Street Car in London: pros and cons

pigeonpie

We are giving up our car in January and were wondering about Street Car membership. On the face of it, it's not a bad deal if you just want it for an hour to go shopping once a week. We have 2 pick up and drop off car locations about 5-10 mins walk from our flat.

However the worrying aspect is the excess insurance. We have a Worldwide cover with insurance4carhire (thanks to this site) but it does not cover UK hire of street cars for some reason I think it should...anyhow they will only sell you daily rate insurance of about £5.

Street Car do their own version which is dear
Reducing your damage excess
Fully comprehensive insurance included, excess can be reduced from £9.95 per month
Insurance is included with Streetcar membership. The standard damage excess is £750. This may be reduced to zero at a cost of £14.95 per month, or to £250 at a cost of £9.95. The higher excess is £1,000, and this may be reduced to zero at a cost of £19.95 per month, or to £250 at a cost of £14.95.

wonder if anyone has any ideas on an insurance cover which reduces the excess but is more affordable? I'm also wondering if the hire rates will go up because of fuel costs and VAT.

It also looks a lot cheaper to hire a car than use Street car if you want to go away for a weekend. The annoying thing is there's no valid hire period between 1 hour and 24 hours - if we go to the nearest shopping centre we are usually about 4 hours there as it takes an hour to get there and back.

What do people think?

vikingaero

In principle Streetcar is a good idea. However you need to work out if it is cost effective for longer hire periods. There have been a few threads on here where hirers have returned a Streetcar and been charged for damage when the car has been hit/vandalised in between you returning the car and the next person renting it. This could be solved by taking loads of pictures each time you return the car.

Justicia

vikingaero wrote: »

There have been a few threads on here where hirers have returned a Streetcar and been charged for damage when the car has been hit/vandalised in between you returning the car and the next person renting it.

Not knowing anything about these schemes, I took your guidance and found the thread that you may be referring to - interesting reading, thanks.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/1819365

pigeonpie

we were just discussing this last night. The Street cars are parked in a normal busy street with a lot of yummy mummies loading kids into 4x4s twice a day as there is a pre-school. The possibilities of damage to a car between your hire and the next customers' hire is a real issue.
I could take a photo which would be time dated but they could (would?) not accept it as evidence because in theory it could I suppose be tampered with, by someone with greatly superior IT skills than us!
They should put a scanner in the car which takes an exterior photo and sends it to them, if that's possible. I am now totally put off SC and am thinking minicab!

However I do think a WorldWide policy with insurance4carhire should cover UK Street car hire. It covers me if I hire from Budget, Avis etc and I don't see the difference ?!

benjus

I've seen insurance specially designed for car clubs from site like insurance4carhire (not that actual site, I think, but a similar one - I found it from MSE, so follow the links from there).

I'm a member of Street Car, Zipcar and Connect By Hertz. I don't have any extra insurance and haven't had any issues of this nature yet.

Last year I lived in central London and joined Connect By Hertz. It was great - loads of cars around, they were almost always available and if I needed some extra time I never had a problem extending. I used Zipcar a few times but generally I preferred Connect.

Now I live in SE3; Connect doesn't have any cars around here, so I joined StreetCar (keep an eye out for membership discounts - I joined via GroupOn for virtually nothing). There are a couple of cars within 5 minutes' walk, and a few more within around 20 minutes' walk.

Unfortunately the current setup is NOT a good alternative to owning a car. The cars near me are always booked at popular times like weekends, so unless you plan your exact movements a week or two in advance you stand no chance. It's not cheap either - driving up to Muswell Hill yesterday to visit a friend cost me £35 (5 hours hire + about 35 miles driven).

The biggest problem is the lack of spontaneity it gives you. Yesterday I decided I wanted to stay at the friend's place a bit longer so I tried to extend - sorry, no can do. I left in a hurry, giving myself an hour to get back (it had taken about 40 minutes to get there). Thanks to the London traffic it took me about 1 hour 20 minutes to get back, resulting in a £25 fine for returning it late and probably spoiling someone else's plans.

So you have the choice between either booking for as much time as you could conceivably need (including allowing about double the time it should take to get back to the drop-off location) at Street Car's rather steep rates, or risking not being able to extend the booking and potentially getting a late fine.

I wouldn't say it's Street Car's fault, just that the system doesn't work very comfortably where it's saturated with demand and there's no spare capacity.

Check if Connect By Hertz operates in your area. The cars themselves aren't generally as good as StreetCar, but they are cheaper and (in my experience) more comfortable to use.

benjus

This is the policy I was thinking of: https://www.icarhireinsurance.com/insurance-information-centre/car-club-members.html

benjus

On the subject of photographic evidence, you could try filming a video; in a single take, start filming something that reliably reflects the current time (and cannot be falsified), such as the car's mileage or the Street Car console in the glove box that reads the current date and time; then take the camera around the car, filming in as much detail as you can its condition. It's a bit of a faff but it would be pretty hard to claim that it was fabricated.

pigeonpie

similar situation: the borough has only Street Car. Good point about the traffic and not being able to calculate exactly how long you'll need it for.
Not being able to extend means the co does not have enough cars in SE3 and this may well be a London wide phenomenon.
Mini cab is looking a lot cheaper at the mo' and can cope with spontaneity.
Or we'll have to look around for a really good deal on a small car. There must be a thread on that on here somewhere!