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Leasing a car for 26 days in the UK?

We plan on driving thruout the UK for 26 days. Anyone know of a good leasing site that does this sort of thing?

Posted by
8094 posts

Check with AutoEurope to see if they have any leases available for the U..K.

Most of the leases are done out of France, and a couple of the auto manufacturers have such programs. But that's for driving on the right side of the road.

Posted by
797 posts

Good lock finding a lease that will let you drive in the UK. The lease (actually lease-buyback) plans take advantage of a loop hole in the French Value Added Tax law that allows someone who is not an EU resident and not traveling on business to buy a car without paying the VAT which is 20% of the sticker price of the car. This gives the manufacturers a nice small pool of low mileage current model used cars that they can resell at a good profit. The problem is that Brexit changed the import, export and insurance processes. As a result, while there are 38 European countries I could go with my lease car last month the UK was very prominently not on the list and you are told not to go there.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. A couple years ago we took a trip that included the Republic of Ireland but made darned sure we did not put a wheel in Northern Ireland.

Posted by
6178 posts

Brexit or not, you don't want to drive a French car in the UK.

Posted by
32523 posts

you don't want to drive a French car in the UK.

I don't know, I drive my English car in France frequently.

Ed from Pensacola used to drive French cars in England and elsewhere in the UK a lot.

Lots of folks do. With a bit of practice and patience - no probs

Posted by
931 posts

Well.............now i know "the rest of the story"! Tkx for alI of the great info.

Guess i'll just focus on the "car hire" rental market.....and try to figure out what the smallest size size car that will comfortably work for our "circumnavigation" of the UK. When we did Ireland I had a small stick shift rental, but that was a horror story. All I did was constantly shift that six speed with my left hand, while my wife was yelling at me telling me that i was running into the shrubbery sticking out of the rock walls. My toothpaste saw double duty as a scratch remover on that trip!

I think that I will look at renting an "Economy" size automatic. I hope it will work for longer drives, but will be small enough to navigate the narrow back roads. Now ....should I wait to see if the Dollar gains against the Pound........

Cheers!

Posted by
553 posts

Steve, we had 33 day rental this past May. I looked into leasing and came up with nothing. I rented through autoeurope.co.uk which was less expensive than autoeurope.com. The rate will be in pounds. If you’ve never used AutoEurope before keep checking back after you book. If the rate goes down you can cancel and rebook.

We had a compact class Ford Focus automatic. It was perfect for two people with two rollaboard suitcases and golf clubs. We drove all over southern England, the Cotswolds, northern Wales, the Yorkshire dales and ended in Norfolk. The rural roads were no problem but it got dicey in some small villages where only one lane was available.

The rental was with Alamo/Enterprise at Heathrow and they were great to work with. We had a small issue with the car and when we told them upon returning they refunded the fee we paid for a second driver as a goodwill gesture.

Posted by
6113 posts

You will have to pay significantly more for an automatic car. Airports tend to have a wider selection of automatics than a small provincial outfit.

Hiring an EV would solve the gear stick issue, but it would probably cost more and you would need to sign up to a payment app in advance so that you could recharge it.

I guess most British posters on this forum can’t call themselves geniuses!

Posted by
1815 posts

Check out Arnold Clark. They are a UK only rental company with very reasonable prices. Our rental came with super CDW and an included GPS. We have made multiple trips to the UK, this June was our first experience with Arnold Clark.

Posted by
30 posts

I rented an automobile from Enterprise last month in York. Even though I’ve driven a manual most of my life, I opted to rent an automatic for my first time driving in England. The additional cost was less than $15 per day.