Frequent car hire

Russinating

Russinating

Russinating

Soldato
Joined
27 Dec 2005
Posts
17,316
Location
Bristol
I barely use my car, and its expenses mount to over £1k a year (insurance, tax, MOT) without even taking into account depreciation, repairs and servicing. SO I'm looking at alternative options.

I live in Bristol so there's the City Car Club and Street Car options, but they're fairly pricey (£50 for 24 hours). Looking about at local rental agencies the cheapest (and one of the closest to me) seems to be Europcar, who also do a 10% loyalty discount card.

Are there any other options I'm missing, or does anyone have any experience as to the cheapest way to go about this? Usage would be for work (24 hours hire normally, once or twice a month) and the odd social use.

Cheers!
 
You'd be better just buying an older car that's done practically all it's depreciation but still fairly reliable I.e 2001 ford mondeo, cheap to insure and tax,
 
A Mondeo? Srsly? I know OcUK bums them and all but I wasn't expecting to have one suggested here.

A 2001 Ford Mondeo as you suggest would cost £245 on tax and £541 to insure (1.8). Plus MOT at £40 and servicing bits (oil etc), it'd cost around £900 to run for a year, excluding any repair costs or even wear and tear costs - which I'd expect from a 10 year old car, hence why I'm getting rid of my old one.

That and the fact it'd probably cost me more in fuel than a newer hire car and I'd be turning up to see clients in a 10 year old Mondeo, I just don't fancy it tbh :p.

An estimate of £1,500 for the above plus an average amount of repair costs (from my experience of owning an old car!) is the equivalent to me hiring a car 50 times (24h), or almost once a week, which I certainly won't do.
 
Not really an option as most of the work travel I do is a 200-300 mile round trip with a 12 hour stop in between. But yes, for the odd travel somewhere in town where buses don't go then yeah, that's an option.
 
I think the only person that knows if it will be worth it is you, ie do you know that you can get around at short notice without a car, or for those trips to b&q to get some large bits for your garden/house etc, I know a lot of these things can be delivered now, but the car is best for being spontaneous and just doing what you want when you want, if you dont need it for this then car hire could work for you.
 
Looking at Europcar the minimum price you are going to be paying (without any discount from membership etc) is £103.99. That doesn't even get you 10 trips for your £1000.
 
imb4tman said:
Looking at Europcar the minimum price you are going to be paying (without any discount from membership etc) is £103.99. That doesn't even get you 10 trips for your £1000.
Click to expand...

lolwut?

Hiring in September, Friday until Monday:

septhire.png



Hiring tomorrow morning until Sunday:

tomorrowhire.png


Minus 10% off all of those with the loyalty card as well.
 
since july I have just been hiring a car when i need one. Got a nice saab estate with climate, leather etc and it cost about 150 quid for weekends, is cheaper than owning a car and if you need a car for a few days works out cheaper than the car schemes
 
Don't you use your car socially at all?

Also how does this work with your employer, they expect you to drive but don't provide you with a car/ give you an allowance? Or are you self employed?
 
Disco Boy said:
Don't you use your car socially at all?
Click to expand...

Not really, no. I live in a city so nobody ever drives socially - it's always a walk or a bus.

Disco Boy said:
Also how does this work with your employer, they expect you to drive but don't provide you with a car/ give you an allowance? Or are you self employed?
Click to expand...

I am my employer (and an employee, technically) :p
 
Got some work travel tomorrow so we've hired a car to test it out/see how we get on. Total cost of £40.50 for hire from this afternoon until Monday. Not bad!

Edit: Scrap that: young driver surcharge is £14 per day :rolleyes: because I'm 24. Stupid.
 
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Russinating said:
lolwut?

Hiring in September, Friday until Monday:

http://www.rghjones.co.uk/files/septhire.png[IMG]


Hiring tomorrow morning until Sunday:

[IMG]http://www.rghjones.co.uk/files/tomorrowhire.png/IMG]

Minus 10% off all of those with the loyalty card as well.[/QUOTE]

That is good prices. I did a search for one day and it came out like this;

[IMG]http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g86/mranaconda/Capture-9.png
Click to expand...
 
I'm also suprised by quite how reasonable Russinating is finding hire cars. I was about to suggest that 1500 quid would hire a car perhaps 20 times, tops, as I have found car hire in the UK to be almost comically expensive.

When I've done comparisons against the prices I pay abroad it usually comes in at something stupid like 80 quid a day for a Focus or something.
 
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