On August 21, Judge Maxine M. Chesney granted final approval to a class settlement that reshapes how the largest rental brand in America handles drivers who operate a car with their hands instead of their feet. The case is Ho, et al. v. The Hertz Corporation, No. 3:24-cv-01066-MMC, filed in the Northern District of California in February 2024 by Disability Rights Advocates on behalf of two wheelchair users, Carina Ho and Christina Mills.
The class sought no money. It sought inventory.
What Hertz actually agreed to do
Per the settlement terms published by class counsel, Hertz will continue offering left-side hand controls in the Kia K4, the Chevrolet Equinox or GMC Terrain, and the Chevrolet Tahoe or GMC Yukon — with a specific engineering condition attached, which we’ll get to. Right-side controls stay available in the Nissan Altima, Chevrolet Malibu, Equinox/Terrain, and Tahoe/Yukon.
The new piece is minivans. Hertz will field 20 minivans equipped with left-side hand controls, reserved exclusively for customers who need them, distributed across 20 U.S. airport hub locations and reservable for pickup at any corporate-owned branch within 200 miles of a hub. They go first-come, first-served on prepaid round-trip reservations booked at least seven days out.
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Two policy fixes matter as much as the metal. Hertz must give hand control users access to the same low rates available to everyone else, ending what the complaint characterized as an effective surcharge. And when you reserve a car with hand controls, the controls must be installed when you arrive — if they aren’t, installation gets prioritized and you get a discount. Hertz also has to publish clearer online information about which vehicle categories can actually be booked with controls.
That last item sounds like housekeeping. It isn’t. A reservation system that won’t tell you what’s bookable is a barrier as real as a curb.
Why the model list reads like a random assortment
Here’s the part almost nobody explains, and it’s the whole reason this fleet looks the way it does.
Temporary hand controls are a mechanical linkage. A lever mounts to the steering column and connects by rods to the brake and accelerator pedal arms — typically push to brake, push down or pull to accelerate, depending on the design. A spinner knob clamps to the wheel so the other hand can steer through a turn without hand-over-hand work. The whole assembly lives in the footwell and lower dash area, directly under the column.
That is precisely the volume a driver’s knee bolster airbag occupies and deploys into.
Hand control manufacturers therefore specify that the driver’s knee bolster airbag be disabled — in some cases physically removed — before the controls go in. Both directions of the problem are real: the bag can interfere with operating the linkage, and the linkage sits in the path of a deploying bag.
Federal law makes that a compliance question, not a shop-floor decision. It’s illegal for a manufacturer, dealer, rental company, or repair business to knowingly disable equipment installed to meet a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard. So switching off a knee airbag to fit controls required an explicit federal exemption.
NHTSA granted one. A final rule published March 15, 2022 amended 49 CFR Part 595, Subpart C to let rental companies temporarily make a knee bolster airbag inoperative for exactly this purpose. Before that, the subpart predated the FAST Act and simply didn’t list rental companies among the entities allowed to use the exemptions. The rulemaking came partly in response to an inquiry from Enterprise Holdings, which had run into the same wall.
The exemption comes with strings. Under Part 595, a rental company doing this has to affix a label positioned where the driver can see it without obstructing the view forward, carrying the statement “To accommodate installation of hand controls, this rental vehicle has had its knee bolster” airbag disabled — and it has to retain documentation of the modification.
Now the settlement’s model list makes sense. Hertz commits to left-side controls in those specific vehicles “as long as they are manufactured without knee bolster airbags.” Pick a car that never had the bag, and you skip the labeling, the paperwork, and the operational headache of pulling a unit out of general circulation until the specific customer shows up. The accessible fleet at any rental company is shaped less by customer demand than by which interiors happen to lack one particular restraint.
That’s a fragile foundation. Model-year redesigns change restraint architecture without warning, and a car that qualifies this year can drop off the list next year. It’s a fleet defined by an accident of interior packaging.
This fight has a long paper trail
Rental accessibility has been litigated for three decades, and the pattern is depressingly consistent: agreement, compliance, drift, new lawsuit.
The Justice Department told the American Car Rental Association back in January 1993, in a technical assistance letter, that providing hand controls is required where readily achievable, and that adequate advance notice depends on location, staffing, and fleet size — an hour or less might be reasonable at a big-city site with trained mechanics on hand. DOJ signed an agreement with Avis in 1994 requiring hand controls at no charge, then had to return in 1996 after complaints that Avis wasn’t living up to it. A later DOJ settlement with Enterprise covered adaptive devices including left-foot accelerators, pedal extenders, and spinner knobs across a variety of vehicle classes.
DRA itself settled a class action against Hertz more than twenty years ago that required temporary hand controls on all models where they could be safely operated. By its own account, Hertz honored that broadly for years, then quietly narrowed the eligible models until whole rental categories became off-limits. Which is how everyone ended up back in the same courthouse.
What renters should do with this
Book early and get it in writing. The minivan program’s seven-day, prepaid, round-trip structure means spontaneity is not on the menu, and a one-way van rental with hand controls remains a problem the settlement doesn’t solve.
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Know that you’re now entitled to the same rate a nondisabled customer would pay for the same car. If the controls aren’t installed when you show up, the agreement obligates Hertz to prioritize the install and discount your rental. Class counsel is monitoring implementation and asks renters to file complaints with Hertz directly, and to notify DRA as well.
And if you get a car wearing that federally mandated warning label, read it. It means a restraint system in your vehicle has been switched off by design, documented in a file somewhere, and reactivated after you return the keys. That’s the trade the federal government approved to make these rentals legal at all, and it’s worth understanding rather than peeling off the dash.