Not exactly a dealership, but I'm out on business driving a rental this week. I arrived at the airport at 8pm and I had to wait while they cleaned and prepared my vehicle. I originally requested a compact car, but was told I received a free upgrade and it seemed like I didn't have much of a choice but to take it. They ended up giving me a Dodge Journey. I don't like driving trucks anymore since they're difficult to use in cities and finding parking and I don't really consider this an "upgrade." Giving me a larger vehicle is not doing me any favors.
Enterprise did this to me last year. Wanted a "Nissan Versa or similar", got a fucking monster truck of a giant deluxe luxury package SUV. I don't care if it normally rents for $200/day, I don't want it. When I returned it, the guy eagerly asked if I liked it, and saying "No, but that's not the car's fault." deflated him pretty hard.
We pretty routinely get "upgrades" from Hertz when renting cars, but it's usually more along the lines of "Reserve a Chevy Spark, get a Ford Focus hatchback or Nissan Sentra" which I'm more OK with.
My favorite time was when the smarmy Hertz guy was grilling my GF to upgrade to a bigger car for her trip for only an extra $x/day (totally unnecessary, and she shot it down)... and then ended up just giving her that next class up anyway because that's what they had on hand. Thanks, guy, way to go.
This was a lot longer than I expected, but it's along the lines of rental companies and reasons to FIRE ASAP, maybe you'll enjoy it.
For work maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I had to rent an SUV to drive a bunch of equipment 500 miles, do some tests for a week, then drive it back. One of our prototypes was broken and needed to be diagnosed ASAP in order to be considered for a contract. At the time it was the product that was going to save the company. The designers of it weren't willing to go, so they sent me since I had performed some verification testing on it at one time and worked on other similar products. I had to bring a lot of equipment, so I asked the person who handles renting vehicles for a large SUV. Well the company was struggling, so she kept trying to get me into something smaller. Eventually I had to go measure all the equipment and check out the dimensions of 5 "midsized" SUVs (basically the CRV's and similar SUV's), so that I could make sure all my equipment would fit in one size smaller vehicle. I spent half a day doing this, to save what, $10/day for a week?
So the next day, I go pick up my "midsized" SUV, and they try to give me the keys to a Jeep Wrangler. On the website they had listed 5 SUVs then said "or similar." Sorry this isn't similar to the other 5. In fact (when I got back from the trip I checked), it was listed on the "small" SUV. That just wasn't going to work.
So I called my company rental contact to let her know of the problem, and started calling other rental places to see what they had. Eventually I found one with a large SUV who had one ready. It was a Friday, I was going to work through the weekend, but in order to use my equipment where I was going, it had to get checked in that day, or I couldn't use it until Monday. By this time, I had an 8 hour drive, and 9-10 hours to get there. So if I picked up the vehicle right then, threw all my equipment in as fast as I could, I would probably make it as long as there wasn't any major construction or wrecks or anything.
I called back my rental contact to say I found something. She starts dragging her feet saying a large SUV was not approved and she would have to find something else. I end up calling the VP of engineering, who puts the rental on his personal CC, I pick it up, pack everything, skip lunch, and have a late dinner after getting all the equipment where it needed to go.
Saturday, I figure out a redundant sensor was giving bad readings on one of the boards. I reprogramed it to basically ignore that sensor so that the customer could get back to testing it. Then hung out there for a week waiting for a new board to arrive. Replaced the board and came home.
In the end, the product met all the requirements, and testing finished on schedule, but they went with someone who met like half the "requirements" for a third of the cost. I had warned about a year and a half earlier at the system requirements review, there was no way they were going to pay what it would cost to meet all of the requirements. So that did not save the company. They had maybe 2 or 3 other products that would save the company before they eventually closed, but I had moved on before then.