I’m planning a road trip for the summer. We will need a car for three weeks. We won’t need anything flash, I’m almost considering buying some wheels Top Gear road trip stylee. Any tips on where to look? Is it worth adding a car to our flights?

Car rental in the USA is cheap. For 3 weeks you’ll almost certainly be better off renting than trying to buy and insure a car as a non resident.

I’ve used rentalcars.com 4 times over the past 3 years for California, always seemed about as cheap as I could find. This year: 17 days, pick up LAX, drop off SFO in May. £327. Focus sized saloon.

Good call zigzag, Boblo and I rented a Mighty Focus for our last trip. That sounds pretty reasonable.

I used Dollar last year, was just under 3,weeks and £270. It was not a looker but did 4.500 miles no problem. Some kind of Toyota.

We had to go with Enterprise because they were the only big firm that would rent to someone who hadn’t held a license for over a year, but they were great even if they weren’t super cheap. However that isn’t really the point – what I did find after looking into it in some depth, was that buying, licensing and insuring a car as a tourist is really difficult, and generally not worth doing.

They’re also not cheap – apparently due to the economic downturn the turnover of cars has slowed, so the 2nd hand market has tightened right up, with even pretty shonky cars costing plenty. We were pretty glad to have a reliable, new rental car when e.g. driving in Death Valley or over the Sierras… Enterprise mostly gave us Hyundais and they never missed a beat.

We were pretty glad to have a reliable, new rental car when e.g. driving in Death Valley

This is a good point, we had to have the heating on when driving through Death Valley in our 400 dollar car to avoid it overheating 🙂

Have always used Alamo when in the States……good cars and good service

We booked a Mustang convertible (or similar!) for an upcoming trip through Argus car hire. Used Dollar last time & found them to be good. Car in good condition, easy pick up & return, in Newark at least.

Reading through some of the reviews, I would definitely try to avoid Hertz if you’re flying into LAX. Hardly saw anything good said about them.

I’d love to do the buy/drive thing, maybe cross the country & import it back home if it was good enough. Just not this year though

Great stuff folks. We are flying into and back from San Francisco. Planning to see Yosemite, Tahoe, Chico then up to Crater Lake in Oregon, Bend, Sisters, Hood River then Portland, a bit of Washington hopefully to climb Mt St Helens. Then a jaunt down the coast to catch the Redwoods and back to Marin.

Check out carrentals.com – if you are flexible on dates, it can make a huge difference to the cost (even just adjusting start or end date forward/backward a couple of days can make a big difference…)

Buy a Car Hire Excess Insurance Policy before you go. There are loads of stand alone products that give far better coverage for way less money than the hire company will charge. I pay 50 quid for an annual policy. The last time I hired a car Hertz wanted more than that for a week and it didn’t cover lost keys, tyre damage etc.

We’ve just done it. Far cheaper to buy car with flights for us. Flights and ford mustang was 650 each after cash back, booked through ebookers.

Flights were Virgin, car was dollar. All very smooth.

http://www.insurance4carhire.com/ rather than the extra charges locally.

I always book the very lowest category, which rarely exists – you arrive, they try to upsell you something bigger for $x per day, you politely refuse, they give you something bigger anyway.

http://www.insurance4carhire.com/ rather than the extra charges locally.

+1

Then just book the car hire without all the extra nonsense.

On my 2 trips to the west coast I went with Budget for no other reason than they were cheap and a decent size company.

As far as the size of the car goes, I figured that it was an expensive trip, I’d be in the car a lot and to pay for something larger or nicer wasn’t much more than a bog standard hatchback. I ordered a Ford Edge both times, think it was £500 for 2 weeks with extras. It was huge and comfy and relaxing to drive for hours, and took is off road (4×4) more than I expected too! Especially useful around Monument Valley area (we did 2 off road drives) and Escalante Hole in the Rock road which I would not have taken a normal car down.

The first time we went we got upgraded for free to a Lincoln MKT – oh my word it was huge. It made an Audi Q7 look small but it was amazing to be in. Did 20mpg with its 3.7l V6 but that was equivalent to 40mpg in the UK with their fuel prices.

We also were able to easily chuck hire bikes in the back of the Ford (could have done it even easier in the Lincoln) without taking wheels off in Moab which was handy.

If you want to look like every other tourist get a mustang convertible. 😉

I very nearly ordered a Dodge Challenger RT – 450bhp V8 muscle car which would have cost £500 for 10 days but I chickened out.

Stick with the US cars and you’ll get a cheap deal. Hiring Euro cars like a Merc is very expensive and the decent US cars are likely. The Ford and Lincoln we had were both easily as well built and nice to drive as a Euro car.

You’re flying 15hrs and spending thousands on a holiday. Why save a few quid on something you’ll spend a lot of that trip in? For me having a big American car was part of the experience!

BTW there was only me and my wife in those cars we had! A family would have been really comfy in them.

We met a party of 4 from the UK in one of the national parks. They had a Mondeo size car and they said they wished they had got something bigger as it was a squeeze getting them and their luggage in.