Getaround – Peer-to-peer car sharing and local car rental. It’s like Zipcar, but the fleet is everyone in your city. Gorgeous, clean and usable website. Fascinating.
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Getaround – Peer-to-peer car sharing and local car rental. It’s like Zipcar, but the fleet is everyone in your city. Gorgeous, clean and usable website. Fascinating.
2 Comments
Brilliant. Reading through their FAQs, they are very careful with legal issues and make it hassle-free for car owners to participate. If they handle customer service as well as they claim, this model can spread faster than Zipcar ever can.
Note this model can generalize to many other situations. The basic conceptual problem being solved is: product X requires a large initial overhead but reasonable ongoing costs so that buyers typically divide into purchasers (who see the independence of ownership as justifying the cost) and renters (who do not). The basic business model is that to connect purchasers with renters.
This raises the question – what other products fit the characteristics of “product X”?
Examples that come to mind are homes, outdoors equipment, and kitchen space.
There might be room for someone to become the eBay of renting.
That’s an excellent way of considering it. While I don’t necessarily believe in a “big box” approach like eBay, I do think there’s similar opportunity in other areas.
For instance, there’s another startup doing the same thing with private jets (which sit idle something like 80% of the time).
Cost, culture and convenience are the three dominant factors I believe. Last summer, I purchased a hammer, saw and drill I’ve only used once or twice since. I would’ve loved to borrow or rent (which are both culturally appropriate) but the costs of purchasing were too low and the convenience not, uh, convenient enough.