Maybe not with the once per quarter road trip. That might not be a bad frequency for renting a nice road trip vehicle. But I generally agree with what you are saying.
I do a lot of 600-1000 trips. I definitely prefer to rent. Driving long distances messes up your car, especially the interior. But, usually I’m going some place for many weeks and renting is too expensive.
I would expect the number of people that routinely drive 450 mile trips to be greatly outnumbered by those that don't. There is also the option of renting a car for the weekend for those few occasions when you want to take a roadtrip.
Totally fair. And I love road trips. If I could do more, I would. However:
1. I don't own a car.
2. When I've rented cars, it's cost me ~$100 USD a day. I normally travel for anywhere from two days to a month at a time. On average, probably a week to a week and a half. So then this quickly becomes a very, very expensive trip - ~$700 to $1000 USD compared to $300 to $500 USD for a flight. On top of that, I travel an average of once or twice a month. So car rentals are simply out of the question for me for most trips.
3. I live in Boston, but places I've visited in the last year include New York, Rochester, Vancouver, Lincoln (Nebraska), Montreal, Las Vegas, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Doha, and Reykjavik. It's simply impractical (if not impossible) to drive to most of those places from Boston. The three that are manageable are New York, Rochester, and Montreal (and I did do the Boston to Rochester and back drive in a rental instead of flying twice).
I've considered purchasing a car explicitly so that I'd be able to travel without flying a little more, but leasing is impractical due to limits on miles per year and I'm not ready to outright purchase a car. Either way, a car would come with additional costs (the cost of the car, maintenance, parking, etc.) and wouldn't be able to replace even ~15% of my flights, so I think it's just impractical for me at this point of time.
Even if you have planned it in advance, car rentals get expensive quickly, especially if you want something more than a passenger car.
SUV/Pickup rentals are often >$500/week, AND the agreement will claim that I'm not supposed to take it off road, so if I'd like to go out to some hiking trailhead along the way, I'm totally uninsured if anything happens on that dirt road.
Adding $1000 to the cost of one of my yearly vacations adds up to a lot of money over the life of a car.
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On that same note, long trips are quite common for many Americans who don't commute those distances. My daily commute is 4 miles each way, I could bike it if the road had better infrastructure for it.
On at least 2 weekends a month, I'm driving 200+ mi each way, and my destinations typically do not have charging infrastructure (or paved parking lots). I know lots of people who do the same for their various outdoor hobbies.
I second this. I rent cars between 5 and 20 weekends a year, and have been doing this for about 6 years. It works out fine. The car is always in perfect condition, and it is not that expensive. It is true though that some trips that do not reach the importance threshold don't happen.
For road trips, rent a suitable car. The idea that you should modify your purchase of a daily driver to accommodate an activity you do once or twice a year is common, but strange.
Cars can be rented for weekend trips. It depends on the math of your specific situation, but if you have to pay for parking you'd probably come out ahead just renting a car for a couple days the ~12 times a year or so that you need to drive out of town.
Some of that last point will be based on how you define "occasionally". If it's a once a year trip down a highway (for a vacation, for instance), you can make the intentional trade-off in your planning to use a short term rental or other mode of travel (plane, train) for that once a year trip to save the cost/wear/tear on your "primary" vehicle [1].
Sure, a lot of American cities in particular are not built very conveniently and often have lots of "necessary" trips on/across "highways" or roads that run at highway speeds that probably shouldn't if you were to intelligently (re)plan those neighborhoods. But that's a somewhat unique worst case to American (lack of) imagination and decades of profit-motivated dismantling of public transit options.
[1] Most accountants and engineers will even suggest that you should already be doing that even with ICE vehicle primaries that are capable of such trips, the associated costs of wear/tear add up on a primary vehicle and it often is far more cost effective for short-term rentals.
If I was going to rent for any drive longer than 150 miles, I wouldn't own a car in the first place. Renting is a big hassle and multiplied by N trips sounds unpleasant. My trips are shorter and probably more frequent than your 620 mile multi-day affairs, though.
I get what you're saying but, for many of us, renting a car for the weekend is a significant hassle and time sink. And then the rental probably isn't set up with a roof rack for canoes, etc. If it were a once a year thing? Sure. But it's not. It's every few weeks at least. (There's also picking up home improvement stuff etc.)
It doesn't always need to be a big SUV either. There are somewhat smaller vehicles that are almost as good for a lot of activities. People are going to keep buying vehicles that they can use for most of their activities.
Once a year? not terrible. More, potentially bad. Car rentals are crazy expensive.
I took a week vacation with friends last year and it cost me more to rent a car to get to the location than the combined cost of every thing else. The car was only used to get there and get back, but it's not like I could only rent it for the start and end days.
Just having to rent a car a few times a year would kill most/any potential savings from an EV.
One reason I do is to avoid the mileage I put on a vacation car. I could travel 1,500 miles across several states while on a vacation trip. That’s 1-2 months of normal driving that I instead put on rental car for about $150.
If you are going to be driving a considerable distance (500-700 miles) in a short amount of time (such as a long weekend trip), renting a car makes sense. I have done so a few times, at a cost of barely more than $100 each time.
Going to a cabin in the mountains is a luxury few of us can afford. Even fewer of us can afford to buy such a cabin more likely you would rent it for a weekend or week. So if you're going to the mountains say twice a year we could assume that you also rent a car to get there, and back.
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