On Monday 8thJune 2015 the paper counter part of driving licences was abolished and any convictions and endorsements on your licence will be held online but what does this mean when hiring here at Central Self Drive?

In theory this quite simply means our customers should log on to the DVLA website, no more than 3 days before hiring from us, enter your driving license number, national insurance number & postcode to obtain a code, which you will then give to ourselves upon hiring a vehicle. We simply input this code to view your driving record (your paper licence online) when you hire a vehicle.

The code which DVLA supply to you is only valid for 3 days, so please could all drivers ensure that they do not get the code more than 3 days before the rental. We will of course require a code for each and every driver in the event of you wishing to add a second driver to your rental vehicle.

Should you not have internet access or forget to bring your code with you to hire, a phone number is available 8am-7pm Weekdays & 8am-2pm Saturdays, meaning we can help you  but unfortunately not Sundays. Should you not have internet access or require any help obtaining the code and have pre booked a Sunday hire please come down to Central Self Drive Offices Friday during working hours or Saturday morning so we may help you obtain your code.

At Central Self Drive we do our upmost to keep our check-in and out service running as quickly and smoothly as possible for your convenience (we know our customers have a lot more interesting things to do with precious time than sit around with us) so if you can have your code ready, with your Driving Licence card, proofs of ID/address and deposit card, when collecting a vehicle it will mean you are not stuck in our offices longer than you have to be. For more information on requirements to hire, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.

Overall we have found the first days of using this new system quite effective apart from a slight technical hitch on day one, when the DVLA website crashed but this was quickly rectified and did not cause any major problems within our branch. There have been reports in the media of drivers queuing for hours at rental companies throughout the UK but we would like to reassure our customers that this is not the case at Central so far and we will do our upmost to ensure this will not happen here.