Lifestyle vehicle choices from fleet drivers are helping to drive increasing interest in medium-term rental, says Meridian Vehicle Solutions.

Meridian said drivers are using medium-term rental to take 4x4s in winter months

Managing director Phil Jerome said the company was seeing a rising market for such lifestyle provision, which is one of the advantages of medium-term rental thanks to the inherent flexibility of the solution.

He explained: “For drivers that have a high degree of control over their choices from a user-chooser points of view, this might mean they hire a ‘proper’ 4×4 for six months to cover the autumn-winter months and then have something more lightweight and sporty for the summer.

“Their demands might also be more practical. Sometimes, we see a driver who is working in a large city hire a smaller hybrid then, if their next contract takes them into a rural location, they come back to us for an SUV.”

Jerome added the thinking here very much mirrored the mobility packages now being offered by some manufacturers where the driver is offered a selection of vehicles within a set monthly payment, provided on a flexible basis.

“We are not able to offer quite that degree of choice where cars can be changed sometimes on an almost weekly basis but, then, our rental rates are substantially lower.”