Guides

Written from the inside

Drive865 has been renting enthusiast cars to East Tennessee travelers since the business started. The guides in this section are written from that vantage point, not as generic travel content assembled from search results, but as practical information from a team that has seen what works, what fails, and what first-time visitors consistently misunderstand about driving the roads here.

The Tail of the Dragon guide reflects years of sending guests to US-129 and hearing what happened when the car choice was wrong. The TYS pickup guide describes the exact lockbox process we designed and run. The manual transmission guide reflects experience renting stick-shift cars to drivers at every skill level, from confident daily drivers to people who learned in an automatic and want to try once. The authority behind these isn't credentials. It's repetitions.

How guides fit into trip planning

Guides are the right starting point when a single attraction or rental page doesn't give enough context. If you've never driven Tail of the Dragon and want to understand what kind of car to book, how a day on the road actually goes, and what to expect when you get there, that's a guide question. The attraction page answers what and where. The guide answers how.

The insurance guide belongs early in any first Drive865 rental. It explains what coverage you actually need, what your personal auto policy does and doesn't extend to for rental vehicles in Tennessee, and what Turo's protection plans cover versus what the Drive865 rental agreement requires. These are questions that come up at booking time, and reading the guide beforehand saves a conversation that tends to happen in the parking lot.

The under-25 guide and the UT student guide handle questions that touch multiple parts of the booking process simultaneously: age surcharges, which vehicles are available at which age, insurance implications, and what to prepare. For those guests, a single guide covers more ground more efficiently than three separate pages.

What guides cover that individual pages don't

Each spoke page in Drive865's content system is optimized for one thing: one attraction, one occasion, one pickup location, one vehicle category. Guides handle the cross-cutting questions that don't fit neatly into one spoke.

The 3-day Smokies itinerary guide is the clearest example: it draws on attraction pages, location pages, and fleet pages at the same time. The booking-direct-vs-Turo breakdown is a longer treatment of the comparison pages for someone who wants to understand the whole decision at once, not just one head-to-head. The first-time sports car rental guide covers what a driver who has never rented a performance car should expect, which spans fleet selection, car mechanics, insurance, and driving technique.

If you're doing early research on an East Tennessee trip, guides are where that research pays off most. If you're close to booking and just need the specific page for your car or destination, the spoke pages are faster. Both have their place. The guides hub is for the first kind of visit.

Choose from the current fleet

Current matching rentals: 2020 Subaru BRZ Limited, 2021 Toyota Supra 3.0 Premium, 2019 Mazda MX-5 Miata RF 30th Anniversary, 2023 Honda Civic Sport Touring, 2014 Toyota FJ Cruiser Base, 2013 Toyota FJ Cruiser Trail Teams, 2023 Honda Odyssey Sport, 2022 Subaru WRX GT, 2014 Nissan NV Passenger SL, 2017 Nissan NV Passenger SL, 2016 Scion FR-S Release Series 2.0, 2021 Subaru WRX STI Base, 2024 Nissan Z NISMO, 1994 Toyota MR2 GT-S. Select dates and times to check the trip you want.

Open a vehicle and select your trip start and end dates and times to see pricing. A listed vehicle is not a guarantee of availability for your dates.