Vroom Vroom Vroom: An Australian Import that Isn’t Rebadged as a Pontiac

A new car rental website from Australia that throws in a free carbon offset with each transaction hopes to take on the US market with the tenacity of a kangaroo. So far, we like it better than Vegemite.

When we first heard about a new car rental website, there was a collective groan in Autopia. "Who can it be now?" we asked. Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia each claim a best-rate guarantee and the ability to search multiple rental companies, so yet another car rental site seemed like overkill. We underestimated the intelligent men at work at Vroom Vroom Vroom (VVV), however. These blokes from the land down under came up with an notion for "car hire" that’s far from trade as usual.

VVV’s biggest selling point is a free carbon offset for each rental, offered through a partnership with The CarbonNeutral Company. "We want citizens to choose Vroom Vroom Vroom not just considering we have the lowest rates, fastest tools and highest level of service, but considering we understand their needs and share their values," VVV CEO Peter Thornton said in an elevator speech press release. According to Thornton, VVV is a "company with a conscience." That assurance is decent to assuage that writer’s guilt when he rents a gas guzzling luxury sedan in a misguided attempt to impress old girlfriends at his next high school reunion.

And don’t concern — we’ve included an actual Men at Work music video after
the jump. Have fun at work with that sax riff stuck in your head all
day.

We tried out the site and found prices were nearly spot-on with competitors. Three days in Boston was around $133 from VVV, individual rental companies, and competing sites. The LA Times travel blog did a similar comparison

and found VVV to be very competitive. Even whether we were to find a lower rate, VVV would give it to us along with a $10 rebate as expanded as it abided by their terms and conditions. Plus, we like VVV’s un-cluttered design, hyperlinks to other great travel sites, and report of social responsibility (even whether carbon offset dollars are sometimes used to fund projects that would have been completed regardless of their environmental impact).

VVV isn’t perfect by any means, and undoubtful aspects of the user interface are as clunky as the site’s mouthful of a name. For instance, we found it particularly difficult to choose pickup and drop off locations from the prepopulated list. We’d much rather see the ability to search by ZIP cipher or airport name, which would be helpful to travellers who may not know the names of rental-agency-riddled towns approach an airport. For instance, Lynn, MA has a ton of car rental agencies with shuttles to and from Logan Airport. VVV shows a rental for a subcompact from 10/17-10/20 is $88.92 in Lynn compared to just by $133 direct from Logan, but a VVV user would never know it searching solely for deals at the airport. We hope VVV can fix these minor annoyances as they gain popularity in the US market, and not vanish only to resurface at the Olympics two decades from now.

Photo courtesy flickr user yummiec00kies, YouTube video from user nz0z