Sport & Exotic Car Rental in Los Angeles

Ninety minutes from Sunset

Los Angeles is one of the few American cities where the drive is the reason for the outing rather than the price of it. From Sunset you are forty minutes from Mulholland, an hour from Latigo Canyon above Malibu, and ninety minutes from the Angeles Crest Highway, which climbs out of La Cañada and keeps climbing for fifty miles. The good roads near the city are short, empty on a weekday morning, and they are the whole argument for a sports car rather than something with four doors.

The argument has an obvious other half, and it is better said here than discovered later. Two seats, one soft bag, and a nose that has to be walked over every speed hump in the Hills and up the ramp of every hotel garage. On Sunset after eight the car is filmed at each set of lights, which is what some guests are renting for and what others would rather avoid. And the 405 at five o’clock is the same hour in a Huracán as in anything else, only lower down.

Which is why the sensible way to rent a sports car in LA is around the drive rather than around the week. Take the keys on Friday, do the Crest early on Saturday before the motorcycles are up, hand it back. If the trip is really about moving four people and their luggage across the county, the luxury SUVs do that and this shape does not.

Quick and loud, but not a supercar

A good many people arrive here having already ruled the exotics out. They want something quick and loud for two or three days, not an event with a Lamborghini in it — and that band does exist in this fleet. It is simply spread across three shelves, because we file cars by roof and doors rather than by what somebody wants from a Saturday. These are the six, each with the day rate it takes today.

Audi RS 3 — $171 a day. 401 horsepower, five seats, all-wheel drive, and a boot. The five-cylinder makes the noise; the rest of the car asks nothing of you for the other six days.

Mercedes-AMG GT 43 — $229 a day. 362 horsepower, four doors, all-wheel drive. The one to take when somebody else is coming and the evening does not end where it started.

Porsche Boxster — $286 a day. 300 horsepower, two seats, mid-engined and rear-driven, with a fabric roof that drops in seconds. Of these six it is the one drawn for Latigo rather than for Sunset.

Chevrolet Corvette C8 — $349 a day. 490 horsepower, a 6.2-litre V8 under glass behind your shoulders, 0–60 in about 2.9 seconds. This is the one strangers talk to you about at petrol stations.

Ford Mustang — $129 a day. 310 horsepower, four seats, a soft top. American muscle, and happier on a long run up the coast than on the tight stuff above Malibu.

BMW Z4 — $171 a day. 255 horsepower, two seats, rear-drive, a fabric roof. A proper roadster and no more car than that, which for a sunny Saturday is the whole of the argument.

Two of the six sit on this page. The GT 43 is filed with the saloons and the Boxster, the Mustang and the Z4 with the convertibles, which is a filing decision and nothing more: they book, deliver and hand back exactly as the cars on this page do.

What they share, and what the asker is really buying, is that they rent on the ordinary terms rather than the exotic ones. The refundable deposit is $750 on the RS 3, the GT 43, the Boxster and the Corvette and $500 on the Mustang and the Z4, against the $2,000 an exotic carries. Damage-and-liability cover is priced off that deposit, so it runs $100 a day on the first four and $75 a day on the other two, where an exotic takes $225. And the young-driver supplement between 21 and 24 is $50 a day on all six rather than the $175 a day the exotic band attracts. The daily mileage allowance is confirmed with the car.

Two days is two days of the rate. The first block price on this site is the five-day one and the quote reaches for it only from five days up, so a Friday-to-Sunday booking is the day rate twice, with cover and Los Angeles County sales tax on top — both of them in the quote before you pay rather than at handover. If the decision comes down to the three in the middle, the GT 43, the Boxster and the Corvette are set against each other car by car: four doors, an open roof, or a V8 behind your head.

The eleven cars on this page

They fall into three groups, and it is worth knowing which is which before you book. The Chevrolet Corvette, which we hold in blue, yellow and black, is mid-engined, American, and the least intimidating way onto those roads: a 6.2-litre V8 behind your shoulders, two seats, and a boot that takes a weekend if you pack softly. It is also, by a wide margin, the least expensive of the mid-engined cars here.

Then the exotics proper. Three Lamborghini Huracáns, one closed and two open Spiders, all on the naturally aspirated V10 that revs to eight and a half thousand and is the reason anybody books one. And the Ferrari 488, mid-engined and twin-turbocharged, which is the quieter car of the two Italians until it is not.

