The Story of Go Car Rental
The owners Steinarr Lár & Jón Óli met while Jón Óli was in University and Steinarr got him to drop his studies and get into business with him. The process happened really quickly, with just a website and an idea. Suddenly during Easter dinner March 30th, 2014, Jón Óli got an email with the first booking and guess what, it was due for the morning after! So how did we manage that? We simply went the next morning and bought a car and the party started!
We were able to get an office space with a friend who had a camper rental company where we had a small desk in a cramped loft without any windows, felt like a sauna. We managed to persuade them to use their facilities to begin with.
We had little idea how this was going to pan out. As things moved on we managed to get into our own office in 2015 and then in 2017 we moved into our current headquarters.
Things were going well up until 2019, then we had a major blow in the tourism industry in Iceland when Wow Air went under. On top of that Covid-19 hit us a few months later and we had to sit down and think well and hard about how we saw the future, If we were supposed to keep going and try to fight through or simply close the company and call it a day.
Thankfully, because we enjoyed it so much, meeting travelers daily and supplying them with a car for their vacation in Iceland, we decided to fight through the hard times and managed to get through it.
We were extremely lucky to be able to secure a fleet for the company in 2020 and 2021 when things started to pick up again and all of a sudden our headquarters became too small.
The next step was to build a house from scratch closely situated next to the airport where we are located now. This allows us to secure the best possible service and optimize costs. Subsequently we are the highest rated car rental in Iceland due to our great service and competitive prices.
Our Green Mission
We purchase all our rental vehicles as new from the local dealerships here in Iceland and we will use the cars for a maximum of 12-36 months. Our average fleet age is just 18 months old. With such young vehicles in our fleet, we limit the possibilities of any mechanical issues occurring. We also aim to buy cars that have low CO2 emissions to minimize the carbon footprint we leave behind. Our Green Mission is to have only electric vehicles in our fleet by the year 2030.
At the moment, Iceland does not have the infrastructure at all of its service stations to support the greater use of electric rental cars. However, Iceland produces some of the greenest electricity in the world, with over 90% of its electricity coming from renewable sources, which gives Iceland a perfect opportunity to become the first country in the world to have an entire fleet of electric cars, leaving zero carbon footprint from its car fleet. When you book your rental car, you can see a report of the vehicle’s CO2 emissions, which is also colored by how green it is.