About this site

It began with a bad return. A car handed back at a closed desk on a Sunday evening, a bay left empty, and a deduction three weeks later for a scratch that could not be proved either way because nobody had photographed anything. That cost a few thousand dirhams and produced the habit that now runs through every page here: inspect slowly, photograph everything, and read four clauses before signing.

What followed was several years of hiring cars for weekends, for months, for visiting relatives and as a way of living with something before deciding whether to buy it. The same questions came up every time, and the answers were never written down anywhere useful. Where does the excess sit. Why is the deposit that large. What is actually excluded. When does a monthly agreement start to make sense. Those questions became the guides on this site.

The writing is deliberately unexcited. There are no lap times here, no comparisons of acceleration and no encouragement to want something that had not occurred to you before breakfast. The measure applied to any car is whether it would be pleasant to live with in this climate, on ordinary roads, with ordinary luggage and ordinary passengers. That measure is unfashionable and it is the right one for most of the people who read this.

Nothing here is sold on commission. No hire company pays for a mention, none is named, and details given through the form never reach anyone who rents out vehicles. The small services offered on these pages are paid for directly by the people who use them, which is the simplest way to keep the advice honest. The site is run by a private person, not a company, and the scale is small on purpose.