Is Sixt Really a Different Type of Car Rental Company? We Found Out

You’ve probably seen the commercials by now, or at least taken stock of their eye-grabbing closing scenes: an Isle of Man Green BMW M3 tearing up an empty freight pier and a runway like a scene from Gone in 60 Seconds, driving with the sort of energy you do in your dreams and shot with true Hollywood verve. Don’t Just Rent a Car, the screen implores you, Rent The Car. Then it hits you with the name of the brand behind all this action: Sixt.

Questionable fun with definitive articles aside, Sixt’s pitch is an interesting one. In a world where companies like Turo, Uber, ZipCar, Lime and Revel have completely redefined what it means to borrow transportation, and where traditional rental agencies like Hertz, Avis and Enterprise haven’t inspired much in the way of direct competition in ages, is there room for a cool rental car company? What would that even look like? If there are plenty of established options out there for booking a car on a trip, is it even worth considering some new player trying to sell themselves as hip?

For the record, while Sixt may not be all that well-known here in the States, it’s hardly some tech upstart. The company was actually founded alllll the way back in 1912 by Martin Sixt of Germany, and it still has its headquarters there. (Their Munich location happens, as it turns out, to be just across town from that of BMW.) Still, it took 98 years for it to make its first inroads in America, when it opened its first U.S. location in Florida, and it wasn’t until the last few years that they’ve gone widespread across the land — complete with the aforementioned attention-getting P.R. campaign to highlight their presence.

So to find out if this new-to-us rental car company was all hype or a worthy contender for your vacation bucks, I tried Sixt’s services out. Here’s what I learned.

Sixt Car Rental: What We Think

Sixt may not revolutionize car rental, but it’s a solid option worthy of consideration when booking a car for a trip. Their extensive selection of BMW models certainly makes them more appealing to enthusiasts, and the rental experience proved smooth and easy, helped in no small part by excellent customer service.

Sixt Car Rental: Testing Notes

Their BMW collaboration is no joke.

For my test, I headed out to a place where just about everyone who goes there will have to wrangle a rental car even in this day and age: Hawaii, a state which, undoubtedly, has a higher percentage of rental cars on the road versus local vehicles than any other in the U.S.

I’d booked an X5, but the folks at the desk kindly upgraded me to an X7, which proved a delightful bonus for when we needed to drive around my partner’s cousin whom we were visiting. The X7 in question was in good shape — a 2021 model with around 26,000 miles on the clock — although the leather on the steering wheel was polished smooth from a thousand greasy palms, and by the third day, the car began flashing an error message claiming it was overdue an oil change. (They also did mention that I only needed to use regular gas instead of BMW’s preference of premium, so keep that in mind in case you’re ever considering buying an ex-rental Bimmer.)

Roughly half the cars in the Sixt lot were BMWs — mostly X3 and X5 SUVs, along with a couple X7s like mine, a handful of 3 Series and 5 Series sedans and a host of Z4 convertibles (again, Hawaii), with a couple Mercedes-Benzes scattered amongst to round out the premium fleet The other half were a blend of domestic usuals – Ford Mustang convertibles in both EcoBoost and V8 forms (but oddly, almost all blue) for the honeymooners and retirees, Chevy Tahoes and Suburbans for the family vacationers, the ubiquitous Jeep Wranglers, and so forth.

Will Sabel Courtney

The experience is nicer than traditional rental car agencies.

Rental car pickups all too often happen when you’re hardly feeling your best. By the time you reach the counter, you’re usually coming off a harried trip to the airport, an irritating run through security and a pileup at the gate, several hours in the high-and-dry, energy-depleting cabin of an airliner, the interminable wait for your checked luggage to finally make its way down the chute and onto the carousel, and a shuttle ride of some sort to the quasi-off-site rental car area. The last thing you want to deal with, by that point, is the traditional rental car fiasco: a long line, a surly representative, a fossilized computer system connected to the last remaining dot-matrix printer in the Western Hemisphere.

The Sixt experience, though, managed to set itself apart from my prior rental car imbroglios. Whereas most of the rental car companies in Hawaii were jammed into communal spaces, Sixt had its own little room, complete with brand-specific orange walls and retro-futuristic desks for check-in. The only other rental car agency with a comparably nice setup was Hertz…but only for their Gold Member customers, who are lucky enough to have their own separate booth away from the plebes.

Once the t’s had been crossed and the i’s dotted, it was a short walk to the separate booth in the parking garage, where another Sixt employee checked my paperwork and passed me the keys to the prepped-and-waiting X7. Compared with my last rental car experience — in which I had to spend 10 minutes in windy subzero temps in an outdoor lot photographing my Turo and waiting for the owner to remotely unlock it — it was vastly more pleasant.

Will Sabel Courtney

Sixt’s customer service, likewise, was impressive. No Seinfeldian arguments here; the Sixt employee at the counter was personable and helpful beyond what you’d expect from any retail employee working with a cavalcade of grumpy customers at 8 o’clock in the evening, even being kind enough to offer up restaurant recommendations. When there was a billing issue, multiple representatives quickly worked with me to set things right; same went for clearing up my concerns over the oil change light. And when I dropped the car off, the Sixt rep checking in cars was both polite and brisk — both of which were equally appreciated while rushing to catch a flight.

The app isn’t perfect

Sixt, like most car rental companies, offers an app for your phone that you can use for many of the usual rental tasks — and even some of the ones you might not expect; for example, you can use it to call a Lyft. As someone who checks their Delta app with maniacal frequency before traveling, I was excited to try it out — especially when it seemed like I could use it to check in ahead of time and potentially forgo some of the paperwork upon arrival.

Sadly, things didn’t go according to plan. While it gave me the ability to upload my driver’s license and theoretically check in remotely, it didn’t work in practice; the app, seemingly, misread my middle name as my last name and threw a code. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t wind up using the app to skip the line as I’d hoped I’d be able to when I downloaded the app before the trip. Still, it’s worth having the app just to keep track of your rental history and receipts in once place.

Oh, and electric cars are coming, too.

Will Sabel Courtney

When dropping my X7 off before my flight, I noticed that, behind one of the many Z4s, there was a line of Level 2 charging stations. Not seeing anything plugged into them, I asked the aforementioned friendly drop-off agent what they were for. “Mostly 5 Series plug-in hybrids now,” he said, “but we’ll be getting Teslas soon.” So take heart: if you want to rent one of Elon Musk’s rides on your next trip, you don’t have to go with the company that might accidentally get you arrested.

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