Savant Car Rentals
Savant Car Rentals turned a hands-on side operation into a fully remote, scalable rental business using Traknova’s live tracking, remote lock/unlock and immobiliser. See how a decentralised setup let them grow to a 15-car fleet without a yard, an office, or ever needing to meet a guest.
How a car rental business scaled without becoming a slave to the operation
Savant Car Rentals is run by Alex Dyer, a professional footballer, and his business partner, who moved into car rental after building a property and service accommodation business together. They wanted an income stream they had full control over and, crucially, one that didn’t tie them to the day to day.
Alex had a clear test for any business: it has to work at 20, 30, 40 units, not just one. Renting cars passed that test on paper but not in practice. Meeting every guest in person, criss-crossing London to hand over keys, was never going to scale.
Their key challenges included:
- No way to go hands-off: Handing over keys in person worked for two or three cars. Beyond that, one person covering pickups from West London to East London was impossible.
- No appetite for fixed overheads: A yard or central depot only makes sense at scale, but scaling required the overhead first, creating a painful gap between three cars and ten where the numbers didn’t work.
- Lockboxes weren’t fit for cars: Unlike a fixed property, a car can be driven anywhere. Without live tracking, a lockbox left the business exposed.
- A weak market for alternatives: The one third-party provider they found came across as unreliable and unprofessional.
- Time was the real cost: Alex was clear that without the right tools he simply wouldn’t have done it. Two or three cars, maybe. A real business, no.
Traknova delivers a fully decentralised rental model
Traknova gave Savant exactly the two things they needed to run remotely: always-on tracking, so they know where every car is at any moment, and remote lock/unlock, so keys can live inside the vehicle and no one ever has to be there for a handover.
That combination let them decentralise completely. No base, no yard, no office. A lot of the time a guest collects and returns a car and the owners don’t even know it’s happened — the same hands-off experience they’d already built into their Airbnb properties.
How we won:
- Contactless handovers as standard: Remote lock/unlock means the car and key stay together and guests let themselves in, removing Alex from the process entirely.
- Total visibility: Live tracking gives constant certainty over where every vehicle is, replacing guesswork and worry.
- A repeatable rollout: After the setup work on the first car, every vehicle added since has been quick and seamless. Confidence from the first car led to three more within months.
- Real intervention when it matters: The immobiliser gives the team a genuine last line of defence when a guest goes off-agreement.
- Scalability without overhead: The decentralised model let them grow to a 15-car fleet with no yard, no office and no extra staff.
The immobiliser in action: stopping a car at Dover
Early on, a guest booked a car and asked to take it to the EU. Despite repeated messages explaining they needed the correct paperwork and approval first, the guest ignored the process, collected the car and set off. Tracking the vehicle live, the team watched it head southeast, past the coastal towns, and on towards Dover, while the guest insisted over the phone they weren’t leaving the country.
With the car at the port and the guest no longer answering, the team used the immobiliser. Within moments the phone lit up with missed calls. The guest was given a simple choice: bring the car back, park it and continue their trip without it, or leave it immobilised. The car came back to the UK, uninsured cross-border use avoided, and a potential recovery nightmare abroad averted.
“Imagine if we didn’t have that immobiliser. They could have ended up stranded with the car in France, and it would have been an absolute nightmare for us to go and collect it. The immobiliser was a game changer in that situation.”
— Alex Dyer, Savant Car Rentals
Security, Control & Peace of Mind
Traknova didn’t just add tools to Savant — it made the business viable in the first place.
Peace of mind at scale: With eight cars out on hire at once, Alex describes sitting back with no stress and nothing to chase. That freedom, he says, is worth more than anything.
Control over the asset: Live tracking plus remote lock/unlock and the immobiliser mean the business dictates how its assets are used, rather than being at the mercy of the customer.
A model built to grow: Because each new car is now quick to onboard and runs itself day to day, the business can scale on its own terms, adding vehicles only when it makes sense.
“If Traknova didn’t exist, I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t have done it. I’d have kept it to two or three cars. It just wouldn’t have been worth my time.”
— Alex Dyer, Savant Car Rentals