With most car hire and van rental companies, customers are charged a penalty fee for returning vehicles with insufficient fuel in. They are then charged an inflated per-litre rate for the fuel required to top up the vehicle’s tank.

Now that might be fair enough – after all they should have filled up – but Europcar have come up with a much better solution that will save customers both time and money when it comes to refuelling.

Anyone hiring a car or van for more than 3 days who thinks they will use a whole tank of fuel will be given the option of paying for a full tank of fuel at the beginning of the rental at 3p per litre under the average high street price. I’m not sure how they calculate the ‘average high street price’ but this certainly sounds like a cost-effective, pragmatic view to refuelling charges.

It certainly compares well to a recent experience I had with another very large, international car and van hire company (who shall remain nameless).

Their fuel policy was the normal ‘return it with the same amount of fuel it had when you picked it up’. Fair enough, except that the vehicle was running on fumes when I collected it, so to avoid giving fuel away that I’d paid for, I had to somehow manage to return it with the needle buried right in the red, too…