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Eco friendly car hire
Are there any environmentally friendly car-hire firms offering fuel-efficient, small cars? jperrone
It's early days, but some of the large car-hire companies are beginning to offer low-emission cars, albeit only at selected locations and often at higher prices than standard vehicles...
In February, Avis (avis.co.uk) introduced a natural-gas VW Tourans for hire at 15 of its city-centre outlets in Germany and 50 hybrid petrol/electric four-door vehicles at Faro, Lisbon and O Porto airports in Portugal. Its most comprehensive low emissions fleet is in Scandinavia, where it hires out the medium-sized 75 Ford Flexi-fuel and 20 Toyota Prius as well as over 400 of the large-sized ethanol-powered Saab 9-5 BioPower cars, which cost from £370 to hire for a week from Gothenburg airport.
Hertz (hertz.com) now offers a "Green Collection" of both automatic and manual cars, which you can hire from 50 selected outlets across Europe. According to Hertz, they all do 40-65mpg and meet the EU's 2008 voluntary target of the maximum average 140g/km CO2 output.
If you want to test out an electric car in London - and steer clear of the congestion charge - you can hire a two-seater Sakura Maranello4 for £175 per week through electriccarhire.com. Also, greentomatocars.com offers private hire of Toyota Prius cars for £30 an hour.
This article, by Richard Hammond, was first published in the Guardian.
Eco Friendly does anyone care?
Do people really care if we the vehicle we hire is friendly to the environment, after all take a good look on the M25 and I bet you will spot more sporty or 4×4 trucks than the eco ones that are suppose to be good to the environment, im not so sure if people really are interested in saving the environment? After all how many of us actually reading this are driving a bad bad car in respect of CO;s? how many of us we actually take today, and actually go out and change the way they see things, go out and get that greener car or better get a bicycle? People power is the answer and can really make this happen, but you got to do this yourself. I looked at selling my vehicle, and actually found a great company offering car hire through out the UK, (CarHireUK) www.car-hire-uk.com as they are better know offer a great range of green vehicles, not actually green but CO2 better cars, without many comprimises, no silly prices, just standard rates and a car i can feel good about driving and not worrying about damage to the environment or my wallet, like it should be, after all we shouldnt have to pay more just to be greener! So my advise is to ditch the car all together, and only hire one when you really really need it, and would certainly recommend this company, as its rewarding to see companies that care about the future www.car-hire-uk.com