Rent a car — buy a car? Survey says: yes!
For years, car rental companies assumed that the cars they rent will affect the cars that ultimately their customers will buy. Heck, it is one of the reasons car manufacturers owned most of the rental firms. A new Avis survey taken in Britain has confirmed those assumptions.
The poll indicated that almost half of the people renting cars were planning to purchase a new car within a year. Carrentals.co.uk reported that, “Of all the drivers surveyed in the UK, almost half said they were ’slightly or much more likely’ to consider buying the car they had most recently rented, while 44 percent planned on a car they had recently hired.”
The survey also suggested that the average rental car is driven by 105 drivers. That’s a lot of advertising that the car manufacturers are getting after selling their cars to the car rental companies.
I’ll bet the next round of negotiations between rental company buyers and automobile manufacturers will have a new economic reality coming into play. And I expect to see fewer SUVs — and more hybrids — in rental fleets.
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That’s a great point. With all the emphasis on “going green” these days, who wouldn’t want to rent a hybrid to try it in for size (as long as it wasn’t too much more expensive than its traditional, gas-guzzling equivalent).
This is exactly what I did last fall. I was considering buying a new car and was especially interested in a flex fuel. My first choice was a Chevy Impala so on vacation in October I rented a regular Impala for the 10 days I was traveling. I was very happy with my rental and bought my 2008 Chevy Impala in January. I live in Iowa I did upgrade to a flex fuel vehicle as we have a fairly good supply of E85 fuel.