About ospreymeadow

This started as a complaint at a table on Florida Road. Somebody had come back from a fortnight on the north coast with a charge for a rear bumper they were sure had been scuffed before they ever saw the car, and no photographs to prove it. Somebody else at the table had been through the identical argument eighteen months earlier. By the end of the evening we had worked out that between us we had read more hire agreements than most branch managers, and that the knowledge was sitting in four heads doing nobody any good.

So we wrote it down. The six long pieces on this site are the result, and they are deliberately longer than the internet usually allows, because the detail is the whole point. There is no shorter honest version of a gravel clause. We keep them current by continuing to hire cars ourselves, which we do perhaps thirty times a year between us, and by reading whatever paperwork friends and readers send us.

We are not an agency and we are not a company. Nobody here holds a licence to broker vehicles, nobody takes a referral fee, and no rental brand has ever paid us a cent or been offered the chance. If we tell you a counter will try to upsell you a R340-a-day waiver that excludes glass, it is because we read the wording, not because a competitor asked us to say so. The money on this site comes from the readings on the services page and from nowhere else.

All four of us are past fifty, which shapes the writing more than we intended at first. We care about whether a seat is still bearable at the end of a six-hour run up to Johannesburg, about whether you can see over your shoulder in the parking at a shopping centre, about aircon in a Durban February and about what a patched surface does to your lower back on the stretch past Mooi River. If you are looking for lap times and power figures, there are better sites and we read some of them for fun.