Just Keep It Under 150

Farhad Heydari September 18, 2006

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Flanked by gently swaying carpets of native grasses, you accelerate out of the two-lane blacktop of Moray Firth and onto the A9. You've just left the posh Edwardian trappings of Skibo Castle, on the outskirts of the tiny town of Dornoch. It's an early autumn day in the otherwise brisk Scottish Highlands, but the roof on your Aston Martin DB9 Volante is down, making the dulcet tones howling from the massive 6.0-litre V12 engine even easier to enjoy.

Perhaps even more stunning than the bucolic surroundings is the fact that this 450-horsepower, 186-mph handmade brute isn't even yours. It's a rental. And it can be yours for $1,570 per day.

Welcome to the rarefied world of rentable exotica, an infinitesimal portion of the highly competitive $18 billion per year rent-a-car industry, where virtually any über-upscale car manufactured for sale is also available to rent -- for business, leisure or both. But not to everyone, and for a price.

See our slideshow of exotic rental cars.

"A general rule of thumb for exotic car rentals is to price the daily rental at 1 percent of the sticker price of the vehicle," says Chris Brown, managing editor at the trade publication Auto Rental News. "So, a Lamborghini Gallardo can rent from $1,600 to $2,500 a day depending on the area, and a Ferrari 360 Modena can run you about $1,000. Porsches will rent for less, but we don't keep overall statistics on exotics as it is such a specialty market."

In fact, according to the American Car Rental Association, these top-of-the-line and exotic vehicles represent such a tiny fraction of the millions of rentals each year that the ACRA doesn't even keep track of such statistics, saying they are far too minute.

In the U.S. the trend toward renting upper-echelon automobiles exploded along with the burgeoning disposable incomes of young dot-commers. But in Europe, it's been happening for years, according to Graziella Zanoletti, president of Geneva-based Elite Rent-a-Car, whose 20-year-old company is among the oldest in the field.

"This is really not new here," she says of her firm, which throughout the years has outfitted vehicles for the likes George Soros, Bill Gates, Richard Gere, the Ruler of Dubai Sheik Mohammed Al Maktoum and the recently deceased Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates.

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