You don’t have to be the First Lady to try car pooling
GETTING together with friends or colleagues on journeys cuts costs as all passengers share petrol expenses. Car sharing’s growing popularity has been reflected in the world of showbiz through Peter Kay’s TV comedy series Car Share and the Carpool Karaoke segment of James Corden’s US TV programme The Late Late Show, which features A-listers singing along in the front passenger seat – and has even featured American First Lady Michelle Obama.
If you’re comfortable sharing with strangers, you can find fellow travellers through websites such as Liftshare and BlaBlaCar.
Alternatively, if you do not drive frequently enough to warrant owning a car and you don’t want to car-pool, you could join a car club and rent a vehicle as and when you need it with fuel costs and insurance included.
Clubs like Zipcar and Enterprise Car Club have cars dotted around cities and in residential areas for the
convenience of prospective customers. Zipcar operates in London, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, Maidstone, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Enterprise Car Club covers 19 British cities from Brighton on the South Coast to Stirling in Scotland.
Annual membership for both starts at £60, while renting a car starts at £5 an hour, climbing to £40 a day with Enterprise, not including petrol, and to £95 with Zipcar for a sevenseater over the weekend, for example.
A car can be reserved online or via a smartphone app and unlocked with a membership card.
Europcar has also recently launched a new ‘long term’ service, providing monthly car rental for a fixed price, including insurance. Prices start at £360 for 28 days with free delivery and collection and a monthly mileage allowance of 2,520 miles. Additional drivers can be added at no extra cost. Anyone signing up to a car club should also be mindful of insurance excess costs – which could mean paying up to £1,000 in the event of having to make a claim after an accident. It may be possible to lower or eliminate the excess by paying extra or taking out a standalone excess insurance policy. Providers include insurance4carhire, Questor and iCarhireinsurance.