Had two car-owning friends that did RelayRides (now Turo) during the peak sharing economy a few years ago. Both cars were involved minor collisions within months. Turns out renting in the city to people that don't drive much, might be prone to accidents. Making sure cars weren't parked on street-cleaning side and dealing with tickets also seemed like a huge hassle. Cars have a really high administrative burden compared to homes, especially when things go wrong, which they do at a higher rate.
I've rented cars myself via Turo a couple times in the past few years. Two of the guys were operating their own small rental businesses (5+ cars, parked around on local streets). At a couple hundred bucks profit per vehicle per month, depending on utilization, having a few cars like that seems the only way to make it worth the while. As a part time job of sorts.
In the East-Bay, AAA is making a massive investment in car-sharing with GiG. I wonder if it will work out financially given state of the world with cheap ride-sharing by Uber/Lyft.
I had a minor collision as well within months, as well as two tows. A lot of the renters did not correctly follow GetAround's 24 hour restriction-free street parking policy as well and so I got a lot of street cleaning tickets. Even when they did, if street cleaning often was in 25-48 hours, so I had to repark my car multiple times per week.
The thing that made me leave was that GetAround Connect started drained my car's battery like crazy and started requiring jumpstarts every few days. I think there might have been a short. Meanwhile, GetAround support insisted that this was normal.
What was GetAround's support like for these issues? Did they cover the cost of the parking tickets, or the repairs? Were you using GetAround's insurance?
Their support is OKAY, but not great. They are helpful, but not always responsive, so you feel like an engineering manager chasing after your junior direct reports, constantly pinging and babysitting them.
I've had to argue with them over points of minor contention in the past before, like one time a renter claimed my car was "dirty" and so I had to record them a video showing its immaculate interior. They also didn't want to help me chase down a renter who didn't refill my gas tank for me, as required by GetAround, but I eventually was able to resolve that as well.
GetAround completely covered the cost of parking tickets, repairs, and towing. They also made the process really hassle free. The towing was also handled decently well, but as a renter, I DID have to _notice_ my car got towed (not something I checked every day) before contacting GetAround to have them take care of it.
AFAIK, you automatically opt-in to using GA's insurance (but still are required to carry your own personal insurance on the car).
Overall, I found that renters just didn't treat my car well enough for me; they treated it like an ordinary rental car rather than borrowing a friend's car. After nearly every trip, there was garbage left behind in the car (straw wrappers, tissues, spills, stains), most did not following the parking rules, and the vast majority just didn't bother getting gas for me like they are required to by GetAround. One renter (I couldn't pinpoint the exact person) stole my mobile phone dashboard mount, my cigarette lighter USB charger (which was there mostly to help the renters!), and my SD card.
The brakes also squeal now, so I suspect somebody was driving with a square wave shaped braking pattern.
I don't understand people who rent their things out yet are surprised when folks treat them like a rental rather than borrowing something from a friend. The thing is, when I borrow vehicles or skis, or stay in a friend's house, I don't pay them. I may refill the tank or refrigerator, but otherwise, it's free. Once you demand money from someone, it's just a transaction and no you no longer get the friend treatment / stuff treated with kid gloves. Now I (obviously) don't go out of my way to trash rental things, but I certainly don't treat them with as much care as something I borrowed from a friend.
When I rent cars, I think it's fine to leave minor messes in them; it's implied as part of the rental service they'll vacuum carpets or recycle a stray bottle or two.
I, for one, go our of my way to treat AirBnBs (even) nicer than I treat hotels because its an actual friendly person's house -- not a hotel room owned by a big evil soulless corporation.
I don't see why this isn't the case with other people. With GetAround, the whole premise is that you're borrowing your neighbor's car, not getting a late model Prius from Enterprise that has been beaten to hell and back already.
I'm paying them, no wonder they're friendly. Normal wear and tear should be factored into their prices, same as if I was renting a hotel room or apartment or car.
When an AirBNB listing looks like they expect me to put myself at extra inconvenience, I don't bother with it. Especially with how many of them are basically full-time landlords of their rented spaces these days.
