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Share Your Car (For Cash)

Start ups that encourage people to share their personal vehicles are becoming increasingly popular. Each offers their own system to entice you to make money from lending out your car.
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What’s the Latest Development?

If you have a car, you could be earning money while you are not driving it. That is the idea behind a string of new start ups encouraging vehicle owners to share their cars in return for cash. In general, the owner receives two-thirds of the rental proceeds. “RelayRides says an owner of a midsize, late-model sedan who rents out a car for 10 hours a week could expect to clear about $3,000 a year.” Currently, peer-to-peer car sharing is most widely available in San Francisco. Legal questions over insurance claims have slowed broader adoption.

What’s the Big Idea?

There was a time when registered drivers outnumbered registered vehicles. As environmental and financial resources become scarcer, we may be returning to that age, says Randall Stross, professor of business at San Jose State University. “Car sharing is just one form of ‘collaborative consumption,’ the clunky catchphrase that…is commonly used to suggest an ideological or moral imperative to share more things.” Projects encouraging drivers to share their cars are further evidence of social networking’s ability to improve resource efficiency.

Photo credit: shutterstock.com

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Happy New Year
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth). Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay. Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
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