Stan and I need wheels

Here’s the practical post (almost entirely).

I gave up my car when I embarked on the principle of ‘Doing more with less’. More on that in another post; but essentially the goal was to remove erroneous expenditure for things that either didn’t give me joy or had no use. The car certainly fell into the latter category.

So the task of sourcing the short term use of a car, with the right to travel to Europe at a cost-effective price was a fun research project. I knew I didn’t want to buy a car and go back to having something I didn’t really need long term - so either hiring or leasing were my options. Hiring a car for 5 weeks costs a bomb; so leasing definitely provided what I needed - if I could get it at the right price and with the right to travel to Europe.

My first ambition of doing the trip on public transport were dashed by the cost of getting Stan across the channel but the desire to ‘leave nothing behind’ was still on my mind. So first stop, electric vehicles. Was there an electric car our there that would meet my requirements and be kind to the environment?

And I really did try. There are some amazing short term leasing deals for electric cars through providers like Onto and Drive Fuze. The latter did not permit European travel for longer than 28 days. Onto did allow European travel. So I started to explore what it would look and feel like to drive an EV all the way to Italy. I dived into the mesmerising world of google maps to figure out it was feasible. You can find tons of EV route planning tools just by googling. The challenge for a journey of this length was figuring out which stops would have the fast charging points that would make the journey viable (i.e. no two hour stops waiting for the car to power up). Now if you have a TESLA it’s a lot easier by virtue of Tesla’s own fast charging points. I learnt that some of these were accessible to other car manufacturers but I couldn’t quite find a reliable source about which were and which weren’t. All in, after a particularly painful dream about being stranded with Stan whilst attempting to reach an EV charging point and running out of power I decided that, until the lower priced EVs had more range, this wasn’t a viable approach for me! Maybe next time.

So back to more standard options. I landed with a company called mycardirect and we’ll be traveling in a SEAT IBIZA. We took the car on a 3 month lease. What made them stand apart was their customer service. It was complicated needing to have confirmation that the European part of my journey was acceptable before the lease contract started. Some other firms either rejected the length of the trip, didn’t allow it at all or just said yes to every question with an eye on the income rather than the experience. It really did help to use review functions to see what others said about the companies’ reputation. Mycardirect had both a really cost effective monthly cost and could guarantee the VE103 paperwork on time for my trip.

So the car arrives two weeks today, the countdown is on!

Driving from London to Liguria