Car Rental in Provence, France
It is not until having driven in Haute Provence, France for the last 12 days that I appreciate how important it is when renting a hire car to make sure you have the most suitable car for the environment in which you are driving.
In all honesty I think we were very lucky with the car we ended up with. Car hire is very big business on the internet and extremely competitive and I would be amazed that anyone reading this article found the page by typing “car hire” into one of the search engines such is the competiveness for search engine ranking between the big hire companies and affiliate websites alike.
Our initial criteria for a car were simple: something small with air conditioning. On reflection we got so much more. The car we ordered was a Peugeot 307 with air conditioning at a cost of £263 for 14 days through Hertz, which was an excellent price. As is the case with most car hire companies, a substitute model was supplied, but I would class it as an upgrade at no extra cost. The car supplied was an Opel Meriva 1.7 CDI which we picked up from the Aix-en-Provence TGV having got off the Lille TGV and it proved to be a fantastic car.
For starters it only had 5km on the clock, so essentially was brand new. Secondly it was a diesel which meant better fuel consumption especially given that diesel is actually cheaper than unleaded in France just like it used to be in the UK in the good old days.
The third and probably the most important feature were alloy wheels and low profile sports tyres. Now this may not sound like anything special, but having driven on some very narrow and precarious high alpine mountain roads, the extra grip really came in handy especially considering that some of the roads have soft verges, falling rocks and sheer vertical drops on one side to contend with. The Dunlop 205/150R16 sports low profile tyres proved absolutely essential and with hindsight, I would have settled for nothing less.
Hertz have a large portfolio of cars to rent like most other car hire companies, but if you intend driving in the Alps, avoid the rear wheel drive German cars if you can and go for a sensible front wheel drive car like the Opel Meriva which is not too overpowered. To complement its good 1.7 litre diesel engine, it has excellent viewing out of the front windscreen as well which can also be very important as some drivers on the continent have a tendency to overtake in the most unbelievable of situations.
This entry was posted on Tuesday July 22nd, 2008 at 1:48 PM and is filed under Things to do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.
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