Top Gear’s Top 9: the secret rules of holiday hire cars

AKA, the ‘or similar’ rule. Got your fingers crossed for a Ford Fiesta? Reckon on it being pretty much any supermini except the best-selling Blue Oval. Probably some sort of badge-engineered Suzuki you’ve never heard of. To most car hire outfits, cars are as indistinguishable from one another as washing machines or fridges or contestants on The Voice. So, don’t get your heart set on a particular example. Just ask for ‘a car about ten feet long please, with some wheels’, and keep your fingers crossed the seat cushions haven’t collapsed.

Some car rental outfits will have a clause buried in the agreement that says damage less than five centimetres long isn’t counted against you. So, you may well be shown to a car that’s got a cosmetic scar in the paintwork, or a death trap with a dent in the crash structure and panel gaps you could climb through. If you’ve a suspicion your new transport is in fact the result of three different Renault Clios being welded together, keep that deposit receipt handy. 

Rentals are often driven by folks who haven’t been in a manual car for a while, and their clutch foot isn’t perhaps as sensitive as it used to be. Happily, it appears most superminis can be driven with only occasional use of the clutch, which is usually so worn anyway the left-most pedal is best used as a footrest. 

‘Bring it back with as much fuel as you collected it with’ is another typical piece of holiday rental small print. And of course, your hard-earned spending money is far better deployed on multi-coloured cocktails with miniature umbrellas floating in the top, water park tickets and novelty T-shirts. As a result, you’ll learn to adopt a fuel-saving strategy that ekes out mileage without ever waking up the dicky fuel gauge needle, which will freefall the second your rental outfit hands the car over to the next hapless customer. Box, box, box.

Sure, you’ve got visions of bombing across Route 66, down the Pacific Coast Highway or even through the French Riviera with the soft-top folded, wind in your hair and the sunshine on your face. The reality is more likely to involve such a severe case of sunstroke that you spend the rest of the trip self-isolating in your hotel room with the air-conditioning maxed, watching foreign language soap operas on the CRT television. Get a hard-top, and save the sunbathing for the beach.

It’s so tempting. You’re on a fabulously twisting coastal road, you’re freed from the shackles of preserving tyres you paid for, and you fancy dropping a gear and pinning an overtake on the dawdling Fiat Panda ahead. Don’t be taken in.

Most unsuspecting superminis in mainland Europe are in fact being piloted by an individual with the skills, reflexes and unerring bravery of a World Rally Champion. You’ll merely irritate your new neighbour, and spend the next 20km locked in a futile bid to shake them from your tail as they extract ten-tenths from a million-mile shopping trolley that’s older than you are. 

Just don’t. They’re ungainly things to walk along in at the best of times, but using them for driving is like attempting to play the piano wearing oven gloves. No wonder the clutches are all burned out. 

Chances are you’ll want to visit a waterfall, maybe a hidden beach cove, or some sort of mountain beauty spot on your travels. In many parts of the world, paved roads will not quite have reached all the way to your Instagram-haven destination. Fear not.

With the right application of ambition and throttle, it appears even the humblest of hatchbacks can in fact achieve the sort of Paris-Dakar rally performance that’d make a Range Rover quiver. Top Gear’s top tip: keep a wet-wipe handy to clear up the tell-tale dust from the dashboard before you hand it back. And don’t forget to pop the towing eye back in its holster.

Just because you thought that charming little Lancia Ypsilon was a corker of a find on your summer vacation, don’t go thinking it’ll bring the same brio to your commute on a damp February morning in Stoke-on-Trent. Some memories are better left behind at the airport. What you drive on holiday, stays on holiday.