People want car ownership; it's built into the culture. The question is at what cost.
I have gotten rid of my car because Uber/Lyft and public transport/biking are SO much cheaper than owning a car. On the order of a few hundred dollars a month (if I had gotten a new car and insurance).
Additionally, I don't spend time parking or with car maintenance nor do I worry about speeding. In addition, I have more time to make or take phone calls on the road, do some light work on a laptop (with a mobile hotspot) or if I'm feeling tired, just nap.
Despite initial concerns, Ubering and Lyfting is simpler, faster, easier and far, far less stressful than driving. This only compounds for longer trips. There is nothing like an hour-long Uber ride where you basically take a nap and wake up when you've reached your destination or just calmly listening to a podcast or watching an online lecture and being able to take notes.
Now, that said, I'm becoming an avid outdoors person and I want a vehicle I can take on trips that can stow my gear. I use a car rental service for this (currently Turo) and that works well but, I wish there was a service that let me borrow my friends' cars but, got a daily insurance rider so that their asset would never be at risk and that I would be in compliance with the law in California that requires all drivers to have insurance. Something like what Google's ridesharing is doing but, for car borrowing.
Put a per-mile fee on there based on IRS mileage, slap a $5 per rental fee for putting all of this together and boom, you have something that would really revolutionize things.
Maybe you need to write the app and build the product behind it that lets people insure any vehicle for any journey and any amount of time with the proviso that it is not your vehicle and that the vehicle is otherwise insured and road legal. If the process was no more thought involving than paying for parking.
The business logic behind the insurance could be very different, a lot would be known about the journey to be undertaken, the app could be recording what really is happening, with a source of crash sensors and satnav it should be possible to identify what happened in ways current insurance can't do. You could make it so an app has to run during a one-off insurance permit, you could not do that for normal insurance.
You could get different rates for different cars that you can borrow, therefore if making a big one-off journey it might pay to borrow the eco-mini-car instead of something flash. Going into town then the sportscar might be worth the higher rate as the journey could be short. So you could end up borrowing different cars.
Now if you allow some charge back to the owner 'profit' then people just might have a fair incentive to lend you their vehicle. The app could even tell them how many pennies they are to earn.
I pretty much gave up on ridesharing after our daughter arrived, and use our own vehicles exclusively (each with a car seat semi-permanently installed).
I have gotten rid of my car because Uber/Lyft and public transport/biking are SO much cheaper than owning a car. On the order of a few hundred dollars a month (if I had gotten a new car and insurance).
Additionally, I don't spend time parking or with car maintenance nor do I worry about speeding. In addition, I have more time to make or take phone calls on the road, do some light work on a laptop (with a mobile hotspot) or if I'm feeling tired, just nap.
Despite initial concerns, Ubering and Lyfting is simpler, faster, easier and far, far less stressful than driving. This only compounds for longer trips. There is nothing like an hour-long Uber ride where you basically take a nap and wake up when you've reached your destination or just calmly listening to a podcast or watching an online lecture and being able to take notes.
Now, that said, I'm becoming an avid outdoors person and I want a vehicle I can take on trips that can stow my gear. I use a car rental service for this (currently Turo) and that works well but, I wish there was a service that let me borrow my friends' cars but, got a daily insurance rider so that their asset would never be at risk and that I would be in compliance with the law in California that requires all drivers to have insurance. Something like what Google's ridesharing is doing but, for car borrowing.
Put a per-mile fee on there based on IRS mileage, slap a $5 per rental fee for putting all of this together and boom, you have something that would really revolutionize things.