Blancfleet Aims To Be The Next ZipCar, Add Bugatti And Pagani To Fleet

 

                    

Posted By Antony Ingram

 

 

 

If you want to feel like a million dollars for a day, you could do a lot worse than to hit up one of the many companies offering supercars for daily rental. But until now, barely any have actually offered million-dollar cars on their fleets—making Blancfleet's supercar hire business extra special.

Blancfleet founder Charles Polanco says the company hopes to become "the next ZipCar", though your average ZipCar fleet doesn't allow drivers behind the wheel of a Bugatti Veyron or Pagani Huayra.

 The company's business plan is already an unusual one, side-stepping some of the usual supercar rental drawbacks with its crowdfunded setup.

As the company announced back in May, Blancfleet actually buys, rather than leases the supercars on its fleet. The firm allows each car a certain number of rentable hours per year, and money made from these hourly rental periods is used to pay for the cars.

The company also notes the difficulty in obtaining insurance when you're renting out ultra-valuable supercars, when the potential damage caused in an accident can escalate beyond that of the average house.

 For the renter, liability insurance is rarely high enough to cover such damage, and the huge deposits many supercar rental firms place on vehicles means even the smallest incidents can hit the customer for thousands of dollars.

To make its own process more attractive, Blancfleet self-insures its cars—all costs are rolled into the price of the hourly rental rate, and risk is spread across the hundreds of people who've crowdfunded the business.

Of course, hiring a supercar, even for an hour, still isn't cheap. If you want to rumble around New York City in a Bugatti Veyron or cruise the streets of Fort Lauderdale in a Pagani Huayra, you'll pay $1,325 and $1,040 per hour respectively, once enough people pledge hours to afford the cars' lofty price tags.

 You could have a lot of time in an $83-per-hour Nissan GT-R or even a $204-per-hour Ferrari 458 Italia for the same price (both vehicles are already in Blancfleet's garage). But the important thing is that you will actually be able to rent a Bugatti or Pagani if you've got the green—and you really will feel like a million dollars while doing so.

For more details, head over to Blancfleet's website.