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I considered taking 2 vehicles but the cost was more than a benefit.
From an existing vehicle perspective we could save rental fees but would be adding 10k miles to personal vehicles which would add maintanence costs and depriciation in resell value. The only options in personal vehicles would be a 2010 taurus or 2002 Camaro, neither of which are that great an improvement over a rented mini-van in mpg.
From a rental perspective at first I thought it may be a better deal considering most Econo cars are ~$600-650 for a monthly rental and most mini-vans were double that. I happened to shop around enough to find a monthly mini-van rental with unlimited mileage for $980 after tax. So an Econo car would need to get more than 2x the mileage to justify it based on price + fuel costs alone.
Storage in small economy cars may be an issue as well, even with 2. We plan on visiting several national parks and camping in the area so we will probably have a fair amount of extra equipment in addition to a month of normal clothing, etc. With a mini-van it is possible to store/remove one of the middle seats to increase storage space, keep weight balanced, and still fit 5-6 comfortably. Not to mention that several camping places may limit # of vehicles per site and a national park yearly pass covers an entire carload so would need 2 with 2 vehicles.
I created a spreadsheet with vehicle rental rates, epa mpg ratings, and fuel costs for every rental vehicle available and calculated per person total based on a comfortable number of passengers. The best value is a full sized 15 passenger van loaded with 12 people and rear seat removed for storage but we won't have that many people. A Nissan Versa or Ford Focus are both great values but only hold 4-5 so we would need 2 and could have storage issues; it may work if we had 8 people going though. After that comes to deal I found on a Grand Caravan. For 5-6 people it seems like the most economical option.
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