The Rolls-Royce Wraith and the two Dawns sit on this page because the fleet files them with the exotics, not because anyone would call them sports cars. The Wraith is a four-seat fastback with coach doors and a V12 that never raises its voice; the Dawn is the same idea with the roof taken off. Rent one for the arrival, not for the Crest.

And the odd one out. The Audi RS 3 is a five-seat saloon with a boot, four hundred and one horsepower, and a five-cylinder engine nobody else still builds. It costs a fraction of the rest of this page per day, it has all-wheel drive for a damp morning on the nearest mountain, and it is the only thing on this page you could sensibly use for a whole week.

American muscle, in this fleet, is the Ford Mustang, and it is filed with the convertibles because the roof folds. Four seats, a soft top, and happier on a long run up the coast than on the tight stuff above Malibu — but if a muscle car is what you came for, that is the one, and it books the same way as anything here.

The terms that only apply here

Mulholland, Latigo and the Angeles Crest are what these cars go out for, and every term that decides a canyon booking is better had as a figure than as an adjective. Most of the fleet rents on one set of conditions; the exotics do not, and knowing which set a car is on before you book is cheaper than learning it afterwards. A Corvette at $349 a day carries a $750 refundable security deposit, $100 a day of mandatory damage-and-liability cover, and a young-driver supplement of $50 a day for a driver aged 21 to 24. A Huracán at $1,799 a day carries a $2,000 deposit, $225 a day of cover, and a supplement of $175 a day at the same ages. Nothing but the deposit decides which set applies: the cover band and the supplement both step up at $1,500, so a car's deposit tells you the whole of its terms.

The deposit is a hold rather than a charge, taken at handover against a credit card in the primary renter’s name, and it is returned 5–7 business days after the car comes back. Drivers under 25 are not turned away from this shelf: the floor is 21 with two years of licence history, as it is everywhere else on the site, and the supplement above is what the age costs. The daily mileage allowance is the one term here that is not banded in advance — it is enough for a canyon morning and not enough for a week of commuting, and the figure for a given car is confirmed with the car rather than mentioned at the kerb.

The exotic and ultra-high-value cars stay in California, which costs a canyon day nothing: Mulholland, Latigo and the Crest are all inside the state line. Nevada and Arizona are open to part of the fleet with notice; they are not open to this part, and crossing the line without approval voids the cover. You will need your own full-coverage insurance, collision and comprehensive to the replacement value of the car, or one of our daily plans instead. Every driver must be 21 or over with two years of licence history and named on the agreement, and renters from outside the United States need a passport alongside the home licence, and nothing more — we do not require an International Driving Permit. The FAQ carries the rest.

Renting one in LA

The minimum is twenty-four hours. Beyond that you can rent by the day, the week or the month. Every car carries a daily figure, and where it also carries a five-day or twenty-one-day block that block is printed on its own page and on the rates page — several of the exotics carry neither and hold one rate at any length, which the page says rather than leaves you to discover. There is no counter and no queue: we deliver to a hotel, a residence or an office, complimentary at our partner hotels in Beverly Hills, and we collect the car at the end. Delivery to LAX is arranged against a flight number, so the car meets the aircraft that landed rather than the one on the schedule.

Notice is what decides which car you get. Same-day rental happens more often than people expect and is always worth a call. A weekday in February needs nothing. A Saturday in July, in a particular colour, needs a few days, because there are eleven of these cars and no second Ferrari.

What do you rent that is quick and loud but not a full supercar?

The Chevrolet Corvette at $349 a day is the direct answer: mid-engined, two seats, and a roof panel that comes out with two hands. It is a supercar layout at roughly a fifth of what the supercars on this page cost. Under it, the Audi RS3 at $171 a day is the five-cylinder saloon that makes the noise and still carries four people and their luggage. Both sit in the $750 deposit band, which puts the damage-and-liability cover at $100 a day, and twenty-four hours is the shortest booking — so a couple of days is two days on the agreement whichever way the hours fall.

Which of these cars suits the canyon roads above Los Angeles?

We are not going to call ourselves the best at it, so here is what actually matters on those roads. The Corvette is the one built for them — mid-engined, short, and happier being steered than being pointed. The RS3 drives all four wheels, which is the one that forgives a damp morning on Mulholland or a shaded corner on Angeles Crest. The wide exotics are the ones people picture up there and the ones that spend the drive worrying about the surface. Every car on this page carries its rate, deposit, cover and a live calendar on its own page, so you can settle the car and the dates in one place.