We had two hire cars, each for around a week, and this was our first to transport us from Calgary to Jasper. On arrival at the Avis desk in Calgary they said there were no more cars of the type that had been booked for us (a medium-sized Ford of US-market derivation) so we were offered a pick-up instead, which would be an upgrade. Sounded good to me, so I agreed. Then we found it in the car park – you couldn’t miss it. An ENORMOUS GMC Sierra.
We quickly discovered that the rear load section was useless. It had no load cover, so we couldn’t use it. Instead we had to pile all the luggage and bags in the back seat area, meaning one in the back and three up front, with Jo being smallest being relegated to the fold-down seat in the middle. Apparently it wasn’t that comfortable, something I had no experience of as I was the only driver and my seat was fully electric with heating bottom and back. I had to keep adjusting it just to keep it comfortable and didn’t tell Jo about it (much).
Getting out of the airport car park was an experience but we slowly exited. At this point I discovered (and heard) the engine was quite large – a 5.3 litre petrol V8 – and pleasurably noisy. It wasn’t hugely quick but had plenty of torque meaning acceleration was more than adequate. We later discovered it hit 100km/h (60mph) in around 9 seconds, though Jo wasn’t happy to time me doing this.
We did discover probably its best feature – the noise it made on cold startup.
However, being an American vehicle, I soon discovered its rather significant downsides – it wandered side-to-side on straight roads (probably due to the tyre width), and was utterly incompetent on corners and offroad surfaces, despite being four-wheel drive. So from a driver’s perspective it was much harder work than driving at home.
The only other point of note was the fuelling cost – before leaving Lake Louise for our near 300km trip through the Icefield Parkway (where there was only one fuel station) we filled it up from around half full – 55 litres of fuel (so I guess well over 100 litre tank) costing about £43. That would make fuel prices in Canada around half that of home.
So, not the best hire car we’ve ever had but fun to try something different.