Because, if you frequently sleep in your van, being able to customise it to your needs is important, like building in a bed, stove, heater, cupboards and so forth. Renting a full camper van every weekend/holiday would be prohibitively expensive and not fully customised to your taste.

My guess is the OP is a climber or similar and has pretty specific van needs.

Speaking for German prices, because it eventually adds up, specially taking into consideration that to be on the safe side it is better to have full coverage insurance.

With own car one pays insurance once, while renting the insurance gets payed every single time it gets rented.

Not going full coverage is an open game as they will charge for any little new scratch the car might get, no matter how tiny.

Meanwhile, I have been in countries where the only thing that matters is that the car is returned in one piece still.

Dont buy comprehensive insurance top up cover from the car hire company. Use a third party insurer. e.g. insurance4carhire.com Same price for a year of 'super cover' as for about 4 days cover from the car hire company.

I doubt any of the car dealers here work with such type of companies, and in any case I usually don't thrush they would properly handle the case when called to act upon.

Surely that's anti-competitive behaviour; it's not up to the car rental to choose whether or not they deal with your insurers. In fact they deal with you (as if you weren't insured), and you claim from your excess insurance. See e.g. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/insurance...

In Germany you cannot rent a car without insurance from the dealer, there is no way for them to deal with us as if we hadn't one.

The car hire company never knows that you have it because the insurance you take out is for the excess only, not the full legally required car insurance. Most hire cars come with a basic insurance included in the cost, but with a massive excess charge if you damage the car. When you hire the car you accept the massive €2000 (or whatever) excess. If you need to make a claim, you reclaim the cost of the excess from the third party insurer and pay this to the car hire company. The third party insurance costs ~€40 per year. This is a much cheaper way of reducing your excess to a manageable amount than taking out the €15/day 'super cover' option from the car hire company.

EDIT: The car hire companies make a massive profit on the 'super cover' optional insurance.

If you are worried about the provenance of a financial services company, there are usually national regulators who maintain registers of companies that have to abide by certain standards. You should check that an insurer is on this register before taking out a policy, as well as checking to see if there are a lot of complaints about them on the internet.

Thanks, I will need to research into it.

The idea is to go nearly every weekend - as a climber living in Munich, all those lakes and the mountains offer enormous weekend potential. As someone else deduced already, I'll be building some platform in the back and add curtains, something I can't be putting in a rented van.