Where to Find Hybrid Car Rentals Online

A hybrid car rental can be a great idea, especially if you would like to conduct an extensive road test to discover how they operate. However, you should be prepared to work a little harder, and pay a higher daily/weekly rate, if you are interested in renting a hybrid car. The following information is intended to make the process of renting a hybrid car online somewhat easier.

Of the major car rental companies, Enterprise Rental and Budget Car Rental may provide the clearest online method of searching for hybrid car rentals. Their websites let you quickly scan the metro locations where hybrid cars are available for rent. Among the other major car rental agencies, including Hertz, Avis, National and Alamo, you first have to specify date/time/destination information (i.e. initiate an actual reservation) before you can determine if a hybrid car is offered at a certain location. Furthermore, while many of these major rental companies do include a section on their website that provides information on renting an environmentally-friendly vehicle, this does not necessarily mean that hybrid cars are widely available to rent.

You might also want to visit websites that first aggregate the information from each of the major car rental companies and then present car availability on a city-by-city basis. For example, Car Rental Express, Car Rentals.com or Rental Cars.com can provide search results (arranged by car size) across the major car rental fleets. Moreover, travel/vacation planning sites such as Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity provide similar functionality. However, when using these car rental information aggregators, it’s not always possible to specify the hybrid category beforehand; thus, it can be time-consuming to scan for hybrid cars through dozens of results.

Hybrid cars should eventually become more widely available throughout the rental fleets. Until then, you can expect to pay 30% to 50% more per day/week for a hybrid car, compared to a traditional car of the same size. Nonetheless, by renting a hybrid (as opposed to taking a mere test-drive), you can determine more conclusively whether or not you would actually like to own such a car.