I think there's room in between. If the owner expects you to treat the property well, they can do things to enhance your experience that a hotel can't. But treating things well is a minor burden, so sometimes you just want to get a hotel and not worry about it.
More than a few of my AirBnB hosts didn't really seem like they needed the money, but they really enjoyed meeting new people and being in the company of their guests.
Now I understand AirBNB et al would love for folks to get suckered into the idea they need to pay cash and get the friend-loaned-you-something treatment, but that's silly.
No, renting != borrowing, but with Airbnb you often meet the owners, may even have breakfast with them in their home, etc.
Yes, money changes hands - you pay for use and cleaning of the place - but my Airbnb rentals have been significantly more intimate than any commercial hotel I've stayed in (even small hotels or regular commercial BnBs).
That's odd. Every AirBnB I've stayed at has been as impersonal as the most generic cheap hotel chain but with far more hassle and inconvenience.
The notion that you'd experience any kind of "community" or "sharing" with AirBnB has always seemed like pure marketing BS. It's cool that you've actually experienced it. Maybe it does happen sometimes.
My wife and I did a trip through Western Europe a few years ago - meeting and visiting with our "hosts", talking about what they liked about living there, etc., was a fun enhancement to the trip. The couple of hotel stays were much less welcoming and more generic.
My wife made the Airbnb reservations, and she really likes meeting local people, so she may have selected for that experience.
Brake squeal is commonly caused by the lack of anti-squeal compound on the back sides of the brake pads. It might not be correlated with brake pad wear.
Making sure cars weren't parked on street-cleaning side and dealing with tickets also seemed like a huge hassle. Cars have a really high administrative burden compared to homes, especially when things go wrong, which they do at a higher rate.
Oh gosh, don't get me started on this. It's theft, plain and simple. Or rather tax. Owning a car in a city is a massive pain in the butt, and it's cost me like $2k per year. Whether it's bullshit tickets, street cleaning gotchas, expired plates (got a ticket one day after it expired just yesterday), being parked in a valid parking spot that is nevertheless a tow zone for mysterious reasons, having to go in front of a judge to point out that it was bullshit for me to be towed because the facility that I had to visit to pay for the ticket was closed due to a holiday, on and on and on. You get the idea.
I've sort of resigned myself to it just being "car stuff," so whenever another crap ticket appears on my window it doesn't bug me much. Just more tax for the city. Whatever.
I know a few of the tickets are my fault, but geez, it seems almost impossible to be a perfectly law-abiding car owner in a major city over the course of five years.
It's actually tempting to rent out my car to someone else just to cover the administrative cost of owning a car in a city.
Two thousand bucks is like one and a half ticket-tow combos in Manhattan. And it's ~impossible to avoid legal problems if you street park a car in the city.
"To start, I found the top address where this ticket were given: in front of 575 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where over $48,000 in parking fines were issued in the last 2.5 years. To my surprise, the spot, (or really spots since there are two ramps), are legal,"
It's not just tickets. It's tickets + permits + insurance + plates. I wasn't blaming anyone else, either. I assume you're perfectly vigilant in every aspect of your life? Meh, never mind.
By the way, a friend just tried to park in the spot that I got towed out of. That's how unassuming it looks. That's just a thing you get to learn if you happen to live here, and the only way you learn it is after you get towed. Not a damn thing you can do about it other than pay up.
And how about the $120 ticket the other day for making a left at a light that was green but happened to be labeled no left turn without an arrow? No reason not to be able to turn left, as long as it was green. There wasn't any oncoming traffic. Yeah we missed the sign, and for that we get to pay $120 to follow the silly rule. The tickets add up faster than you think.
> And how about the $120 ticket the other day for making a left at a light that was green but happened to be labeled no left turn without an arrow?
Are you complaining that you got a ticket for committing an infraction?
It's one thing to complain about regulations that seem to make no sense to you; it's another for breaking those regulations, and then bitching that you got caught.
Man, I have owned a car in a medium-sized city for something like 20 years and I can count on both hands the number of tickets I've gotten.
