The car is always greener on the other side…

Let’s put it like this: cars are the second most expensive thing we own. The first most expensive thing is the house, but since many of us aren’t lucky enough to own one, the car gets the first place. Not only buying a car is tough on our finances, but things don’t get cheaper after we finish paying it off, au contraire, bills keep coming in: there’s the insurance, the road tax, the registration fee and then, of course there’s maintenance. How awesome would it be to find out that after all you don’t need to by a car and you can just borrow your neighbor’s?

 

In the US this dream has become a reality, thanks to Getaround, a San Francisco start-up which lets you  borrow other people’s car when they are not using it. The idea behind Getaround came to Jessica Scorpio, when she was a student at Singularity University and was asked to develop a project that could impact the life of a billion people.

 

There are a bllion cars on the planet in fact and most of them are idle 92% of the time. Between the trips to work and the store most cars are hardly ever used. Getaround has developed a very easy system that enables anybody with a driving license to borrow other people’s cars in the U.S, giving the car’s owner the chance to make some money on it.

 

You can choose the car you wish to rent on the Getaround website and after you’ve paid the rental fee, you can pick up your car thanks to the Getaround I-Phone app, which is connected to a special device inside the car that will allow you to directly unlock it. According to Jessica Scorpio, the company’s number one priorities were trust and safety. This is the reason why Getaround works closely with the Department of Motor Vehicles, to ensure that the people renting the cars are safe drivers.

 

Car sharing in the US, is getting more and more popular, Getaround is not the only company offering this service, RelayRides has developed a system which is very similar to it and is offered in several different cities. These services are changing people’s mind about car ownership. When people start sharing their car, they reduce their footprint by 44%.

 

In its first year, Getaround has already signed up 10 thousand cars.