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Car rental agencies primarily serve people who have a car that is temporarily out of reach or out of service, for example travellers who are out of town or owners of damaged or destroyed vehicles who are awaiting repair or insurance compensation. Because of the variety of sizes of their vehicles, car rental agencies may also serve the self-moving industry needs, by renting vans or trucks.
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Car rentals are subject to many conditions which vary from one brand to another. The vehicle must be returned in a good condition and must not exceed a maximum driven distance, otherwise extra fees may be incurred. Additionally, some companies set a minimum age for the vehicle driver, which in some cases is as high as 25, even in countries where the minimum legal age to hold a driver's license is much lower. Recent conditions have utilised GPS technology to limit maximum speeds or driving to specific regions. Renewable fuel vehicles are available in certain areas. |
There are two major types of car hire companies. The first group of companies own their own cars (known as a fleet) and may have agreements with car manufacturers to provide all the cars for that fleet. An example of this type of company would be Alamo or Europcar.
The other type of car hire company operate on a broker model and have commercial agreements with car hire companies to provide access to their fleets of cars.
To allow for a uniform classification and easy comparison of car rental prices, the Association of Car Rental Industry Systems and Standards (ACRISS) has developed the ACRISS_Car_Classification_Code coding system. This describes the size, dourcount, gearbox type (manual/automatic) and whether the car is air-conditioned in a short code.
Carsharing
This article deals with the use of shared cars for public transport purposes. For the activity of private sharing arrangements between car owners, see Carpool
Carsharing is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by the hour. The organization renting the cars may be a commercial business or the users may be organized as a democratically-controlled company, public agency, cooperative, ad hoc grouping. Today there are more than six hundred cities in the world where people can carshare.
The term carsharing is also used for carpooling or ride sharing some places.
As is often the case with innovations that spring up more or less spontaneously in different parts of the world, operations are organized in many different ways in different places, according to the objectives of the organizers and users. A small informal start-up may have only one shared car, and only a handful of sharers. In the larger services that are increasingly coming into existence, participants are typically city-dwellers whose transportation needs are largely met by public transit, walking, or cycling.
Carsharing is supported by the New Mobility Agenda, which combines Transportation Demand Management (TDM) strategies and measures for containing, channeling and limiting private car traffic in cities, with support of a “bouquet” of alternative transportation arrangements. These include utility cycling, walking,Verde's Green Program[1] in Miami, and public space improvement, electronic substitutes for travel (such as telework, telecommuting or e-work) and a variety of shared and public transport strategies.
