Why is bike hire so expensive compared to car ?

[AndyGB]

I'm over in the US during July and am hoping to get some time to do some travelling once my official business is finished.

One of the things I was going to do was hire a bike for a week and ride up the Pacific Coast Highway. However looking at the prices I can't understand why hire is so expensive. For 7 days hire of a 250 Kawasaki Ninja (from Eagle Rider) its $619 and for a 600 (from werentbikes) it's $700.

Given that I can hire a two door convertible car for £250 why is it so much more expensive to hire a bike ? The car will be worth more and from an insurance point of view surely you can do more damage with a car than a bike !

I'm still tempted with a bike but financially (and practically) the convertible makes much more sense.

[colin1]

bikes are more likely to get trashed
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colin1 is officially faster than god

[Phoenix]

I wouldn't trust the company you've been looking at to give you a convertable, do some reasearch and you'll find that most of the main hire companies in America (Thrifty/Dollar, Hertz, Alamo/National) will 9 times out of 10 never give you the car you book, when you book a car they don't actually book it at all they just make sure one of the minimum size you specify (seats and boot) is available if they don't have it they'll give you a bigger one for free, which may sound great but if you booked a 4 door sedan having to drive a gigantic 4x4 is going to be expensive.

Convertibles and sports cars are the worst for this, you're likely to never get one unless you hire from a company that specialises in sports car hire.

I booked a 4dr economical sedan in Canada with Dollar as I figured it'd be the most available, unsurprisingly when I got there my choice was infact an upgrade to a "Luxury 4dr" chrysler 300 (didn't want it at 25-30mpg) or downgrade to a PT Cruiser, bloody horrible things, went for that as it'd do.

Look at UK bike hire costs and you'll see the American equivalent is not that different, UK hire rates are about £60 a day minimum for a small bike, and I mean small. I used to work for an accident hire firm and so the daily rates were obviously much better than you'd get paying privately being trade long term contracts, a 600 sports bike was about £60 a day and a 1litre bike between £90-100 so you can see how much more private hire would cost.