What car should you rent in Madeira?

Open any rental site for Funchal airport and the first thing you notice is the gap between the manual and the automatic. It is a real gap, and the obvious move is to save the money.

Don’t. On this island that is the wrong economy, and it is the one rental decision that will affect every day of the trip.

Take the automatic

Madeira’s roads are steep in a way that photographs do not convey, and a great many of them are wide enough for exactly one car. Put those two facts together and you get the situation you will meet repeatedly: halfway up a gradient, nose to nose with something coming down, and one of you has to reverse — uphill, on a slope, often around a bend.

That is a manageable annoyance in an automatic. In a manual it is clutch control on a hill start, repeatedly, in front of an audience, for the entire holiday.

When this was written, on the operators this site prices, manuals advertised from about €30 a day against roughly €52 for an automatic — call it €14 a day between them at the middle of the range. Our car-hire comparison carries the current numbers, and they move a long way by season. Whatever the gap is when you book, it is worth it.

One thing that is not a problem: finding an automatic is easy. This is not a booking you need to make months out to secure the gearbox you want.

Don’t take the weakest engine on the list

The cheapest line on any rental page is usually the smallest engine, and on flat ground you would never notice. Here you will.

You cannot fix this by reading spec sheets, though, because every listing ends in “or similar”. You are booking a category, not a car, and whatever is on the forecourt that morning is what you get.

What you can control is the category. The very bottom of the range is where the underpowered ones live, and one step up from the cheapest line is cheap insurance against a week of labouring up gradients — for the sake of a few euros a day, on the one thing you cannot swap once you have it.

But definitely not a big one

This is the part people get wrong in the other direction, having read that the roads are hard and concluded that something substantial will help. It will not.

We drove a Toyota Yaris Cross, which is short and not especially wide, and it was the right car. Even in that, there were roads where getting through meant squeezing harder than felt reasonable. We had one of the smallest cars available and it was still a nightmare in places. I genuinely cannot imagine doing it in something the size of an X5.

Whether the big categories are even on offer here is another question: the independent operators this site prices list nothing above an estate — economy, mini, compact, estate, and no SUVs at all.

Where the small car costs you

The honest trade-off, because it is a real one:

• The back seats have very little legroom. Fine for two people. Not what you want with adults or older children behind you.
• The boot is small. We travelled with one large suitcase and it was fine. With two genuinely large cases, I do not think it would go in.

So the recommendation splits. For a couple, a car of roughly this size is close to ideal. For a family of four with luggage, you are choosing between a boot that fits and a car that fits the roads — and that is a harder call than any of the above. Size up as little as you can get away with.

Pay for the full insurance

The one upgrade worth taking that is not about the car at all.

The odds of returning a hire car here without a mark on it are not good, and the problem is not really the likelihood — it is the size of the bill. Rental companies routinely charge far more for damage than people expect, and finding out how much after the fact, on a card you have already handed over, is a bad way to end a trip.

We scratched ours. Not, as it happens, on one of the tight roads — which is rather the point. It does not take a dramatic moment.

Buy the peace of mind. You will drive better for not flinching at every stone wall.

The short version

Automatic. Small. Not the weakest engine on the list. Fully insured. If you are a couple, something in the Yaris Cross bracket is close to perfect; if you are four with luggage, go up one size and no further.