The most beautiful rental car in the world – get it now! (With the resources of course)

Think about it: what is the best rental car in the world?

Hmm… There was a time when I ordered a Ford Focus, but the lady at the counter suggested “For $6 a day I can upgrade you to a Challenger R/T”. Of course I took it. Thanks to the 6.1 liter Hemi engine, it went like clockwork, but was always comfortable and pleasant to drive and still had plenty of room in the trunk. There is hardly a better car for driving from Phoenix to Vegas and other scenic drives in and around Arizona.

As fun as the above rental car experience was, it never comes close to the very, very best rental car experience in history. Because the best rental car EVER is and remains this:

The Shelby GT350H from 1966, ladies and gentlemen! Popularly known as “Rent-a-Racer”.

Yep, that’s right: That’s a 1966 Shelby GT350 to the letter, one of those highly tuned Ford Mustangs that were custom built by Carroll Shelby’s company in the Shelby Cobra style and sold as stock. The ‹H› in the model designation indicates this model as a model that was specially produced in 1966 for car rental company Hertz, which the latter offered to customers as a rental car.

You have to think about it for a moment: a car that was built so that the owner could race it on weekends was suddenly available to everyone – as a rental car.

A few exclusive modifications set the GT350H apart from the rest of the Mustang range. The most obvious of these was the black and gold livery that became the Hertz Mustang’s identifying mark – although some units (fewer than 50 produced) came in red, white, blue and green (pictured below).

Under the hood, the GT350H was powered by the same engine as the standard GT350, a 4.7-liter V8 producing 306 hp at 6000 rpm and 446 Nm of torque at 4200 rpm. The engine had a four-barrel Holley carburetor on a high-performance head and a tri-Y exhaust manifold.

The GT350H was an instant success. Car enthusiasts flocked to Hertz rental locations across the country to rent a car for a day or perhaps a weekend. The car was particularly popular with drag racers who saw the GT350H’s potential as a formidable quarter-mile competitor.

And stories promptly surfaced of rented GT350Hs whose engines and transmissions had been stripped down by the renter and mounted on a regular Ford Mustang for racing for a weekend. After the end of the race weekend, the engine and transmission were refitted to the original car and it was returned to the rental car shop.

Other weekend racers drove their races themselves with the rental car, which quickly made the maintenance costs prohibitive for Hertz, which led the company to withdraw from the project after almost a year.

All in all, Shelby only made 936 pieces, which is why the GT350H is now a sought-after collector’s item, with six figures up for auction.

On April 1, two of these cars will be auctioned by auction house Mecum; one in black and gold, one in the even rarer ivy green and gold color scheme.

estimate for it black Car: $210,000 – $220,000.

Here let’s go to the list.

Estimate price for the green car (that too manually and has Carrol Shelby’s signature on the glove box): $300,000 – $350,000.

Here let’s go to the list.

Oh yeah. Dreaming is still free.