Car rental vs car owning

[callmedave]

Hello all!

This is my first topic after a long time browsing!

I want to discuss the pro/cons of renting a car as and when i need it vs owning a car out right.

My thoughts are this, as a new driver (after a ban) insurance is ridiculous, plus the cost of buying a car, tax, mot, maintenance etc. if i can hire a car as and when i need it would this be a better option? I do not NEED a car, i walk to work, im near town and my kids happily jump on the bus with me.

Car rental is around £75 for a weekend, so lets say i rent a car every other weekend, it costs me £2k a year, and im hoping fuel will be relatively low due to getting fiesta/polo type models. but i will not build any NCB this way.

But if i go and buy my car, i can have something nice, But pay around £2/3k for insurance, +tax +MOT +maintenance (of which most i can do myself) and all the other costs involved. It will be nice to have a car on my empty drive i can just jump in, rather than arranging a rental, but as i said year one will be very expensive.

Any thoughts? does anyone else do this already?


Many thanks in advance
Callmedave

[pherlopolus]

how do rental companies feel about less than clean driving licenses?

[GoodDoc]

Have you confirmed what the likely rental costs will be with the ban? I know some companies won't rent/insure cars to a driver with particular types of bans (e.g. drink driving).

I worked abroad for five years and it worked out much cheaper to hire cars when i was back in the UK at weekends than continuing to maintain my car, but I wasn't renting every weekend.

Edited by GoodDoc on Friday 25th May 17:13

[callmedave]

pherlopolus said:

how do rental companies feel about less than clean driving licenses?

Oh! I had not even thought about that! A friend of mine hired a van with a speeding endorsement on his license (cant remember the code) Thank you for raising this point, i suppose i should query this with the company i am considering using.

Many thanks

[sawman]

When I lived overseas, we rented cars at the weekend for a while. We often found weekend deal rates, meaning you could pick up thurs pm and hand back tues am for a pretty reasonable rate, and whilst insurance was all in, and the rental office was within walking distance of my house it worked well - enough time to do a supermarket run and weekend messing about, in fact after a while the guys in the office managed to find us upgrades and extra deals, due to being regular customers - one weekend we had a Dodge Charger for the price of a hyundai