I'm by no means "perfectly vigilant" but if you're getting them with any regularity then that's just carelessness. That is something fixable by you, personally, rather than suggesting the systemic changes that you seem to want to see.
Personal responsibility for the small stuff, systemic change for the big stuff.
May I suggest that owning a car in a medium-sized city is a bit different from owning one in one of the largest cities in the world? (Top 25.)
When the parking people patrol your car, specifically, every day, looking for any small mistake, you bet you'll get a ticket. The best is getting one for "illegally parked too far away from curb" when it's literally one foot away.
Besides, in your original post, you said "Owning a car in a city ..." more than once.
But, in the spirit of charity, I actually went to the trouble of asking a couple friends who live in NYC and own cars, "hey do you get a lot of extraneous parking tickets?" According to them, no, it's not the problem you're making it out to be.
You'll have to do more to convince me that you're not just careless and want to blame someone else for it.
Not a single one of my tickets were for speeding. I forgot to mention that, so I think it's more likely that this animosity is from people equating tickets = lunatic driver. I drive like an old man on the road.
I'm glad your NYC friends are well-off, but different neighborhoods are different. The south side of various cities are completely different from north side. This isn't a new phenomenon, and it matters where your friends are. I don't think it's very wise to draw conclusions from a sample size of three.
Perhaps I'm an atypical example, but it sounds like my story resonated with a bunch of other people, so I'd bet the other way. That ~$50M/yr has to come from somewhere, and if the revenue started drying up, they'd simply invent more rules until it didn't.
You're not wrong about the carelessness, but given that I make sure to be careful where it matters, are you sure you want to reward the behavior you're defending? A life of papers and registrations, dotted i's and crossed t's is pretty annoying.
Yes, my plates were expired for one day, and I got a $60 ticket for it. Yep, I was somehow parked in a tow zone (that someone else tried to park in too, and I see multiple cars per month fall into the same trap) and so I got to pay over $400 when all was said and done. Yep, I turned left at a green light when there was no oncoming traffic even though the damn thing was marked "don't turn left without an arrow" and a cop was watching it like a hawk just to meet their quota.
Does that make it all my fault? Maybe. You can think what you want, but at least you aren't analyzed daily for any vulnerable patterns in your behavior to exploit.
> UPS, FedEx and other commercial delivery companies pay a steep price for doing business in New York City, getting an average of 7,000 parking tickets every day and paying more than $102 million in fines in the city’s latest budget year.
> Atlanta-based UPS has a fleet of 1,000 trucks and receives about 15,000 tickets a month here. The company is the biggest offender in the city, paying $18.7 million in parking violations for the fiscal year ending June 30, according to city data. Memphis-based FedEx was second with $8.2 million.
Are we really in a situation where it's heretical to turn left when there's no traffic? Ok then.
If you didn't notice my other comment, we didn't see the sign. So maybe reserve judgement for whoever you like to judge.
The point of traffic laws are to mold behavior into healthy patterns, not to generate money for the city. That's the goal, anyway. If you're really defending a "don't turn left without an arrow under any circumstances," then I couldn't disagree more strongly with your stance.
> The point of traffic laws are to mold behavior into healthy patterns,
You haven't done traffic studies. You don't know the traffic flow at that intersection. You don't know how often there were accidents before that sign was placed. You say that the point of traffic laws is to mold behavior into healthy patterns, but unless you're perched up above that intersection for a month, 24/7, taking notes, you have no idea what is or isn't healthy there.
It's a Chesterton's fence situation.
> If you're really defending a "don't turn left without an arrow under any circumstances," then I couldn't disagree more strongly with your stance.
I'm not. See above.
> Are we really in a situation where it's heretical to turn left when there's no traffic?
It's not heretical, but it is illegal. If you do illegal things, you can expect to eventually get caught. You're not fighting segregated schools here, this isn't a moral crusade.
> If you didn't notice my other comment, we didn't see the sign.
I actually didn't. I do apologize; you sounded totally unrepentant about it in the comment I replied to.
