London may have a reputation for being one of the most expensive cities on the planet – but when it comes to car rental the capital doesn’t cost the earth.

That’s according to a survey from CarDelMar, an innovative online car rental broker.

CarDelMar has launched a new ‘Gas Guzzling Grid’ – an index which gives holidaymakers an accurate insight into the relative costs of car hire across the world’s most popular destinations.

Hiring a car in London would not set you back as much as other popular cities such as Melbourne, Paris or Berlin, despite London pump prices ranking among the highest in the world.

The company took several key factors into account when compiling its exhaustive league table - The cost of the hire, insurance and extras over a week; the price of fuel to cover 250 miles and the exchange rate with the local currency.



The index identifies Oslo as the most expensive city on earth to rent a car – costing four times as much as the oil rich city of Dubai, and twice as much as London. Paris costs more than double Dubai for car hire. Other high rankers include Vienna in second place and Pisa coming in third.

The Grid highlights Los Angeles as the second cheapest city followed by Cape Town and other U.S City, San Jose.

“Once we had put all these factors into our formula we realised we had come up with an accurate and helpful comparison index,” says Carsten Greiner, managing director of CarDelMar.

The league table works like The Economist’s famous ‘Big Mac Index’ which economists use to calculate which country is worst and best off.