US Rental Cars

Everyone knows how to rent a car, right? Well, things are a little more involved in the US when you don't already have a car there - and the usual insurance!

What we found out:

• we absolutely can not apply our French car insurance to a US rental, as you normally would with US car insurance.
• we could borrow a car from friends or family, and their liability insurance would cover us if needed. But the usual required amount of coverage is relatively low; if we really needed it, we might also lose our shirts!
• we could get the same amount of insurance on a rental car. In fact, if you don't have insurance already, they're supposed to provide it (and charge you, of course).
• we finally found a place that would sell us supplemental liability insurance, but it would only cover us in a rental car; we couldn't buy it to cover us in a borrowed car.

Well, so what to do? We ended up renting cars for two short periods, buying the insurance (RentalCover, $20/day), and getting rides the rest of the time. To be fair, no one made us feel like we had put them out, but it did feel like a loss of freedom. Just a bit.

Speaking of freedom! This Mustang convertible was one of the cars! Ahhh, top down, sun shining, wind in my hair... And a satisfyingly growly engine 😀😛

It seemed we hit the rental market at a strange time - both times, I was met with the statement: "it's all we have..."

OK - the first car we aimed for was a mid-size, thinking we might drive others around; we ended up with a Spark instead (which was actually pretty roomy). The shock was that they were going to charge us twice as much! They fixed that...

The second car was supposed to be a Spark (LOL), because we needed the fold-down seats for our luggage. That became the Mustang! We put the top down to load/unload our suitcases 🙄.

We also hit the near-peak of gas prices! We paid $6/gallon...

Both cars required a $200 deposit, and took 30-45 minutes to check out (gone are the days of my premium membership - here's your car number, and the keys are in it. Hah!). Both deposits were returned 🙂. Both cars had relatively minor issues - they had definitely been brought out of retirement! The nice thing was, returning the car to SFO, we got the platinum treatment! Just us in an SUV, driven directly to our terminal - nice chat while we were at it, too! 

I'm toying with an idea for next time. If I owned part of a car, I could probably get the insurance I need. And the cost for a year might be better than a month of temporary insurance - plus, I could borrow cars again! Anyway, it's something to think about...