That no-left sign is there for a reason. For example, there's a similar innocentlylooking intersection near my place. There were identical crashes weekly. It was especially dangerous with seemingly no traffic due to poor visibility for incoming traffic. Now left turn is forbidden and all is good.
> May I suggest that owning a car in a medium-sized city is a bit different from owning one in one of the largest cities in the world? (Top 25.)
All it takes is for the city to outsource the parking patrol to some for profit company and let them take a cut of the fines. This is what happened in my relatively small city (population of ~150k). Next election pretty much nobody of the ones that were pushing for that got voted back in to the city government.
I live in the top 25 and I never get tickets. I do however see idiots getting towed from spots clearly marked as reserved for food trucks all the time, sometimes 2 different cars towed at the same time from the same food truck spot.
Meanwhile, I got towed when I was away for the weekend at a close friend's wedding, flying back into SF from Seattle Monday morning, and a sign was literally placed either Saturday or Sunday night saying that cars parked on my street after 8 AM Monday would get towed due to construction. I got there at 10 AM, and my car was gone, and there was no construction yet either.
I'll have to agree with you. Having owned cars both in small and medium-sized cites and also while living a few blocks south of the 575 Ocean Avenue spot mentioned earlier, I was very happy to no longer have to deal with parking/owning a car in NYC.
Shit happens everywhere, but owning a car in Brooklyn was a level of hassle I'm not prepared to ever deal with again.
Perhaps the city is telling you something. When I got a job that didn't require daily commuting, I quickly racked up parking tickets and decided it was cheaper and less stress to bike/take cabs/zipcar, etc. Now that Lyft/Uber are around, for many living in a city, car ownership is a bad financial decision.
If it is only costing you $2k a year, you are still taking money from tax payers. Cars are a huge burden to a city, costing billions a year in revenue, and more in lost revenue. Not including the number of deaths and injuries.
Do you have a source on the average annual external cost for cars? There are a quarter million cars in the US, so billions could be anywhere from $4/car/year to $4,000/car/year (unlikely as that would be a third of all state/federal/local income tax.)
Carbon offsets cost about $100/year or less.
Auto crashes supposedly cost a trillion a year in direct costs and lost time, but those costs are mostly absorbed by insurance, employers and individuals, so don't factor into the $2k/year figure.
Interested to see corroborating or contradicting data.
More or less. I don't even live in the city but I still get a ticket per year or so, for often inscrutable reasons, when I come in.
It doesn't help that so many of the signs related to parking are sufficiently complicated that I rarely have full confidence that I'm 100% legal.
The latest naked revue grab is switching a lot of the 2 hr. parking meters from ending at 6pm to ending at 8pm. It's not so much paying for the extra 2 hours of parking but that, when coming in for dinner and a show, I pretty much have to be parked before 6pm. (And I've been ticketed for feeding the meter.)
Different analysis: it's much more likely that a car can be damaged & completely unusable, leaving the owner in an expensive and inconvenient bind. We read about the occasional Airbnb horror story, but I think that scenario is relatively rare for property.
Second, idle cars have a lot of value to owners. The car in my garage right now is giving me optionality and convenience, and that is worth a lot. In fact, I may exercise that optionality after posting this comment!
OTOH, one could argue that damage/theft/etc. to a home could involve much larger sums of money and be less easily resolved with a check from the middleman handling the rental--especially if it's not specifically a rental property.
Another issue with car sharing is that a fair bit of the depreciation is going to be mile-based rather than time-based. A "good" renter is going to put fairly minimal wear and tear on a bedroom. A good car renter is still going to put miles on a car.
Once you capture that cost and add it to your profit, it's unclear to me why you'd expect to be competitive with an outfit like Zipcar which is probably a generally better experience for the renter in any case.
I disagree and argue that any damage to a home can be repaired in a way that makes things better, while most car repairs have a negative impact to the car's value.
Somebody damaging a wall: the drywall can be replaced and the whole room repainted, the end result is a nicer room.
Somebody damaging the side of your car: it's never going to look quite the same as it did before and the resale value is going to be impacted when it shows up on a Carfax report, etc.
