Best car clubs: alternatives to Zipcar

What are car clubs?

Car clubs and car sharing companies let you book vehicles by the hour or day, usually via an app or website, with insurance included. You’re then charged only for the time (and sometimes distance and fuel) you use.

Enterprise Car Club – closest Zipcar alternative

The nearest like-for-like Zipcar alternative with good availability, hourly rentals and stable pricing – though its smaller fleet and per-mile charges dent the convenience.

You may associate Enterprise with multi-day rentals, but it also has an hourly car and van club that’s close to Zipcar's offering. It has a simple booking process, consistent pricing and self-service rental with no need for human interaction.

You need to pay for a membership to use Enterprise Car Club, with the cheapest Basic tier costing £10 a year (which you get back as driving credit each year). Right now, it's also offering its Standard tier for £10 a year (usually £60).

The hourly pricing is similar to Zipcar's, but there is no mileage allowance. This means you also pay per mile (25p for cars, 30p for vans) for each journey you make, which can add up on longer trips (see our comparison table for a better idea). Below is the full membership pricing.

Pricing varies by region, so we've included price ranges to account for the different hourly rates you might get.

How big is its fleet? Enterprise's fleet is much smaller than Zipcar's. When we checked its map, we found cars were largely concentrated around city centres. Cambridge, Brighton, and Bath have cars spread out across the city, but in most other places you’ll need to travel in to pick up your vehicle, which takes away much of the convenience factor.

That said, a customer services rep told us that Enterprise is expanding its fleet in response to the surge in enquiries after Zipcar's closure. You can fill out this form to request a vehicle in your area.

Hiyacar – wide choice, but watch the fees

Hiyacar is rarely the cheapest, and is generally only worth considering for longer hires of five or more hours (or if there are no other options available to you).

Next up is Hiyacar, a peer-to-peer platform where you can borrow other people's cars and vans for hourly and daily rates, with prices varying by car and car owner.

When you first go on the site, you’ll see eye-catching prices starting from as little as £1/hour, but once you factor in the fees, it’s almost always going to add up to more than that, especially for short rentals.

For example, we chose a Volkswagen Golf at ‘£4/hour’, but when we selected to borrow it for two hours, Hiyacar slapped on a £32 ‘Platform Admin’ fee and £8 booking fee on top, working out at £24/hour in reality. You also need to factor in the 'same to same' fuel policy, which is a bit of extra cost and hassle as you need to go to the petrol station.

The prices do get more reasonable the longer your rental, so when we tried to book that same car for seven hours, it came to just under £10/hour. When looking at another economy car for five hours, it came to about £12/hour. Most daily rentals start from around £100/day.

We found van rentals for around £14/hour, but often with a minimum five-hour rental period (which doesn't apply if you subscribe for £6.99 per month). As with Enterprise Car Club, the £6.99 subscription fee is automatically credited towards your bookings.

Turo – best for longer rentals

Despite only offering daily rates, it can work out cheaper and less stressful than renting from hourly-rate car clubs for several hours.

Another peer-to-peer option, meaning a nice variety (if not necessarily quantity) of cars spread across a wide area. Turo diverges from the Zipcar model by not offering hourly rates, but it offsets this with daily rates that often equate to just a few hours of using Hiyacar or Enterprise (see our comparison table for more info).

Like Hiyacar, the face-value price you see in the thumbnails doesn’t tell the full story, but the hidden costs are significantly lower. There’s a sales tax of 10-20%, and you select from a few protection plans with each booking, which range from £5 to £50+ per day, depending on the car and level of cover.

The main difference between the three protection tiers is the excess you pay in the event of an accident, so the MoneySaving option might be to get the minimum cover, then get third-party excess insurance.

We found economy cars such as the Peugeot 108 and 2016 Vauxhall Corsa from about £38 a day with minimum cover, or a 2015 Seat Ibiza for three days at £28/day (which included a three-day discount). For vans, we found a 2018 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter for £86/day with minimum cover.

Note that Turo has a 'same to same' fuel policy, so do factor in the cost and hassle of filling up at a petrol station (though you can pay extra to get your car refuelled).

Individual car owners can set discounts for renting the car for three days, a week, or longer, so if you’re going to rent for two or six days, always try adding that extra day to see if better deals pop up. Car owners also set the daily mileage, and we found most cars come with at least 200 miles included (some even have unlimited mileage). Some owners let you add optional extras, such as booster seats and phone mounts, for an extra fee.

Turo may not have hourly rates, but you can rent compact cars for a whole day for the same price as a few hours with a Hiyacar or Enterprise car (with less pressure to return it on time).

With no subscription tiers or memberships to worry about, it's nice and straightforward, though each car owner will have their own rules around picking up the car, so be aware that you might have to pick up the keys in person, then listen to a monologue about the ins and outs of the car.

Co-Wheels – cheap and cheerful

The best-value option for short, local trips – especially outside London – thanks to low hourly rates, transparent pricing and decent coverage in smaller towns and cities.

Co-Wheels stands out because it caters to towns and cities that are less populated by other car clubs.

The Co-Wheels location map shows Oxford, Bristol, Brighton, Tunbridge Wells, Newcastle, and Glasgow have the highest density of available cars, while Reading, Ipswich, Bournemouth, and Birmingham (among dozens of other areas) are also well catered for. London is missing out for once, as there are no Co-Wheels cars in the capital.

How big is its fleet? Co-Wheels has a fleet of MG cars and vans (though the latter are few and far between). It used to require a special Smart Card to unlock them, but nowadays the majority of cars can be unlocked using the app, so pickup should be seamless.

Looking for cars on the Standard plan (£5 per month), the best prices we found for entry-level cars were £5.75 per hour (or £52 per day), and £9.90 per hour (or £68 per day) for a van.

These are decent prices (especially if you manage to get a car for under £6 an hour), but you do have to factor in those mileage fees.

How do car clubs compare on price?

To give a direct comparison, we've calculated what you'll pay at all four companies across a few different combinations of hours and miles you might drive (such as a two-hour rental in which you drive 10 miles). This way we account for per-hour and, where applicable, per-mile fees and typical fuel costs in several scenarios.

These prices are based on the typical cheapest cars we could find on each site, on the basic paid membership plans (if applicable).

What does it show? Co-Wheels generally offers the best value for short rentals (up to five hours), factoring in 25 miles. In fact, you could drive nearly 100 miles in those five hours before the price catches up to Hiyacar's typical cheapest rates.

Going beyond five hours, the balance shifts in Turo's favour, as at that point you can hire the cheapest cars on the platform for 24 hours for less than the cost of a Co-Wheels car for six hours.

Of course, it's possible that you might not have a Co-Wheels near you, or that you happen to have a cheapie Hiyacar down the street from you while your nearest Turo is a Porsche 911 that's a bit overkill for driving down to Aldi. So it's worth checking across all the companies to see what the best-value option is near you.

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Car clubs are one way to save on driving, but we have dozens more tips in our Motoring MoneySaving guide. If you need a ride for more than a few hours, head over to our cheap car leasing guide.