A new model for car sharing in the local community
A guest post from Emily Kerr of Share Our Cars
A couple of years ago someone posted a photo on our neighbourhood facebook group of our street in the 1970s, with very few cars on it. I liked it, and promptly forgot about it.
Then in June 2021, I was looking out of my window and suddenly noticed just how many cars there were on my street. And I thought how little I used my own car, and how wasteful it was to have so many cars just sitting out on the street all the time. So posed a question on the facebook: “Is the idea of sharing cars with each other to reduce the number on the streets possible or completely crazy?”. I got a lot of comments. Everyone was positive about the idea, although many people thought it would be impossible to execute.
In my day job, I’m a management consultant, which means I generally do 3-4 month projects going into businesses and helping them out with problems. Car-sharing seemed like a manageable problem of the type I was used to, so I started to do some research.
Car-sharing’s been around for a long time in various forms, from taxis and getting a lift with friends, to car-rental companies, car-clubs, and borrowing a family member’s car. In the last few years start-ups such as Turo, Hiyacar, and Getaround had become reasonably large doing Peer-to-Peer commercial rental – sort of like Airbnb for cars where the borrower pays a fee which includes insurance, a rate for the car owner, and a platform fee. This was closest to what I was thinking of, but I wanted to only to rent to people within a small neighbourhood, and also to do it at a cost-covering rate and not-for-profit.
I researched traditional community car clubs, and learned that many have been set up with some running for over 20 years. But they were generally run as co-operatives and required volunteers and lots of admin. And what I wanted was a system which would run itself and require very limited input from me.
It struck me that the easiest thing for me to do would be to persuade a commercial company to partner with me. That way they’d do all the insurance, scheduling, driver verification and admin, and all I’d have to do is persuade people to sign up. Right away, Hiyacar seemed the best fit. I contacted their customer service team and asked for a call, a couple of days later I was speaking to the right people. No one had done anything like this before but Hiyacar were willing to give it a go, and they created a ‘closed-loop’ for my neighbourhood, ring-fencing our cars so only people participating in the trial could see them.
Now I needed to convince neighbours to sign up. I created a very brief Google survey, asking people whether they would be interested in borrowing or lending cars, any concerns they had, and to leave their email addresses. I posted a link to the survey on Facebook, and sent it to street WhatsApps. I put leaflets with a QR code link to the survey through doors, and did a stall at our local jumble sale where people could talk to me in person. I was planning to launch in July but the Covid situation was worsening, so we decided to postpone until September. I felt a bit nervous the first time I lent my car to a stranger testing the system, so decided that I’d be the first person to test each of the other cars who came online. Over the summer we got 8 cars signed up from our small area of a few streets, and I made sure I tested each one as it joined so I could meet the owners.
There are three main differences to Hiyacar’s normal model: First, as previously mentioned, the scheme is restricted to a closed loop of neighbours rather than being accessible to anyone with a Hiyacar account. Second, we’re renting our cars at a cost-covering rate, so not-for-profit. Third, we remove our rubbish, but we don’t bother cleaning our cars or emptying them of stuff unless the borrower needs us to. For example, I leave my kids car seats in unless the borrower needs the space.
Our trial has just launched and although it’s early days, it’s going well so far. I’m not going to use my own car this month, to see if it’s possible to give it up altogether. I’ve also had a lot of interest from people in other neighbourhoods looking to set up their own loops so I’ve set up a website with more info on how to do that for anyone interested. www.shareourcars.com