With rental car rates at ridiculous levels (there's a separate thread for that, over here), I am exploring the option of shipping my own car to Hawaii, especially because I have a 28 day trip coming up, made longer this year because I didn't go at all last year. I called Pasha and Matson and they seem to be about the same in pricing:
- About $1500 to ship from port of Oakland to a port in Hawaii
- About $900 to ship from a port in Hawaii back to Oakland

That's fairly straightforward although they both have some annoying rules. For example, they told me there are no personal items allowed in the vehicle (which by the way, includes dashcams and portable Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment(!?!?!?)). I asked them why since the EVSE goes with the vehicle and Pasha said they had an incident last year where a portable EVSE disappeared from a vehicle and therefore, they are disallowing all EVSE. So basically, their employees steal stuff and instead of finding out who did it and firing that person, they are forcing all of THEIR CUSTOMERS to remove the vehicle charger from the car that could be the most convenient way to charge it while over in Hawaii. And that thing is definitely something I don't want taking up space in my carry-on.

Oh, and check out these glowing reviews of Pasha. I know that Yelp reviews for services like this tend to skew negative, because happy customers tend to not leave reviews at all, but that's quite a bit of detail (and some reviews even have photos).

With that out of the way, we can turn to interisland shipping, which is done by Young Brothers. The company appears to operate on a hub-and-spoke model, with Honolulu as the hub, of course. The rates are all to/from Honolulu, so I assume this means if I am flying from LIH to OGG, I would have to pay two rates, one to ship to Honolulu from Nawiliwili, and another to ship to Kahului from Honolulu. I'd get a discount on the shipping to Honolulu (since HNL is my first destination and I'm staying there for about a week) but no discount on the shipping to Kahului. Overall, that's about $1400 in inter-island shipping charges, since all of my vehicles count as "large" since they are over 4000 lbs (one PHEV and one BEV, those batteries really add weight!). But that's not all. They apparently only run their service twice a week to/from any given port. Now the problem is, I fly from LIH to OGG on a Sunday. But Young Brothers only departs Nawiliwili on Tuesdays and Fridays, so obviously I'd have to ship the car out on Friday, which leaves me without a car for two days. Then it arrives in Honolulu on Saturday, but there aren't any Saturday departures from Honolulu, nor are there any Sunday departures. There is a Monday departure, but that would mean that I'd be without my car on Maui for another two days, as I wouldn't be able to pick it up until Tuesday.

So while it would actually be nice to drive my own car over in Hawaii for once, I'm actually leaning against doing this, given that:
- I'd still have to rent cars at exorbitant rates to account for the delays in inter-island shipping
- Cost-wise, it appears to be about the same as renting cars at the current exorbitant rates, at least for a 28-day trip to 3 islands
- I'd have to worry about my personal vehicle being damaged while on vacation
- I'd have to worry about my personal vehicle being damaged in the shipping process

Oh, and I asked Pasha whether they offer any sort of discount for buying a roundtrip. Nope.

If rental cars were twice as expensive as the quotes I am getting now ($110-120/day), or I were going for 56 days instead of 28, I'd strongly consider it though.