Here in the UK (and the rest of Europe I think) when you rent a car you own all the petrol in the tank. When you leave the kiosk at the rental place they tell you to bring it back _empty_ because you own the petrol inside. This is even Avis’ policy over here too.

I don’t get what the Jaques Chester guy is saying, all of the rental places over here have their own petrol-filling-up facilties so they don’t have to take the car anywhere. Furthermore, all European rental cars have to be safety checked each time they are returned and most rental companies also valet them – so it isn’t the simple case of the car being returned then instantly rented out again.

Also, I agree with Peter – we definitely need a Europe datacentre! From my house, a ping to Dreamhost is about 1070ms.

Think about it: the rental company makes more money when someone is using the car. Every day, every hour and every minute when the car is not on rental is a dead loss to the firm.

So if you can get a car back, clean it and turn it out in an hour, you’ll make more money in the busy season than otherwise possible.

When someone brings back a car with less than full fuel, the car has to be refueled. This means that someone, somewhere, has to drop what they’re doing to refuel the car. This could be front counter staff, it could be the detailers. It doesn’t matter, because the upshot is that A, that car may turn up late and piss off some other customer, and B, work on all other customers & cars is slowed down, possibly pissing off multiple customers.

So it’s really about getting you to help out the next customer. It’s also exactly why car companies charge like wounded bulls when you return the vehicle late.

Their upstream providers are Level 3 Communications and Global Crossing. My current understanding is they have two gig uplinks for each provider.

Having said that, any problems I have are not due to bandwidth quality, rather to living 5350 miles from the data centre! (ping times are 175ms on a good day, 200ms+ on a bad day)

A European data centre with the same prices would be much appreciated ;)

Is there redundancy ?

Last time I rented a car I did option 2, though I wish I had done option 1, thats the gamble though. Coming back I am honestly shocked it did not stall out going into the gas station to fill it up before returning it. Option 2 4 LIFE! (And the refill price was like $6.75/gal!) Like with anything on a car, optional things are 99% profit. ;-)