My concern wouldn't be some minor damage to drywall or similar incidental damage of the sort that happens around a house on a semi-regular basis. It's the big party that leads to possessions being trashed and waiting six months for a contractor to repair major damage.
I agree that a lot of "routine" house damage is probably easier to deal with than similarly routine damage to a car. But the outlier incidents with housing are probably worse. Assuming Turo or whoever honors their obligations, at worst you just buy a new car.
ADDED: I can't imagine renting out either in any case.
The thing with a car is that it can easily be badly damaged or totaled by simple driver error. A house can be destroyed by fire maybe but that's far less common than car accidents.
Oh in general I agree. But, as you say, the stakes are a lot higher. With a car, the main serious concern is liability. Even if the company is good for covering you financially, who wants to get into a traumatic legal situation?
Also, the compensation for renting out your car on the platforms I've tried does not cover wear and tear. I received 80 dollars for nearly 2000 miles driven in one month. Considering the inconvenience and risk this does not turn into a profitable venture for me.
I've used Turo for a 3 week rental and I learned a few things.
I wanted to buy a new Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, but as you may know those are enthusiast vehicles and not without their quirks, so I wanted to live with it awhile and really be sure that was what I wanted. Also I was going elk hunting in Idaho for 2 weeks and I didn't own a car so I thought, how perfect?
The trip and the Jeep were great, but it got me thinking about the economics of the whole thing. I noticed that my "host" I was renting from had about a dozen identical Jeep Wranglers on Turo, not multiply listed but completely different vehicles. I realized that the "Uber landlord" model was already taking hold here. I did the math - Wranglers are some of the lowest depreciating vehicles right now even with heavy mileage, and even with 2-3 days of rental a month the owner would likely break even at the end of the loan. Interesting business.
In the right area of the country I could see a decent market for renting Jeep Wranglers and Rubicons as the rental options for that type of car tend to be fairly limited.
That said, off-road vehicles will tend to be taken off-road and beat up a bit. It's unclear whether the insurance covered by Turo covers the vehicle being used off-road etc. Of course, if someone is running this as a business, they can presumably get their own commercial insurance.
I do really like the idea of a 'shared fleet' to get cars off the road and encourage alternative transport (walking, biking, public transport, ride sharing) and reduce our 'car culture'. Because these alternatives don't cover all use-cases, I need a car sometimes so I'm mostly forced to bear the rather large expensive of having a car all the time. I'd totally consider ditching my car entirely if I could press a button and reliably get a nice-ish car valet'd to my door in a reasonable amount of time for a reasonable cost. It's unclear if this is where we're at with these companies (and I already have a car sitting in my driveway so i'm already pot committed for awhile)
I'm in a similar situation. I rarely used my car, and was considering getting rid of it for a while. About a year ago I got rear-ended in a hit and run that totaled the car, so I decided to just try using Uber / Lyft, and decide if I wanted to buy a car.
It's been about a year, and I'm pretty seriously considering buying a used car. There are some use cases that Uber and Lyft don't cover, and my only option is to go rent a car, which requires some lead time, etc. Being able to get a car valet'd to my door would be nice, but what I'd really like is to find a neighbor that has 2 cars that they use to drive to work, but would be willing to let me use an extra car of their's on the weekend (for a fee of course). Our city has car2go, but the cars a really tiny, and you can only park them in a small part of the city.
I live in Seattle and there are a couple shared fleet services that are pretty close to this. Interestingly they're both owned by car makers (Car2Go [1] by Mercedes and Reach Now [2] by BMW). Sort of like a Zip Car in that you can get into the car with your phone, but unlike a Zip Car you can just park it anywhere within the bounds of the service (they pay the city a monthly fee per car to cover parking).
I put my car on Getaround for a few months in Oakland, got tired of it smelling like weed and McDonalds eventually. Damn device also ended up draining my battery.
That's seriously impressive to drain a car battery. Makes you wonder what in the hell that thing was doing. A phone-sized battery should probably be sufficient for their use case.
