Age restriction or driving license requirments for Oz?

[srebbe64]

My son is doing a gap year this year (Sept 09 - Aug 10). He plans to hire a car in Australia, but he'll be 19 and will have had a license for 2 years. Does anyone know if there is a minimum requirement for age and / or the length of time a full driving license has been held in order to hire a car?

[v15ben]

Need to be driving for 1 year before you can hire. Excess normally gets a little easier when you are over 21, but most places will take under 21s with a few bucks more on the excess.

[deviant]

Depends where he is hiring a car from. There are a sheet load of backpacker rental places that rent high mileage or older cars for not very much.

There are also similar places that sell cheap cars for backpackers and have a netowrk around aus that you can sell them back to.

[durbster]

No point hiring if he's going for more than a couple of months. Best to fly into a major city and buy a car, there's always loads around the major cities but if he flew into Darwin just before the wet season he could pick up an absolute bargain from a desparate seller (b
(bit risky since most people clear off in October/November but quite feasible)

A 2 year old licence should be fine but bear in mind the rules for registration and insurance differ quite a bit from state to state. As far as cars are concerned they might as well be different countries.

[Buffalo]

Note, my bro came out here in 2005 and at that time was 21. He could not drive the v6 engined commodore that he had booked himself through a travel agent in the UK. In the UK they said he would be fine, in Australia they said he had to be 25.

Bear in mind v6 engined cars here are the norm... I would imagine the biggest car he would be able to get, if at all is a yaris, maybe a Corolla.

My advice would be call into a hostel, find a gap year person that is desperate to sell their overpriced shed of a car before they fly out of the country in two days time, deliver the sucker punch and buy it for next to nothing (remembering to mark it up to sell it, when it is his turn)