Peer-to-peer car sharing platforms are – as cliché as it may be – just like Airbnb for cars. But unlike Airbnb, which is currently valued at $78.8 billion, carsharing has yet to take off—despite cars sitting still 96 percent of the time. But now, with old-fashioned rent expensive and hard to come by, car sharing may finally have its moment.
Xavier Collins, vice president of Truo, says convenience is another benefit of going peer-to-peer, with many people finding a car a short walk away rather than a parking lot on the outskirts of town. That convenience is fine if you’re already in a city, but what about people flying in for a vacation? HiyaCar is currently targeting local renters rather than tourists, and says vacationer support will hopefully be added this year, but the other two companies will target fliers. Getaround is working on parking spaces for its cars at transportation hubs; in France, for example, it has special places near train stations.
Truo goes one step further. Cars are delivered directly to the arrivals area at airports, with the owner meeting the tenants with the keys or leaving the vehicle in the airport parking lot where it will be unlocked via the app.
Apps like Truo, Getaround and HiyaCar have the same advantage as Airbnb and other so-called sharing economy platforms: they own nothing. “The cars on the platforms are not the company’s,” said Even Heggernes, vice president at Getaround Europe. “The ubiquitous shortage of cars is not something that really affects us.”
But that doesn’t mean these platforms have enough vehicles – in the UK, HiyaCar has 2,000 cars for its 150,000 registered users. Truo has 3,000 in the UK, while Getaround has 160,000 in the US. Sharing platforms rely on individuals letting strangers drive off in their cars, requiring both trust and effort to keep vehicles clean, full of gas, and otherwise ready for renters. It’s a challenging question, although Heggernes, whose job is to encourage drivers to sign up, says supply has increased as a result of the cost of living crisis, with people looking for ways to make extra money. to earn money.
HiyaCar has one solution to the persistent lack of supplies: top up the system with its own vehicles. With 150,000 registered users, HiyaCar has only 2,000 cars, 350 of which are part of the car club system. They’re not from HiyaCar, but from automakers, who have a guaranteed minimum income and the goal is to fill in cars where there isn’t enough supply yet, what the company calls the “cold start problem.”
“We have a lot of demand, but not enough cars,” said Rob Lamour, co-founder of HiyaCar. “You can’t just launch into an area and suddenly have a lot of cars that people can rent; it takes time to build up.” Car clubs are also being set up in areas without sufficient vehicles in general, such as central London, where public transport can reduce car ownership but demand for ad hoc rental remains high.
But traditional car rental companies don’t sit back and let upstarts disrupt their market. Even before the pandemic, rental companies lobbied for tighter regulation of the peer-to-peer market, demanding stricter vehicle controls and restrictions on airport drop-off zones.
