How Far the Daily Mileage Allowance Actually Gets You

Every rental carries a daily mileage allowance, and almost nobody in this market will tell you what theirs is. Ours is two hundred miles a day on the saloons and the SUVs, lower on the exotics — and it multiplies by the days you have booked, which turns the whole question into arithmetic you can do before you commit rather than a line you meet on the return sheet.

The allowance is the quietest number in this business. It is not in the headline rate, it is rarely on a pricing page, and it is the figure most likely to turn a good weekend into an argument at the kerb. Somebody planning Palm Springs and back has no way to tell whether that sits inside the deal or outside it, because the number they would be measured against is not published anywhere they can read it.

So here is ours, with the distances worked out against it. Every drive people actually take out of this city, how far it really is, and whether it fits. Where it does not fit, the fix is written down. None of this should need a phone call.

One thing to settle before the numbers: this is a page about distance, not about roads. If the question is which road is worth driving and at what hour, that is the driving roads and road trips guide, and it answers it far better than anything below.

What the allowance is, in one paragraph

Two hundred miles a day is the band on the saloons and the SUVs, which covers most of what leaves this city on a weekend — the shelf described on the luxury SUV page and the saloons alongside it. The exotics carry less, and that figure is set per car rather than across the shelf, so it is named on your agreement rather than asserted here.

The important mechanic is the one nobody explains. The allowance is quoted per day and settled once, when the car comes back. What you are measured against is therefore the daily figure multiplied by the days you booked, not a fence you hit at midnight on the first one. A four-hundred-mile weekend on a two-day booking is a four-hundred-mile allowance. Only the total has to fit.

Anything past it is charged per mile at a figure printed on the agreement before you sign it. We do not publish one number for that, and the honest reason is that there is not one: a mile on a Corvette and a mile on a Cullinan are not the same mile, and a rate typed into an article in August is a rate that is wrong for somebody in November. Ask for it in the same message as the quote and it arrives with everything else. The terms carry the rule; your agreement carries your figure.

How far these places actually are

Measured from the Westside, where our cars go out from, rather than from a park gate or a county line. Everything is rounded to the nearest five miles and everything is there and back, because a rental has to come home. A different starting point in the city moves the whole table by a few miles in the same direction, which never changes an answer below except on the two lines that are already marked as close.

Where	One way	There and back	Against a 200-mile day
Malibu, the pier	23 mi	~45 mi	Fits four times over
Point Mugu, out along the coast	47 mi	~95 mi	Fits, with half the day spare
A Malibu canyon morning	—	~120 mi	Fits
Santa Barbara, on the 101 both ways	95 mi	~190 mi	Fits by about ten miles
Santa Barbara, coast road one way	110 mi	~205 mi	Over
Big Bear Lake	110 mi	~220 mi	Just past the line
Palm Springs	115 mi	~230 mi	Two days
San Diego	120 mi	~240 mi	Two days
Joshua Tree	140 mi	~280 mi	Two days
The coast and Angeles Crest in one go	—	200+ mi	Two days
Las Vegas	270 mi	~540 mi	Three days, and not on every car
Big Sur, as far as Bixby Bridge	300 mi	~600 mi	More than three days

The Joshua Tree figure is the Park Service's own: its directions page for Joshua Tree National Park puts the park about 140 miles east of Los Angeles, and the park roads add another fifty or sixty if you drive through rather than turning round at the west entrance.

The trips that fit a day and are not close

Most of what people picture when they book a car here is nowhere near the line. Malibu and back is under fifty miles. The full coast run out to Point Mugu and home again is under a hundred. A canyon morning — out along the water, up one of the Malibu canyons, back over the top — lands around a hundred and twenty, which leaves room to add a second canyon on the way home and still be inside it.

That is the honest headline: for the drives this city is famous for, the allowance is not a constraint and you should stop thinking about it. It is the second category that needs planning.

The trips that need the second day's worth

Palm Springs is about a hundred and fifteen miles each way, so a same-day return is around two hundred and thirty before you have driven anywhere in the desert. It does not fit one day. On two it fits comfortably, with a hundred and seventy miles left for the part of the trip that is the point, and two days is how people take that trip anyway — see the Palm Springs page for the rest of it.

