Some Assembly Required – Your Car In Europe

I recently spent 2 months in Europe with my wife Kelli, doing what used to be called a Grand Tour. We covered a lot of ground and had a wonderful time. Of course, this meant that absolutely no work occurred on my 1963 Jaguar Etype restoration project. That caused me some minor frustration but the trip was ample compensation.

We had been planning the trip for the better part of a year. Early on, I had a brief flirtation with the idea of taking one of my sports cars over to be our daily driver. I ruled that out for several reasons, which represent the basis for this article. My wife was raised in a ranch environment. Her idea of travel destinations is probably different from most folks. She generally prefers rural locations versus big cities and resort areas. She carefully curates our destinations with many of our overnight stays on rural properties that generally fall into the AirBNB category. We almost always stay 2 nights in one spot and in several cases we spent a week. This approach really requires that we travel by car.

Any of you that have driven in Europe will know that some of the roads can be quite narrow. In my previous trips, I fell into the trap of letting the rental car companies “upgrade” me to a bigger car. This time I vowed to go as small as possible. But also, getting the exact rental car you want when you arrive can be an issue. Which led me to a neat solution, which is the French “Car-2-Europe” program. Very broadly, you obtain a short term lease on an exact car you want. You “own” the car as a leaseholder for the duration of your trip. You pay a fixed upfront fee based on the duration of your trip (mileage is unlimited) and when you return the car, they “buy it back” at zero cost. For the 10 weeks that we needed a car, it wound up being cheaper than a rental. We reserved a brand new Citroen C3 Aircross. 6 kilometers on the odometer when we picked it up at the Paris CDG airport. There is a lot of info online about this program so I’ll let you look into it more if you are interested.

So that is what we did and it worked out fine. But my mind at times did drift to consideration of bringing over one of my sports cars. I think the answer remains “not a good idea” for me but here are some things I found out that you might want to consider.

Cost- There are generally 2 ways to get a car from the US to Europe. Both involve ships that leave east coast ports. There is “drive on” and “container”. Both have their merits with container being a little more secure but more expensive. There are firms that specialize in this process. The lease fee I paid for my Citroen was ballpark $3000 and very generally, that would be a pretty good start towards the cost of ship transport. You also have to figure out how to get your car to an east coast port and how to pick it up in a European port. Not a trivial concern. And you have to buy supplemental insurance.

Functionality- Any modern sports car would generally do fine in Europe. Keep in mind that gas runs $8 to $9 a gallon in Europe. My Citroen averaged 45 mpg for the entire trip. My own sports cars would have been about half of that. With older cars, you should really consider the “hassle factor” if you have a mechanical problem. Just like it is hard to find someone you trust to work on your classic car in the US, the same problem exists in Europe. Before my trip, I had told myself that if I spotted any interesting classic car repair shops, I would stop in for a chat. That frankly never happened. Just like in the US, you kind of have to seek them out. My lease car was covered by a factory warranty. Thankfully, nothing came up but Citroen dealers were plentiful if it came to that. Doubly thankfully as we planned our trip on a pretty fixed schedule. Europe is so popular now that you really need to book things months in advance. A repair problem that took very long to fix would have had an adverse impact. And if you were to have a collision requiring body repair? Well, I just don’t really want to think about it! So if you are going to take over a personal car, make sure it is in tip top shape. As an aside, France has a pretty aggressive series of 30 kph speed bumps and “sausage curbs” placed directly in the roads in all the towns. I am pretty sure these would have ripped the low hanging exhaust system out of the bottom of my Etype, had this been the car I was driving.

Enjoying the driving experience- I like to drive. I’m a confident driver. I specifically requested my Citroen to be a stick shift, just because I like the interaction of shifting. That said, I never got really comfortable driving around in Europe versus at home. By default, all the roads were new to me. They seem to be fairly serious about speed limits. I stuck strictly to the posted limits, although in some countries the locals queued up behind me with evident frustration. We did spend a little time on unlimited speed limit autobahns in Germany, which was fun but also nerve racking. There were some interesting curvy roads in the mountains but again, especially with the wife in the right hand seat, I was pretty conservative. As noted above, any mistake by me would have been a real downer for the Grand Tour experience. So I am frank to admit that to me, the fun of being in one of my personal sports cars probably would have been overshadowed by the added anxiety, for all the factors discussed above. But hey, people do it. It all really boils down to your circumstances and personality type.