14 DAY TRIAL // Peer-to-peer car exchange services are beginning to spring up in the United States, primarily backed up by investors in Silicon Valley, who are convinced that this model will be adopted by many. In short, it involves people sharing their rides in order to reduce costs and consumption.
What happens is that individuals who own vehicles may choose to enroll in programs that allow them to share their rides with complete strangers for a nominal fee. That person would come, take the keys, go about their business, and pay you the agreed-upon fee when they return.
RelayRides is one such service, and it allows those who subscribe to make as much as $8 per hour by lending their cars to total strangers. For Northeastern University students, for example, the entire $175 monthly parking fee can be covered. They can win up to $300 monthly by being a part of this service.
What Silicon Valley investors are actually supporting is a new concept called collaborative consumption. The most basic idea driving it is that sharing personal possessions can lead to a decrease in maintenance and ownership costs, and also to a reduction of one's environmental footprint.
Other industries, such as real-estate, have already been applying this model for a long time, but it is only now that entrepreneurs worked up the courage to do the same for the automotive industry. RelayRides, for instance, has only been operating in San Francisco and Boston for 24 months.
Thus far, it includes about 200 of the 250 million passenger vehicles in the United States. But analysts are optimistic that as much as 10 percent of the entire population in the country will give up personal cars use in favor of some form of shared vehicle within the next decade or so.
Some of the more interesting aspects of such services are the impacts they could have on city infrastructure, pollution, gas, oil and electricity consumption, and so on. Disadvantages include the fact that some cars may be in poor working order, or be dirty to some extent.
Even the federal government has taken some interest in this model, in addition to large manufacturers such as General Motors. Both have invested moderate sums in developing peer-to-peer car sharing as a general idea, Technology Review reports.
If these efforts are successful, then we can expect to see a series of state or federal laws being passed that would regulate the economic impact of such models. In a world where the effects of climate change are knocking on our doors, we cannot afford to ignore any type of measure that could help us out.