San Diego is the same shape at a hundred and twenty each way. Joshua Tree is heavier: two hundred and eighty on the interstate plus the park roads, which is comfortably inside two days and comfortably outside one.

The one people get wrong is not a destination at all. A big driving day — the coast out to Point Mugu in the morning, then Angeles Crest in the afternoon — clears two hundred miles without going anywhere, because the two roads are at opposite ends of the county and the drive between them is most of an hour. If that is the plan, book two days.

Santa Barbara is the one that catches people

Ninety-five miles each way on the 101 makes a hundred and ninety there and back, which is inside a two-hundred-mile day by about ten miles. Ten miles is lunch and a wrong turn. It fits, and it fits with nothing to spare.

Then there is the version everybody actually drives. Up the coast through Malibu, along the water to Oxnard, and onto the 101 where it meets the sea again — which is the better drive by a wide margin and about fifteen miles longer each way. Take the coast road one way and the return lands a little past two hundred. Take it both ways and you are well over.

So the pretty version of Santa Barbara breaks a single-day allowance and the dull version does not, which is a strange sentence to write and a useful one to know. Two days solves it and removes the reason to hurry. The Santa Barbara page has the rest.

Las Vegas is three days of allowance before you have driven anywhere

About two hundred and seventy miles each way on the 15, so five hundred and forty there and back. Two days of allowance is four hundred, which is a hundred and forty miles short before anyone has driven from a hotel to dinner. Three days is six hundred, which fits with roughly sixty miles to spare — a couple of evenings on and off the Strip, not a week of them.

Mileage is the second question on that trip, though, and not the first. The first is whether the car may leave California at all: interstate travel is approved in advance, part of the fleet is permitted into Nevada and Arizona with notice, and the exotic and ultra-high-value cars are not part of it. We also rent here and take the car back here — there is no one-way drop in Nevada. Both of those are set out in the piece on which cars may cross the state line, and the booking side of it is in the Los Angeles to Las Vegas road trip guide.

The exotic band is lower, and that is not a trick

It reads like a catch and it is closer to a description. The cars on that shelf are booked for a morning, an evening, a shoot or an entrance, and the allowance is sized for what they are actually used for rather than for a commute. A canyon morning fits it. A week of errands does not.

It also points the same way as every other rule that applies to those cars. They stay in California. They carry the largest deposits, and therefore the highest cover band. And an interstate run in a Huracán is four hours of being loud and low with somewhere to put one soft bag, which is an expensive way to be uncomfortable. If the plan has real distance in it, the honest recommendation is the SUV and the exotic on a different day — not because we would rather rent the SUV, but because that is the version of the weekend that works.

When the plan does not fit, there are two moves

The first is to add the day. That buys another two hundred miles as well as another twenty-four hours, and it adds the day's rate, the day's cover and the tax on both. What the extra day costs is genuinely car-specific — on some cars a fifth day prices as part of a block and on others it does not — and that is set out car by car in where the price actually breaks rather than guessed at here.

The second is to ask for both totals and take the smaller. Tell us the mileage you expect, ask what the overage would come to on the shorter booking, and ask what the longer booking costs outright. On the saloons and the SUVs the longer booking usually wins, and it comes with a whole extra day attached. On the exotics the answer is more often to move the plan than to move the dates.

• Count the return, not the destination. Nearly every mileage surprise is somebody who read one figure on a map and booked against half the distance.
• Add the driving you will do at the other end. Park roads, a second dinner, the drive back to the hotel. It is routinely another sixty miles on a desert weekend.
• Check for closures before you count. A closed pass is a detour, and a detour is miles you did not budget. Caltrans traveller information carries live conditions and closures on the state highways.
• Ask for the per-mile figure with the quote. It is one line in the same email, and it is the number the whole plan turns on.

The cars with the generous band

These four are saloons and SUVs, which is the shelf the two-hundred-mile band belongs to, and all four cover the table above without argument. What separates them is what the day is for rather than how far it goes.

What sits in the quote besides the rate →