Silvercar – still my favorite car rental company

My Silvercar at the Opus One winery in Napa Valley

About a year ago I wrote about my very positive experience with car rental company Silvercar. Last week I used them again in San Francisco and I still love their cars and their disruptive business model. I am just surprised that not more people know about them and use them, therefore another blog post to spread the word. And no, I am not getting paid for this of course!

Silvercar is a US based rental car company that only has Audi A4 Quattro cars in its fleet (although that will change soon, I heard they will add Audi Q5s as well). All cars are exactly the same and are silver colored, hence the name. Pricing is competitive, at $89 per day during weekdays and $69 per day during weekends (in SFO, other airports may have different prices). But what really sets them apart from the competition is the experience and the extras that are all for free.

At San Francisco airport lines are generally quite long at the traditional car rental companies. For Silvercar there are no lines, after you made a reservation you just open the Silvercar mobile app when you arrive at the airport and click on the button to indicate that you have arrived. A Silvercar representative then picks you up from the rental car terminal and drives you to the Silvercar location (a 5 minute drive). There you can choose a car, you open the door by scanning the car’s QR code with your phone and off you go. No waiting in line, no filling out of forms and no upselling of insurance or other unnecessary add-ons.

But that’s not all, because the Silvercars are all extremely well equipped. Every car has a great navigation system built in (honestly, it’s much better than the system in my Porsche or Mercedes-Benz), which is free. So no $25 per day for an old-fashioned GPS that some car companies are trying to sell you. Each car has a toll tracking device, meaning that you can take the Fastrack lane at toll gates (very handy around San Francisco), and they will bill you automatically for this. All cars are also equipped with Sirius XM satellite radio, so you are not forced to listen to FM radio stations full of advertising and dumb presenters. Of course you can also play your phone’s music or podcasts through bluetooth. And the cars have built-in wifi, so you don’t have to use expensive data plans if you use a non-US phone or want to check your mails on your laptop. No other car rental company offers this and certainly not for free.

When you get back after your trip you just park the Audi at Silvercar and they automatically detect how full the tank is (with a sensor), so no need to fill it up when you are in a hurry to get to the airport. They will charge you regular gas prices, no huge mark-up like many car rental companies do (Silvercar just adds a $5 fee to fill it up). Unfortunately they do not bring you back to the airport in your own car anymore, you now need to take a shuttle bus (that left straight away after I got on, so no waiting for other passengers). At SFO they charge you an additional $20 for that, but it’s a mandatory airport transportation fee so it seems they can’t get around that.

My experience with Silvercar is excellent and I would advise everybody to use them when they are in San Francisco or at one of the other airports out of which they operate (currently Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin, Miami, Denver and Phoenix, with more locations being added over the next months). Silvercar just closed its $14 million Series B round (in total they raised $31.5 million), so I think you’ll hear a lot more from them in the future!