canyonwalker | (Reply)

From:

The rental car situation on the Big Island has been like that for months. They shipped all of the cars off-island in 2019 when demand dropped through the floor, and now that demand is spiking again they don't have the inventory.

I checked "turo", an app that's like AirBnB for cars. Most places it's so people can rent someone's exotic car for a day just for the experience. Here, it was looking like I could get a 2015 Nissan Sentra for $275/day... Ouch.

Luckily my lovely wife knows someone on-island who makes extra money by renting out their daughter's car when she's not using it. So I wound up driving a Scion iQ for the week I was here, and it only cost $75/day.

Buying a new car is also stupid difficult. You go to the dealer, and there are something like four vehicles for sale on the whole lot.

We eventually figured out that it was well worth the $2K to ship her white car over here. It's not a car we used that often anyway, and of course it's long since paid for! Far cheaper than buying a car or renting for more than a week or two!

Probably not a good solution for your situation, of course. Since it took about a month for the car to get shipped from the Port of Oakland to Hilo.