Whether to Use Our Car or a Rental Car
On a Christmas trip, I continued what I’ve been doing lately of renting a car instead of using our own. Our Range Rover (?????) miles on it, and the thought always is at the back of our minds that it might break down. And besides, as we’re driving 3,000 miles all the way to Yellow Stones, we wanted to make sure we had a car that was really, really reliable.
I tried to get my regular car at Enterprise, but they didn’t have any four-wheel drive cars. We ended up getting one from Alamo instead. The guys at Alamo at San Diego airport have really earned a place in my heart lately because we’ve rented from them a few times. This time they’ve got us into a Suburban, which took us quite a bit of work to find. But they found us this four-wheel drive Suburban that we could have for 12 days. Over the 12 days, we put close to 3,000 miles on the car. It was actually a fantastic car to drive. I’m not really one who’s used to driving on snow or ice. In fact, the concept of having to drive on snow or ice terrified me. My wife was much more comfortable with the whole idea, but the thought of driving in the snow or ice scared me.
The second day we woke up in Utah, and we had a 200 miles of isolated snowy (???), and the road looked like we were driving on 3-4 inches of ice the whole time. I started off the day very timid, very slow and very careful until the TV show, Ice Road Truckers, crossed my mind. I looked over at my wife, said, “Ice Road Truckers”, hit the gas, took it up to 80 and we drove at 80 miles/hour for hours on nothing but ice.
The question comes to mind - Is it better, in a situation like this, to be driving in our own car or better to be renting one? When you work out the costs to purchase a car and maintain it, and you compare that against reliability of always driving a new car, what I figured out is that if I’m going to be taking a road trip and driving for 1-3 days of long driving, it’s usually cheaper to drive our own car. If I’m going to be in an area that’s isolated out in the desert in the summer or out in the mountains where there’s snow in the winter, then I’d rather have a brand new car that you can get when you have a rental car. So, it turns out that the rental car, not only is it more cost-effective, but it also gives you that safety and security.
One of the big problems I run into, though, is trying to find, for a trip like this, a 4-wheel drive rental car. In fact, in town renting 4-wheel drive cars is very, very uncommon. Enterprise claimed they didn’t have any. Alamo had a few. When I talked to the people at the Las Vegas airport locations, almost three rental car companies had nothing but 4-wheel drive SUVs in Las Vegas. When you’re taking a trip, like a longer one where you’re going to be driving, say 500 miles somewhere, where you’re going to be driving 500 miles back, it’s probably cheaper just to take your own car. But if you’re going to be taking a trip where you’re putting a lot of miles on the car every day, it’s always going to end up cheaper getting a rental car, plus, you have more reliability.
The Suburban, by the way, has been fantastic. It’s got excellent satellite radio, which I’d never used before. And we found a station on it, called Coffee House, which plays nothing but popular songs from the last 20 years played acoustically by their artists. It’s such a big part that when you’re inside you feel like you’re in your living room and the weather (???) are absolutely trinormous. It makes driving along thousands of miles at a time and listening to the Coffee House even when there’s howling wind outside where it is 10 degrees below 0 and everything is covered with ice or snow, an incredibly relaxing and comfortable experience.
