I’ve become a real fan of the peer-to-peer car sharing concept, and may even have to try it if a service ever becomes available here (because my car’s often just parked… why not make a little off of it). Still, I wondered if the business model itself would catch on, as some of the same liabilities we saw crop up with Airbnb would also apply here.
Apparently, some venture capital firms think those risks can be managed, as they’re putting money into one of the early start-ups in the space. I’ll let Beth Buczynski of sister site Insteading take it from here…
Rent-n-roll
Private carsharing is now also becoming more and more popular in Europe. Some examples of this are WhipCar in Great Britain on http://www.whipcar.com/ and rent-n-roll in Germany on http://www.rent-n-roll.de/ . Nevertheless, promoting p2p carsharing might be a lot easier in countries where ownership of a certain good is not as important as its use. That’s one of the reasons the U.S. is the pioneer for Collaborative Consumption.