[nutter]

I posted this up on decent world, and only got a couple of useful posts back that suggested posting this here on ridemonkey, so if you've got any info I'd appreciate it if you could post it up, and one place that might rent a car out to us.

Right, at the moment me and a mate are planning on heading over to Whistler next year for a week and a half with the bikes, posting them home then heading on to the US (California) to do some sight seeing. We won't be needing a car in Canada as we'll be staying in Whistler for the whole week.

Now comes the tricky part, minimum age for rental in the US from most places is 21 after some googleing and research, by the time we go over there me and a friend will have held full UK manual licenses for over 2 years, with no convictions. There won't be anyone else (ie no one else over 21) with us, so we can't be put on as nameed drivers which some places will do. We would be looking to rent as 2 19 year olds. I've found 1 place that might do it according to another website, so have emailed them and am waiting a reply.

It's not looking good so far, and I think I can expect that we won't be able to rent while we are over there due to our age. So I'm asking here to see if anyone else had head otherwise or had any experience that they could share.

The other option is that we just buy a cheap and nasty hack job, and drive around on third party insurance only so if we smash up an old crapper it won't matter a damn, but so we'd be covered for someone else obviously if we went in to the back of a nice new BMW.

Any ideas??? Post em up

cheers

Dan

 

[ultraNoob]

That's a tough one. Here in Southern California, I believe that the minimum rental age without an "adult" driver is 25yrs. Your idea about purchasing a beater car with temporary insurance is good provided you don't get stuck with a lemon and end up using your vacation money for repairs.

You could try renting a car in canada and drive to California?

 

[nutter]

i might just end hiring one in canada and drive down then, would give us an excuse to see a bit of the west coast, and since petrol is cheaper than water (seriously), i might just do that.

in the uk per gallon it'll cost you about £4.45 or at the current exchange rate $9.79, so i recon a good drive could be worth it

 

[ultraNoob]

Average drive time from Vancouver, BC, Canada to San Diego is 23hrs nonstop (provided you do not hit too much traffic). There are tons of great places to ride in Washington State, Idaho, Oregon, and North Cali, so I figure you don't even need to drive more than 10hrs from Whistler to get your game on. And if you stay within a 15 hr radius from Vancouver, returning the car shouldn't be that much of a hassle.

 

[nutter]

yeah the riding in the north looks pretty awesome, I saw a lot of stuff when I was looking for a new bike (ended up with a Bottlerocket) mainly in the transition videos. I'm really looking forward to it. Doing a bit of sight seeing so that's why we fancy heading down to San Fran for a bit. Seeing as there will be two of us though, I don't think that lots of driving should be too much of a problem

 

[Kornphlake]

There are a few places that will rent a car to drivers under 24, but I don't think you can get anything if you're under 21.

You could probably work out something with a shady used car dealer where you buy the car for a week drive it and sell it back to the dealer for the price you paid minus a few hundred dollars, but you'd get slapped with title transfer fees, you'd have to register the vehicle, have an emissions inspection and get insurance to boot. It would end up costing a boat load of money, just the paperwork will cost $300 or more depending on the car and the county.

 

[Spunger]

I know that my recent trip where I rented a car (I am 25) they had options down to 18 but the rates were ridiculous. I just thought thank god I'm 25 which is the age at about all of the car rental company's consider you an adult. It was like 4x what I paid to rent a car if you were 18-24.

If you have to rent one you have to rent one. There's really no cheap way around it.

I dunno about the whole buying a cheapo car, insure it for a month, and deal with all that. Southern California sucks for insurance and there's loads of nice new cars out there. The chances are pretty high if you get into an accident the car will be worth more than yours. In some cities you could have a $25,000 and still be considered "cheap" by what else is around. Santa Barbara is exactly that way.....loads of BMW/Range Rover/Mercades and now more and more Bently's/Porsche's/Rolls Royces are showing up. I'd be poor for life if I caused an accident and a Roll's Phantom was involved.