Sports car hire business and insurance questions

[ant111s]

Ive read on here (and followed the story of drivesouthwest) and searched the forums about people trying to hire cars, business start ups and problems getting insurance. I have been searching the market now for about 2-3 weeks and have made numerous phone calls and filled out numerous quotation insurance forms with little results..

I may have jumped the gun before looking at insurance as thought it would be a lot easier. I have purchased an Audi r8 and Aston martin vantage which i am looking to hire out, self drive.

I thought there must be a company that covers on a pay as you go basis, bit like day insure but i have yet to uncover one, so i have looked at insuring the cars for hire and the cheapest quote ive had is £14,0000!!! for the year (this did include a porsche 911 turbo) very expensive!

There really doesnt seem to be many companies on the market willing to touch this yet there are a lot of companies specially in the london area offering this so some company must be covering it, or have i missed the boat as a few brokers ive spoken to have said a lot of insurance companies have pulled out of the market.

I am going to be trying to cover the Poole, Bournemouth, Christchurch, New Forest and Possibly Southampton Area. So please also get in touch if you have a sports car that you would like to hire out or if you already run a similar company as tips and pointers would be great!

below is the demo of the website that will be going up sometime within the next week. Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[ant111s]

Thanks for all your thoughts. I guess it just seems a big outlay, after spending near on 100k for the cars, spending another 14k for insurance seems a bit of a ball acher but maybe something that ill have to just get on and do in order to get the cars making money.. I gues if i rented them both out every weekend for a month that would be over half the cost already! Just a big outlay...

Cheers for insurance john contact.. ill try him now.

[ant111s]

DSLiverpool said:

No - it's an advert

Advert?! The company isn't even live yet, website isn't up and as you can tell insurance still not arranged. Hardly an advert.

Cheers for some of the recommendations. Getting some quotes in now.

[ant111s]

jammy_basturd said:

Whilst everyone is mentioning the insurance as being the problem, I'd also advise that I think the website could do from a few more design iterations.

Thanks for taking the time to have a look and comment. I take it your talking about the demo website I put the pic up of and not the one that's on the domain at moment.

What's your recommendations or improvements? Only problem when you keep looking at something for so long you kind of get used to seing it and it's nice to have a fresh eye cast over it.

[ant111s]

KFC said:

How about you tell us when you've got insurance signed and paid for, then we can give feedback on the site. Its not particularly appealing to spend valuable time giving feedback on something that you're 50/50 on even being able to legally launch.

Coz the whole point of this thread was for some pointers on the business and insurance before launch

[ant111s]

KFC said:

And if you can't get insurance there won't even be a launch, so it doesn't matter how bad your website is.

Brilliant. Thanks for your constructive feedback.

[ant111s]

Paddymcc said:

Another idea might be to look into supplying the cars to insurance companies for like for like hire when customers have accidents in similair vehicles.

Yea this is a good shout. This has been mentioned in passing to me before. Be good for when hiring is quiet i guess in winter period.

[ant111s]

insurance_jon said:

thats where you're wrong. with SDH insurance for new start ups they want to see a plan. Many of these ventures fail due to bad planning, and are attracive to organised crime for VAT fraud so they want to do due dil on the directors. the things they are are looking at when they underwrite it are:

1. experience within the industry
2. marketing - how are you aiming this at clients? what types of clients are you attracting
3. where the vehicles are stored
4. ages of directors, employees and drivers
5. induction process - i.e are you just chucking the keys for the Ferrari at the guy who has only ever driven a mondeo or will there be a documents check drive
6. asset tracking
7. vehicle security

plus much more.

Yea I've been asked this with a few companies.

[ant111s]

jammy_basturd said:

To be completely honest I'm struggling to find many positives. Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh. The visual hierarchy of the website isn't brilliant, my eyes don't know what to look at next. The big banner area takes up a lot of room but does nothing. The whole site looks like it's been squashed together, almost as if someone wants everything to be above the first fold (which doesn't exist). The whole thing just looks like something a junior would have produced in Dreamweaver or Frontpage about 10 years ago.

My advice for someone just starting out would be to engage a web designer/coder who can spend maybe a week pulling together a Wordpress site for you using an existing theme. The reason I suggest a theme is that it doesn't look like you have a strong brand image yet, so a completely custom designed website would be pointless. A theme gives you a massive leap to a professionally designed (usually responsive) website for a fraction of the cost.

I spent 10 minutes on ThemeForest and came up with these suggestions:

Car specific and wouldn't take long to adapt for your needs: http://themes.bonfirelab.com/shandora_cardeal/
Same as above: http://themeforest.net/item/opendoor-responsive-re...

These themes are a bit more generic but I think could work well:
http://themeforest.net/item/glissando-creative-one...
http://themeforest.net/item/goddess-multi-purpose-... (ignore the rainy effect, I'd remove that).

It's not as squashed as it looks on the pic I've put it all together so that you can see full layout. The top images are a moving slider then as you scroll down it will take you to the app form and the buttons. Then scroll down then beneath that will be banner with car emblems.

Cheers for the input I got this theme off of themeforest I'll try dig link out so you'll see eventually what layout should be like. Thanks for showing me the ones you'd think would work will have a look into it. I've got developers helping me at moment. I know the picture does give impression it's like dream weaver but it will look more impressive when live.

[ant111s]

insurance_jon said:

Remember behind each of these stories is a claim

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-13000...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229983/Pi...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8934978/F...


http://www.inautonews.com/rented-ferrari-458-itali...

Strangely you get a lot of these round Ramadan and the wedding season

Frightening isn't it. I've read so many stories including most of the above in my research so it gives me a bit of a better educational decision when who to rent out to. Kind of figures why firstly you have insurance and secondly why the quotes are so high specially for new starters.

[ant111s]

Paddymcc said:

A guy in belfast sells ferrari experience trips in his car whereby you get to drive around the city with him in the passenger seat for 30mins and some driver training.

Sells the 'experience' on daily deal type websites and might be another another avenue for you.

http://www.goldenmoments.ie/ferrari360-belfast-20....

Nice one.. cheers for this!

[ant111s]

jammy_basturd said:

To be completely honest I'm struggling to find many positives. Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh. The visual hierarchy of the website isn't brilliant, my eyes don't know what to look at next. The big banner area takes up a lot of room but does nothing. The whole site looks like it's been squashed together, almost as if someone wants everything to be above the first fold (which doesn't exist). The whole thing just looks like something a junior would have produced in Dreamweaver or Frontpage about 10 years ago.

My advice for someone just starting out would be to engage a web designer/coder who can spend maybe a week pulling together a Wordpress site for you using an existing theme. The reason I suggest a theme is that it doesn't look like you have a strong brand image yet, so a completely custom designed website would be pointless. A theme gives you a massive leap to a professionally designed (usually responsive) website for a fraction of the cost.

I spent 10 minutes on ThemeForest and came up with these suggestions:

Car specific and wouldn't take long to adapt for your needs: http://themes.bonfirelab.com/shandora_cardeal/
Same as above: http://themeforest.net/item/opendoor-responsive-re...

These themes are a bit more generic but I think could work well:
http://themeforest.net/item/glissando-creative-one...
http://themeforest.net/item/goddess-multi-purpose-... (ignore the rainy effect, I'd remove that).

The shandora one looks quite funky