Thirty two of the first hundred cars here are automatic. Compare the gearboxes against price and deposit.
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Most gearbox pages open by asking which one suits you. In Tenerife that is the second question. The first is what will still be on the lot for your dates, because the automatic share of the local fleet is small enough to settle the matter on its own.
Counted across the first hundred cars the live feed returns for an ordinary booking window, thirty two are automatic and sixty eight are manual. That is not a shortage in any dramatic sense. It does mean the automatics are the first thing to go in August and at Christmas, that the cheapest automatic is rarely the cheapest car on the page, and that leaving the choice until the week you fly tends to make it for you.
So this page does not argue a side. The table below is the actual fleet, with the gearbox next to the daily price, the total, the deposit and the cancellation terms, and you sort it yourself. Whatever the premium is for your dates, you will be reading it off real cars rather than off a number somebody averaged last year.
Gearbox split, first 100 cars
Counted at the hundred car window the search widget loads for Tenerife. Eighty four of those hundred are priced under EUR 50 a day, so both gearboxes start from the same part of the market.
Click Gearbox once and the automatics gather at the top of the list. Click Per day and you can read the premium straight off the screen for your own dates instead of taking somebody else's average on trust. Sorting does not remove anything, so the manual you are comparing against stays on the page the whole time.
| Car | Book | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| € | € |
These five columns are here because they genuinely differ car by car in Tenerife. Seats and luggage are not shown on purpose: they are inferred from the model name rather than supplied per vehicle, and a guess does not belong in a comparison. Mileage is left out for the opposite reason, because almost every car in this window already carries unlimited kilometres. Prices follow the dates in the search form and cover what the supplier quotes in advance, not extras bought at the desk.
In a flat destination the gearbox is a comfort preference and very little else. Tenerife is not flat. The TF-21 climbs off the coast and keeps climbing into the Teide National Park, where the plateau sits above 2,000 metres with the highest point in Spain standing over it. That is the better part of an hour of sustained ascent, and then the same road in reverse on the way back down.
Going up, a small manual engine wants third gear and sometimes second for long stretches at a time. The car feels slow in a way that is completely normal and still unsettling if you are not used to it, and the temptation is to keep reaching for a higher gear that the hill will not let you hold. An automatic in the same place will shuffle between two ratios on the steeper sections unless you take control of it, so the idea that it removes all the thinking is only half true.
The descent is the part that catches people out, and it catches out automatic drivers more often than manual ones. A long drop taken on the brake pedal alone will overheat the brakes, and the smell in the car park at the bottom of the mountain is a familiar one. In a manual you select a lower gear and let the engine hold the car. In an automatic you do exactly the same thing with the selector or the paddles, and the time to find out which of those your car has is while you are still parked at the top, not on the third hairpin.
The TF-436 through the Teno massif in the northwest is the other road worth naming by number. It is narrow, it switches back almost continuously, and it regularly involves stopping and then restarting on a gradient while something squeezes past in the other direction. This is the one argument for an automatic here that is about the island rather than about habit, because hill starts in traffic on a single track road are precisely where a clutch you only operate on holiday starts to cost you.
Five columns, chosen because all five vary across the Tenerife fleet. A column where every car says the same thing is noise, so it is not there.
The one field on this page that comes straight from the supplier record rather than from anything inferred. It is also the column with the widest split in Tenerife, which is why it leads the table rather than sitting at the end of it.
Per day is the figure to compare two cars with. Total is the figure you will actually be asked for. They diverge on short rentals, where a one or two day booking carries the same fixed handling cost as a fortnight and the daily rate looks worse than the car is.
The amount blocked on the main driver card at pickup. It is not a charge, but it behaves like one for as long as it is held. Twenty of the first hundred cars here block nothing at all, and seventy eight block EUR 700 or less.
A tick means the booking can be dropped without a fee. On a fleet where the automatics are the minority this is not a nice extra, it is the mechanism that lets you reserve one early and still change your mind.
Flights, apartment, car, in that order, is the usual habit and it is the wrong order here. The automatic share of the Tenerife fleet is roughly a third, and a third of a pool empties long before the pool does. In the first week of August and over Christmas the remaining automatics are the expensive ones, because the cheap ones went in May. Nothing about this is a trick of the booking page; it is simply what a smaller sub-fleet does under the same demand.
Seventy six of the first hundred cars can be cancelled at no cost. Book the automatic you want now and keep looking. The worst case is that you cancel, and the alternative is arriving with nothing automatic left.
Filtering to automatics hides the price you are paying the premium against. Sorting by gearbox keeps both halves of the fleet on screen, which is the only way to see what the change of pedal box actually costs this week.
An automatic is far more common in the classes above the smallest city cars, so the next automatic up the list is often a slightly larger vehicle rather than a different supplier or a different week. That is a real trade on this island, because the Tenerife resort car parks and the older village streets both reward a small car. Compare the larger automatic against the smaller manual on the table rather than assuming one of them wins, and check the deposit column while you are there, since the classes do not hold the same amount.
Almost nobody weighs gearboxes in the abstract. One of these three is usually already true of you before you open the table.
Then the choice is already made and the only real work is availability. Check your licence as well, because a licence issued after a test taken in an automatic is usually restricted to automatics, and a hire desk reads that restriction the same way the authorities do. Book early, use the table to find the cheapest automatic rather than the first one, and accept that it will not be the cheapest car on the page.
Then you are the reason the manual column is two thirds of the table, and you will save money by staying in it. The honest caveat is holiday fatigue. A fortnight of mountain roads is more clutch work than most people do in a month at home, and the Teno roads in particular stack hill starts one after another. If you are driving every day rather than twice in a week, price the automatic anyway and see what the difference really is before you dismiss it.
Then stop reading and sort the table. The premium is not a fixed figure in Tenerife: it moves with the season, with how far ahead you are booking and with how long you are keeping the car. Compare the cheapest automatic against the cheapest manual for your own dates, then do it again on the total column rather than the daily one, because on a short rental the two columns tell noticeably different stories. Whatever gap you see is the real price of the decision, and it is the only version of that number worth acting on.
Net Tenerife shows the gearbox, the daily price, the total, the deposit and the cancellation terms on every car in Tenerife, so the premium is something you measure rather than something you are told.
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