Cant rent or contract hire an old car

In the US there are used car rental options. One is Rent-A-Wreck. Another is Cars to Go which runs a slightly different model in that you can just leave the car anywhere in a designated city or area and pay by the hour if desired. You find available cars on your smartphone and most have bike racks.

I think the traditional car rental companies have a volume pricing advantage where a smart shopper gets quite a good price, sometimes less than $20 a day. Most of those kinds of deals are at non-airport locations. For airports, there are some new strategies where one consumer "rents" his airport parked car to another consumer. The cars are tracked and insured through services like Flightcar Sharing.

 

It IS possible to hire older cars, such as classic cars but there are much higher insurance costs applicable to the hire companies. Older cars, whilst still correctly serviced, are more likely to break down or fail causing accidents and importantly, injuries to the hirer. This results in much higher rental costs for these older cars.

Also as a business case. It barely makes financial sense to use older cars. You can hire a modern car for £20 a day all in. The profit on that is minimal. Why would a hire company want to use an older car with no warranty with potential for failing parts and thus compromised reliability, just so they can offer hire for £15 a day? The main expense to the hire company is the premises, tax, insurance where the car itself is minimal in that £20 a day.

A lot of the big companies like Enterprise will buy cars in large numbers and buy them outright. After 6-12 months they will sell them on, often with minimal depreciation due to the original discounted purchase price for that large purchase. I wonder if you said to Vauxhall you wanted to buy 15,000 (or whatever) cars in one go, you would negotiate a significant discount.

Finally, a lot of car hire companies have regular business or contract companies (insurers, bodyshops, businesses) who demand new cars and are happy to pay an extra £5 a day (assuming they don't get a discount - which they do!) to have that benefit.

I would say that it's an open market out there and if you think hiring old cars is a missed business opportunity, then by all means, make it your niche business.