Fashion Contrast

Reddit has been in the news recently with a user posting pictures of himself engaged in some kind of heroin raddled encounter with a silly girl living of the back of her Dad’s music career and her mothers overdose. You probably know who I’m talking about. Reddit is however probably one of my favorite sites on the internet presently. Filled to the brim with juicy morsels of ‘web goodness’ and indeed badness.

Every so often there is a fairly interesting “Ask Me Anything” section, usually a member of the community higher up in a company than others or maybe even a UFC cage fighter who answers questions on how easy it to break someones leg – you should get the gist.

An interesting “AMA” was from a “Co-owner of an exotic car rental company“. Some of the more interesting points or should I say questions answered are listed below.

• You could be a massive executive with lots of money, but without the correct experience you can’t hire a car.
• Once you start a rental company you start hating your own countries attempt at car creation and tend to enjoy other brands more.
• Having old ‘exotic’ cars is not a good idea. The market suggests that people want modern fancy over old fashioned, sophisticated.
• Insurance doesn’t always pay out. Hense why this company does credit checks up to $100,000 just in case…
• Strange rental requests include : Car being at a certain temperature when pick up occurs.
• Cars are sold when the cost of upkeep gets close to how much they make of a rental. Depreciation can also be a factor. Cars are apparently then sold onto smaller car hire brokers or, ‘blokes who want a sports car but can’t afford new’

He has a car in his hand.

I browse Reddit most days, I like the American anger towards anything which is omnipresent on the site, I also like the picture section and could quite happily spend most of my day looking at pictures of Chipmunks acting out Star Wars etc…

A interesting subject came up in the Ask Reddit section, regarding a possible American’s concern that Manual cars cost less to rent then an Automatic one, and since he had never driven a Manual, how quickly could he learn to drive and pass of being a Manual owner for the car rental broker when he arrived in Ireland.

I was interested by what he said about Automatics cost more to rent, now the real question is not whether he will be able to learn to drive the manual vehicle as pretty much all of know that its not really possible in a day… As my mother proved this weekend (recently converted to an automatic) that automatic’s are a lot easier to use and she promptly cried when it came to driving my fathers big manual. It was also fairly terrifying…

After a quick phone call to a local car hire broker – posing as a prospective rental customer, this felt very espionage and pretty fun! The man at the end of the line who had a very gruff, local accent told me that to rent a small one person type automatic it would cost me £260.29 for a week, not bad perhaps, but then here’s the encouraging, not so good for the aforementioned American, that the ‘easy to learn’(not) manual would cost him £179.91 for the week! Now after trying some very basic mathematics I came to the conclusion that there is a 31% increase in price from manual to automatic which in my simple non mathematics head seems to be fairly steep… However I do know mathematicians who admit to not being able to do maths without a calculator..

For further reading on how the fervent internet faithful of Reddit try and teach this guy how to drive the article is here