Car-Sharing Companies Link Owners With Renters

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 a year. The hourly fee to rent a car, including insurance, averages $6 to $8. Older cars can run as little as $3 an hour. Fancier models can run much higher â€" Getaround says it has Tesla Roadsters that go for $50 to $75 an hour. Peer-to-peer car sharing remains in the trial stage; it can be found in San Francisco and a few other places. It has a long way to go before it becomes the auto equivalent of Airbnb, the surprise success story for peer-to-peer sharing of space in apartments and houses. 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. To address that, he points to Airbnb, saying, “Letting people sleep in your living room is much more of an intrusion into your personal space than letting someone use your car.” All of these companies offer their own insurance coverage for their renters, which is supposed to put owners’ minds at ease. But only two states â€" California and Oregon â€" have passed laws to clarify that an owner will not suffer any repercussions should a car-sharing renter have an accident, says Robert C. Passmore, senior director of personal lines policy at the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America. “In all the other states, legal ambiguity remains,” he says. “If a renter should be involved in a serious accident in those states, the victim can be expected to go after every party possible, including the car’s owner.” Also to allay the worries of car owners, the driving records of renters are checked for recent serious violations. Getaround makes it easy to start: participants use their Facebook log-ins, and owners can control who rents their cars. “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, the company’s C.E.O. “We want people to be able to start gently, perhaps renting just to friends of friends and not requiring any technology.” The owner personally hands over the keys to the renter â€" a big inconvenience if the owner doesn’t care to meet every renter, every time â€" and renters pay for the gas. 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, and the company installs it free. Mr. Clark looks forward to not having to install it in the future. RelayRides has announced a partnership with the OnStar division of General Motors, allowing renters to find, reserve and unlock G.M. cars with their cellphones via a factory-installed OnStar system. JustShareIt, which started in January, requires most cars to have hardware like that of RelayRides, and offers a few other features for security monitoring of renters, like a sensor to detect sudden braking or signs of towing. 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. Both owners and renters can pay optional charges for extra reports and services. Getaround says it has 536 active cars in San Francisco and San Diego and 80 beta users in Portland, Ore. 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 neighbors. The company obtains new vehicles to be rented out, just as Hertz and Avis do. 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. The new companies also emphasize the way they transform an otherwise impersonal transaction into a personal one. “We want to remind renters that the car doesn’t belong to Hertz but to a person,” Shelby Clark at RelayRides says. “When a renter makes a reservation, they see a photo of the owner and the listing is ‘Shelby’s Mini.’ ” Car sharing is just one form of “collaborative consumption,” the clunky catchphrase that encompasses Airbnb’s space sharing and is commonly used to suggest an ideological or moral imperative to share more things. Who knows? In the future, car sharing may become so accepted that we can eventually return to that bygone age when licensed drivers actually outnumbered licensed vehicles. Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com. Powered By iWebRSS.co.cc