zipcar
- Thread starter Peño
- Start date
Where do you live?
That's exactly the point - being a part of a car club as opposed to owning your own car means that there is now a decision to make, "Do I really need a car to make this journey?" I will see how I cope over the next few months and if I save any money in doing so.£430 fuel presumably equates to around 4,000 miles/year. Will you be covering 4000 miles a year in your zipcars? I doubt it since you'll probably try to stick to a) the 40 mile limit per rental and b) short rentals as it otherwise becomes expensive quickly.
By the way, seriously good effort on spending £475/year on servicing
A full service including cambelt should probably not cost more than £350 unless you're at a main dealer, <£200 without cambelt; bulbs and wipers cost literally pennies and a few minutes to fit; and four good tyres recently cost me less than £300 (and I expect them to last considerably longer than 4k miles!)
With regards to servicing - a good engine oil is £40-50 and I changed mine every year. I would also consider things such as axle bushes, wishbones etc. part of servicing. I also had the windscreen replaced once. Of course, the total cost of servicing varies with how much you know/care about your car and considering a good mechanic in London charges £60/hr, I would say £475/yr on servicing is reasonable.
70p per mile doesn't seem so cheap! That's a pretty serious insurance spend! I'd expect that your annual renewal should be somewhere around £400 if you have 5 years NCB.
Servicing seems very high too unless you've been quite unlucky!
Anyway, would be interested to see how you get on, I had a look at similar schemes in Oz and they didn't make enough sense even though I do barely any mileage.
In central London? looool good luck!
So can you take an open ended rental, to be returned whenever you are finished with the car (e.g. just as you'd use your own car)? If not then it's inflexible to quite a large extent IMO.