You may not be able to afford your dream car, but a new Chicago car rental startup will still let you roll up to your event in style.
Prestige Exotics, founded at the beginning of this year, is a luxury car rental platform that allows users to rent high-end vehicles for hourly and daily rates.
The startup currently has 21 vehicles available for rent, ranging from Ferraris to Bentleys. Most of the vehicles cost upwards of $1,000 a day.
“We fill a void," said Prestige Exotics Founder and CEO Ehab Odah. “Not everyone can afford or wants to own one of these cars full time, so that’s where we come in."
Prestige Exotics will drop off and pick up vehicles from your home, or renters can pick them up themselves at Prestige’s headquarters in Burr Ridge. The startup allows cars to be rented for up to one month at a time, but cars cannot be driven across state lines.
Odah’s family, which has been in the car sales business since 2005, owns three dealerships, one of which sells luxury vehicles. Odah sources Prestige Exotics’ rentals from his family’s dealership, allowing the startup to make some extra cash on cars that otherwise just sit on a lot waiting to be purchased.
“We thought we’d combine the best of both worlds by allocating a few of the high-end cars that we were stuck with,” Odah said.
Most of Prestige Exotics customers are looking for luxury vehicles for special events, such as weddings and parties, said Odah, adding that most of their cars are currently booked for this year’s prom season.
The most coveted cars Prestige Exotics offers are Rolls Royce models, which can run for $1,700 a day. Other models, such as a Mercedes G550 4×4, cost $1,000 a day.
“It’s not a regular G Wagon,” Odah said. “It’s a high-performance one. It’s a $175,000 vehicle.”
Odah said he plans to expand Prestige Exotics to other markets in the future, such as Miami, but wants to monitor how business grows over the next year in the Chicago area. The startup faces competition locally from other luxury car rental companies, such as DS Luxury and Veluxity, but would face even stiffer competition if it expands to warm weather markets and vacation destination cities, where luxury auto rentals are more common.
But Prestige Exotics thinks it can differentiate itself because it’s not just offering the "average" Lamborghini and Ferrari for rent. Odah says the company offers the most recent and unique models that have carbon fiber, exhaust and intake upgrades.
“It’s all about our fleet,” Odah said. “They’re highly specked-out cars.”
