Wheelz launch on college campuses for a bunch of reasons. Students tend to be tech-savvy, early adopters. They tend to trust their classmates. They think about consumption in a different way than their parents do. Most of all, some kids have cars and others want them. "At every college in America, there's supply and demand," MIller said. “The college and university is an ideal place to start -- the key words being place to start, not finish.”
Boston-based RelayRides, meanwhile, is expanding from Boston and San Francisco, where it currently offers cars, to the rest of the country, with an assist from General Motors. GM has about 6 million OnStar subscribers, who will be offered the chance to rent through RelayRides. GM will get a cut of the rentals, as Steve Girsky, the company's vice chairman, told the LA Times:
"Urban mobility solutions are a vital building block of the future success of GM," Girsky said. "Peer to peer concepts such as RelayRides in combination with OnStar's technology delivers against this target. We could stand on the sidelines and watch or we could choose to participate and try to make it into a favorable business model, which in this particular case, we have."
All of this is unproven, of course, and it bumps up the very American idea of owning your own wheels. Then again, we're in a sluggish economy -- which makes sharing attractive -- and the environmental benefits of car sharing are obvious.
Car sharing is one of many businesses made possible by the overlap of social media and sustainability, which will be one of the topics next month at FORTUNE's Brainstorm Green conference, which I co-chair. I'm pleased that Jeff Miller of Wheelz has agreed to speak. On our agenda, too: Ford CEO Alan Mulally and and Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar. It should make for some interesting car talk.
Photo of passing along car keys via Shutterstock.com; logos courtesy of Wheelz and RelayRides via MarcGunther.com
I can understand why peer to
I can understand why peer to peer car sharing can be a win-win situation for the car owner and for the person renting. The article points out some of the economical or practical reasons very well. And I think from a social stance it's really good as it increases mobility. I was also a student with no car and too few bucks to rent one. And I remember missing out on a lot of things because of that.
However I find it inaccurate to say "the environmental benefits of car sharing are obvious"....
Yes car sharing has a certain environmental benefit if and only if, several persons are in the car during the same ride.
Peer-to-peer car sharing is about different people riding separately in the same car. The effect of that is that you increase the usage of the car per day. More fuel burned and more emissions mean less environmental benefits. And then add to that the loss in fuel efficiency of public transportation means the people renting the P2P cars were normally taking before. There is some loss in environmental benefits coming from that.
I am pretty familiar with Life cycle assessment and from that perspective P2P car sharing has no actual environmental benefits since it does not reduce the cars on the road (rather the contrary) nor does it reduce the number of manufactured cars since its clients are people who cannot afford buying a car in the first place.
On the other hand I can see how, through a calculation artifice, a car manufacturer could claim that its environmental impact linked to manufacturing operations is decreased because it sells cars that are used for P2P sharing.
So P2P car sharing: socially super! Environmentally neutral at most.
One only needs to look at
One only needs to look at Kodak to see what happens if a company gets locked into the idea that their business model does not stretch beyond manufacturing a single product and then defend that market share to the death. Kodak's reluctance to cannibalise their film market with digital products opened the door for the rest of the market to eat their lunch, right in front of them!
Managing a car fleet might be a good move for improved product design.
Car sharing may appeal to a
Car sharing may appeal to a very small niche segment who can't afford a ride any other way, but it's just a dumb idea on so many levels. Why would I ever choose to allow a stranger to destroy my car for the pittance that I could earn from this? And why would I ever depend (reliability + safety) on a stranger to maintain and make their car available when I need it? This is the hole that Zipcar fills, by keeping inventory, managing the quality, ensuring sufficient availability, etc.
This is discussed in detail here, especially in the comments:
http://blog.getscaffold.com/roll-out-the-carsharing-roundup
It's all a little too idealistic if you ask me.