Lend your car to strangers for cash
Suppose you don’t need your car today. And suppose, as it happens, that a stranger in your area does need a car. Would you be willing to rent yours out?
Several car-sharing start-ups, including Getaround, RelayRides and JustShareIt, are eager to connect car owners with renters this way. The companies use different formulas, but participating owners receive, generally speaking, about two-thirds of the rental proceeds. RelayRides says an owner of a midsize, late-model sedan who rents out a car for 10 hours a week could expect to clear about $3,000 (Rs 1,47,203) a year.
The hourly fee to rent a car, including insurance, averages $6 (Rs 294) to $8 (Rs 392). Older cars can run as little as $3 (Rs 147) an hour. Fancier models can run much higher — Getaround says it has Tesla Roadsters that go for $50 (Rs 2,453) to $75 (Rs 3,680) an hour.
Shelby Clark, founder of RelayRides, based in San Francisco, says prospective investors in his company have been concerned that owners will be afraid to hand their car over to strangers. “We have seen many owners get up right to the point of that first rental and hesitate, as if standing at the edge of a cliff,” says Sam Zaid, Getaround’s CEO. All of these companies offer their own insurance coverage for their renters, which is supposed to put owners’ minds at ease. Also to allay the worries of car owners, the driving records of renters are checked for recent serious violations.
RelayRides installs hardware in each car to control the door locks. A smartcard reader is mounted behind the windshield, and the renter presses the card against the glass to gain entry. The ignition keys are hanging by the ignition, so the car can be rented many times without troubling the owner. Gasoline is currently included in the rental fee, but the company says renters will pay for it in the future.
The RelayRides hardware also includes a GPS receiver and a cellular connection, so the company always knows the car’s location, as well as a remote off switch that prevents car theft. The hardware costs RelayRides about $500 (Rs 24,533), and the company installs it free.
At JustShareIt, owners pay $249 for installation of the hardware required for most cars, as well as a $2.99 monthly fee for the bare-bones service that locks and unlocks the car.
Getaround says it has 536 active cars in San Francisco and 80 beta users in Portland. RelayRides has 200 cars in San Francisco and Boston, and the newly opened JustShareIt has 60 cars and four motorcycles in the San Francisco Bay area.
Zipcar, a corporate version of car sharing that began in 2000, has a running start. It offers widely dispersed pickup locations to people who want to rent a car by the hour or the day.
The company has more than 9,000 vehicles in the United States, Canada and Britain; many are on or near college campuses. But Zipcars are owned by the company, not by you or your neighbours.
The newer start-ups say peer-to-peer sharing is an environmentally friendlier option because it allows an existing car to be used more fully. Of course, a car has a life span of only so many miles. Car sharing, which causes more miles to be clocked, necessarily hastens the day when a vehicle must be replaced.
