Dire cars

As ever, it is the hope that kills you. I have heard so many stories from so many friends about how they intended to hire a Renault Clio but ended up in a BMW 5 Series at no extra charge that every time I hire a car, I torture myself into believing that, and with apologies to Liza Minelli, maybe this time I’ll be lucky. Maybe this time I’ll win. But I never do.

In the pictures on the website, the family car you hire is always either a Volkswagen Golf or a Ford Focus. So that’s what you book, conveniently choosing to ignore the most hated and abused phrase in the hire car lexicon: ‘or similar’. To this day, and having been hiring cars for half a lifetime, I have never managed to hire a Golf, or a Focus.

Sometimes it’s not too terrible: I remember years ago hiring what I hoped would be a Fiesta at Milan’s Linate airport which turned out to be a Fiat Panda, in which I was quite happy to bowl about for a couple of days, but most of the time it’s just disappointing. The Golf becomes an Opel Astra, the Focus a Peugeot 308. But just occasionally, it’s appalling.