What would you like to see a hire company hiring out?

"Rent a Wreck" was iirc a US-company renting dunebuggies in the nineties.

But the problem with renting cars -whether your idea or the rental company- stays the same: the customer hops in, drives and leaves the car, generally he doesn't care about it.

Point is that rental companies changes their cars after 5000 -10000 km, because otherwise they would fall apart.

Your kind of cars will fall apart too and far more easily because the older cars are a bit more fragile but you cannot replace, you have to repair which means off-time, searching parts, etc.

Above that older cars are less foolproof for the actual kind of stupid drivers: no airbag? No ABS? No electronic stability? Be ready to get your ass sued off for providing your (crashed) client an unsafe car! :-)

All the best though!

Tom De Moor

All very valid points. As were PeteM's. SteveH did make a valid point too, about the amount of "anorak" type people keen enough on older cars to want to bother being possibly quite limited, although he did miss the point in a big way in pointing out that people that clearly weren't the target market wouldn't have been the right people in the market to target.

But maybe it could work if you got people to sign a disclaimer that said "I promise to be really nice to this car, treat it with mechanical sympathy, as it's getting on a bit, and treat it like it's my own cherished classic car" :-)

P1 is still around, and there's a couple of other, Segrave and Group20 come to mind. They've all been around a while, £20k membership per year seems to be the norm. If I won the lottery I'd have a years membership to test all the supercars to see which ones I liked best to buy :-)

As I never read disclaimers -things like "abuse can lead to injury and possibly death", make me feel uncomfy, so I prefer not to know- I have a better idea (and a free one just for this time).

Delete the safety belts (weight gain!) and place a 20 cm-knife in the middle of the steering wheel with the pointy bit aimed at the driver.

I garantee that most - the odd zombie excluded- will be careful. Better not to mention this particular feature in your leaflets though: let the clients discover it themselves!

Second bright idea: put in your contract that the client in case of sudden death by heartfailure or stabbing (maybe he lives in London!) dedicates his heritage to your company.

Against the Law? Hey, you're the CEO! You handle things!

:-)

Tom De Moor

PS I want a percentage on the second idea!

They sound awesome man. Where did you drive it?

TBH I doubt I will ever be without some form of interesting car, even if I live a 5 minute walk from work. All that will mean is that I've no need to run a "sensible" car.

Bah. John Deere or old school MF is where it's at.

Isn't there about 2mm of stuff behind the rear wheels?

or

SWB locost, inna rally audi-style?

cheers, clive

The company my dad used to work for hired him an XR4x4 once. I did about

Mind you, this was about 18 years ago...

Best cornering grip this side of a ferrari? I would. I've been through the loop of considering them, looking through autotrader, doing some sums before sanity reasserts itself, quite a number of times now.

TBH if I were to bother renting something interesting, it'd probably be stuf like the following:

E30 M3 BMW CSL ur quattro, preferably SWB Lotus Carlton A modern scooby or evo Delta Integrale

Basically, big, fast, relatively expensive and high maintenance kit, that there's no way I could afford to own at the moment. I reckon a hell of a lot would get crashed and thrashed - I'm always very careful in a car that's new to me for a while until I learn its handling traits and quirks. So I might not be able to get any great enjoyment out of a car like that if I only had it for a couple of days. OTOH you'd get a lot of mongs who have no idea about driving (and some people really do know bugger all. I remember mentioning to a bloke who'd be driving for some while about how the car handles differently depending on weight transfer, and he'd never twigged it at all) who'd go and jump in something 20 years old, reverse out of the place at 3000 revs in a cloud of clutch smoke and stuff it at the next roundabout because it doesn't brake or handle like a Mondeo with ABS, ESP and huge power assistance.

There ought to be a Jaguar or two on the list, an X300 6.0 V12 in particular. Everyone should have the chance to drive something like that in order to appreciate just what the interest is in massive-engined vehicles with slushmatic boxes.

"Doki" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

...now think about how high the rental prices would have to be to PAY for those factors...

How about the rental prices for these relatively inexpensive and low risk classics?

Heh, my tractor does the levers to excess. Three clutches, throttle, two gear levers, three point linkage ram, spools. Even the steering is by lever, none of this poncy steering wheel business.

That was kind of my point - to be profitable you'd have to charge a mint, although TBH I couldn't give a f*ck if it were an original or replica SWB quattro.

If you could afford to hire such a thing for a day of pissing about, you'd probably also be able to afford just having one. I suppose it could work along a car club concept where you x days per year, as long as there were a good selection of cars and a hefty deposit. But for that you need a really special cars...

None of this poncy wheels and tyres business either?

Ooh no, just good continuous belts of steel plate.

The first time I drove it I can rememebr thinking "damn it's just like a boat, no accelerator pedal!"

"Doki" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

All the companies who used to do that seem to have disappeared or gone day-rate.

My list of things I'd like to hire if it were possible to do such a thing would be;

Jag E-type S1 1/2 4.2 roadster Jensen Interceptor III coupé (7.2, natch, Brienze blue) BMW E30 M3 Evo Merc 190 Evo Subaru Impreza 22B Rover P5B Coupé VW Microbus splittie Ford GT40 - saw one of these being hooned about yesterday, noise out of it was trouser tenting... Ford Galaxie 500 Ford Mustand 390 GT Fastback in Highland Green Dodge Charger 440 R/T in black (or, f*ck it, Dukes of Hazzard spec) '74 Dodge Monaco 440 '77 911 Turbo 3.3 '97 911 Turbo S

Hmm. I think this'd be more expensive than I'd be willing to pay, and only the microbus is likely to have cupholders...