There is no battery in the 'connect' device; it uses the car's battery for power. Major mistake not including a battery as it is the reason I and many others have taken our cars off the service.
Hell, inattention for less than 3 seconds at the wrong time can cause a huge accident. Then there's the issue of willfully bad driving when it comes to sports cars, bad weather, and drunk driving.
I had great experience. Rented BMW Z7 and Porsche Boxster on two occasions. Picked cars in SF and dropped them in LA for an extra ~$300 fee. The owner then would fly over and drive them back. Total price was significantly cheaper than any rental company could offer. The biggest advantage to me is that you get the exact car you see in the pictures.
It also allows you to test the car you always wanted. After a week spent driving a powerful convertible I have decided that I don't want one.
I've rented from them a few dozen times and while it has its pros and cons (99% of which involve having to coordinate with a real person for pickup/dropoff) the service is generally simple to use and useful.
I thought this article was really strongly negative for no obvious reason. Clearly it's a challenging market and the challenges are newsworthy but there must be many positive experiences as well, since that's what I've had and presumably I'm not literally the only one.
I keep the app in my phone and will definitely use them again, it's especially great when you want to drive a specific or unusual vehicle and/or are doing a linger rental.
I wish they included all of the fees in their quoted prices. I wanted to rent quoted at $108, but it was $135 by time I got to checkout. Given the unknowns of renting a car from a private individual, and a similarly priced car being available from a rental car agency, I rented from the agency instead.
The problem here is that accidents happen. We are humans and especially during travel we might not be at our sharpest.
If your attention slips in an airbnb and drop a mug and the handle breaks off, well, that's a few dollars and an apology to the owner.
If your attention slips in a car and get in a fender bender and even if no one is injured that's a mess with insurance and at least several hundred dollars of repair.
There were a couple of German car-via-internet-sharing startups (tamyca was one of them, seems they're still in business) and I tried them once. My impression was at the end that I payed not much less than when I would've rented from a commercial car rental company, but with much more overhead.
So that was the experience for me as a customer. With airbnb it's completely different. I feel I often get more from the things I want (e.g. kitchen access is very common in airbnb's, no Airbnb ever tried to charge me for wifi) and the prices are often massively cheaper than hotels.
They have been a much easier option than a traditional rental car company.
They meet you at the airport.
You can rent hybrids.
You deal with a consumer who owns the car not a customer service rep who could care less about their job.
My complaints are that the app and website have terrible user experiences. Terrible is an understatement.
They were cavalier with my drivers license data going so far as to email it around to vehicle owners as an image. Though I emailed their CEO and he stopped that years ago.
Still, I'm a big fan of Turo.
GetAround is my second choice. They have much more restrictive mileage limits so I stay away.
Marketplaces are hard since the main thing you can sell is liquidity. If I were these car companies I'd focus in a benefit that helps users without requiring liquidity (single player mode) to bootstrap the marketplace.
FlightCar shut down because it offered monthly parking at the SFO airport for free, on the condition that you rent your car out for them. I did this because I wanted to keep my car, but I did not want to pay $400/month for a parking spot in SoMa, and my car hardly got rented out.
They eventually started doing some shady things like moving some of the cars to Oakland behind owners' backs. I ripped them a new one when I found out they did this to mine, but still stayed with the service because it was such a sweet deal.
When FlightCar finally kicked the dust, I went to pick up my car and saw a lot full of barely-used other cars from other people presumably exploiting the monthly parking in a similar way that I did.
Earlier this decade, I loved the NYT, used to be a great source of insight, now I feel they have lost their objective leaning edge. It is due to my generation, we do not know how to separate our personal feelings from our professions.
I've rented cars myself via Turo a couple times in the past few years. Two of the guys were operating their own small rental businesses (5+ cars, parked around on local streets). At a couple hundred bucks profit per vehicle per month, depending on utilization, having a few cars like that seems the only way to make it worth the while. As a part time job of sorts.
In the East-Bay, AAA is making a massive investment in car-sharing with GiG. I wonder if it will work out financially given state of the world with cheap ride-sharing by Uber/Lyft.