easyCar, the low cost online car rental company founded by Stelios the serial entrepreneur, is to use the Vauxhall Corsa at its new London site in Earl's Court. Previously easyCar had offered only Mercedes A-Class cars to its customers but introducing the Vauxhall Corsa will allow easyCar to offer car rental of the Corsa at prices starting at a daily rate of £7. easyCar economies of scale from a uniform fleet are achieved at site level so as long as an individual site offers only one type of vehicle, easyCar can offer its customers lower prices by exploiting contestable markets between its car suppliers.
Vauxhall Corsas from the easyCar site in Earl's Court (Warwick road) are available for booking now at and can be driven away from May 28th 2002.
Further savings will be offered to customers by allowing them to clean their own car. As well as charging a daily rental fee easyCar charges a £7 one-off preparation fee on each Mercedes A-Class car rental to cover the cost of cleaning and safety checks. With the Vauxhall Corsa at Earl's Court customers are incentivised to clean their own cars as the preparation fee at this site is £2 provided the car is returned clean. For those customers who do not want to clean their own rented Corsa there is a £10 cleaning fee (the cost to easyCar of ad hoc cleaning).
Another cost saving innovation at the easyCar Vauxhall Corsa site in Earl's Court is to provide cars with empty fuel tanks. The Earl's Court site will provide exclusively Vauxhall Corsas that the customers themselves will fill with petrol. When the Corsa is returned at the end of the rental period easyCar customers need only return the car with enough petrol to get them back to the site. In this way easyCar has eliminated the cost of checking that cars are full of petrol upon return and this cost saving contributes toward the easyCar ability to offer the lowest cost car hire to consumers.
easyCar continues to develop ways of cutting the cost of car hire to consumers. One feature of the car hire industry is that customers always want to pick up their vehicle at 9am and return it at 6pm. Consequently easyCar offers savings to customers that pick up and drop off their vehicles at off peak times during the day.
"Vauxhall Corsas cost easyCar £2 a day less than Mercedes A-Class so we can pass this saving on to customers," said Stelios the founder of the easyGroup. "Customers themselves will decide if they want to pay a premium for a Mercedes. easyGroup companies benefit from economies of scale where relevant but we also want to create contestable markets among our suppliers so that we can keep the cost ot our customers as low as possible," he continued.
The easyCar site at Earl's Court will have a fleet of 400 Vauxhall Corsas. As easyCar opens more sites they intend to fleet these sites with more Vauxhall Corsas. easyCar currently has a fleet of 6000 A-Class Mercedes cars deployed across 18 sites in Europe. 95% of easyCar bookings are made online. Telephone bookings for cars that are being picked up within a month of the call can also be made from a premium rate telephone line.