when some vehicles come from the factory with spares, rental companies are starting to remove them.

This trend became personal when my colleague Jim Travers rented a motorhome in New Mexico on vacation this fall. The rental company's policy stated that the RV's spare and jack had been removed. Furthermore, the independent rental company offered no roadside assistance, and AAA where he has been a member for decades wouldn't cover the RV. Fortunately, Jim didn't have any problems exploring the wild west.

However, an employee's husband recently rented a truck in Colorado and had a flat. He's mechanically inclined and quite capable of managing a roadside emergency. But when he went to change the tire, he found the jack missing. And while he is a true do-it-yourselfer, he's not burly enough to lift a Ford F-150 while installing a new tire on his own. He'd rented the truck from Budget, which provides 24-hour roadside assistance. While better than nothing, he had to wait for someone to arrive and tackle the task he was capable of doing himself.

Wondering if these experiences were anomalies, we called all three major consumer truck rental companies in the United States: Budget, Enterprise, and U-Haul. For good measure we also called commercial-focused Penske and Ryder.

For their part, Budget said their F-150 should have had a spare and a jack, and they're looking into why the jack was missing. The company's policy is to include spares with vehicles they consider cars, including the F-150, Econoline cargo vans, and 15-passenger E-350 vans. But larger, box trucks don't come with spares.

Enterprise tells us their trucks do include spares and jacks. The company also offers a roadside assistance policy.

Joanne Fried, public relations director for U-Haul, was the first one who gave us a good explanation of why the company doesn't include spares or jacks in any of its rental trucks: The company doesn't want the liability of consumers trying to jack up the large, potentially heavily laden, trucks and properly torque the lug nuts once they put the spares on. We understand the concern. Beyond a passenger-scale vehicle, large trucks are best handled by professionals with the right training and tools.

All three companies say they offer roadside assistance 24 hours a day and that average response time is less than an hour.

Penske and Ryder both say they omit spares and jacks from all their trucks. Both rent mostly large trucks to commercial businesses, and also have large maintenance fleets to take care of the trucks, which carry large stocks of spares.

Penske spokesman Randolph Ryerson says the company does about 10 percent of its truck rental business to consumers, but echoes Fried's sentiment: "We don't want consumers changing tires. It's just too dangerous," he says.

In the end, we think most consumers would prefer to have a spare and a jack on passenger vehicles so they could decide whether to use roadside assistance or change a tire themselves. We're sympathetic to safety concerns about consumers changing their own tires by the side of the road and possibly not tightening lug nuts sufficiently.

Our advice: When renting a car or truck, ask if it has a spare and tools or if they an alternate arrangement for changing the spare. Best to have a strategy in place for dealing with a roadside emergency in advance.

How about you? If you had a flat in a rented vehicle, would you rather have to call roadside assistance or be able to change it yourself?

Let us know in the comments below.

—Eric Evarts