Airbnb Is Popular, but Renting Out Your Car Is Another Story
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I've rented cars myself via Turo a couple times in the past few years. Two of the guys were operating their own small rental businesses (5+ cars, parked around on local streets). At a couple hundred bucks profit per vehicle per month, depending on utilization, having a few cars like that seems the only way to make it worth the while. As a part time job of sorts.
In the East-Bay, AAA is making a massive investment in car-sharing with GiG. I wonder if it will work out financially given state of the world with cheap ride-sharing by Uber/Lyft.
The thing that made me leave was that GetAround Connect started drained my car's battery like crazy and started requiring jumpstarts every few days. I think there might have been a short. Meanwhile, GetAround support insisted that this was normal.
I've had to argue with them over points of minor contention in the past before, like one time a renter claimed my car was "dirty" and so I had to record them a video showing its immaculate interior. They also didn't want to help me chase down a renter who didn't refill my gas tank for me, as required by GetAround, but I eventually was able to resolve that as well.
GetAround completely covered the cost of parking tickets, repairs, and towing. They also made the process really hassle free. The towing was also handled decently well, but as a renter, I DID have to _notice_ my car got towed (not something I checked every day) before contacting GetAround to have them take care of it.
AFAIK, you automatically opt-in to using GA's insurance (but still are required to carry your own personal insurance on the car).
Overall, I found that renters just didn't treat my car well enough for me; they treated it like an ordinary rental car rather than borrowing a friend's car. After nearly every trip, there was garbage left behind in the car (straw wrappers, tissues, spills, stains), most did not following the parking rules, and the vast majority just didn't bother getting gas for me like they are required to by GetAround. One renter (I couldn't pinpoint the exact person) stole my mobile phone dashboard mount, my cigarette lighter USB charger (which was there mostly to help the renters!), and my SD card.
The brakes also squeal now, so I suspect somebody was driving with a square wave shaped braking pattern.
When I rent cars, I think it's fine to leave minor messes in them; it's implied as part of the rental service they'll vacuum carpets or recycle a stray bottle or two.
How is it different from an ordinary rental car?
I don't see why this isn't the case with other people. With GetAround, the whole premise is that you're borrowing your neighbor's car, not getting a late model Prius from Enterprise that has been beaten to hell and back already.
When an AirBNB listing looks like they expect me to put myself at extra inconvenience, I don't bother with it. Especially with how many of them are basically full-time landlords of their rented spaces these days.
Now I understand AirBNB et al would love for folks to get suckered into the idea they need to pay cash and get the friend-loaned-you-something treatment, but that's silly.
Yes, money changes hands - you pay for use and cleaning of the place - but my Airbnb rentals have been significantly more intimate than any commercial hotel I've stayed in (even small hotels or regular commercial BnBs).
The notion that you'd experience any kind of "community" or "sharing" with AirBnB has always seemed like pure marketing BS. It's cool that you've actually experienced it. Maybe it does happen sometimes.
My wife made the Airbnb reservations, and she really likes meeting local people, so she may have selected for that experience.
It worked out really well for us.
I love seeing my neighbors in Oakland lose their minds over GiG because the cars are stealing 'their' parking.
Oh gosh, don't get me started on this. It's theft, plain and simple. Or rather tax. Owning a car in a city is a massive pain in the butt, and it's cost me like $2k per year. Whether it's bullshit tickets, street cleaning gotchas, expired plates (got a ticket one day after it expired just yesterday), being parked in a valid parking spot that is nevertheless a tow zone for mysterious reasons, having to go in front of a judge to point out that it was bullshit for me to be towed because the facility that I had to visit to pay for the ticket was closed due to a holiday, on and on and on. You get the idea.
I've sort of resigned myself to it just being "car stuff," so whenever another crap ticket appears on my window it doesn't bug me much. Just more tax for the city. Whatever.
I know a few of the tickets are my fault, but geez, it seems almost impossible to be a perfectly law-abiding car owner in a major city over the course of five years.
It's actually tempting to rent out my car to someone else just to cover the administrative cost of owning a car in a city.
"To start, I found the top address where this ticket were given: in front of 575 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where over $48,000 in parking fines were issued in the last 2.5 years. To my surprise, the spot, (or really spots since there are two ramps), are legal,"
By the way, a friend just tried to park in the spot that I got towed out of. That's how unassuming it looks. That's just a thing you get to learn if you happen to live here, and the only way you learn it is after you get towed. Not a damn thing you can do about it other than pay up.
And how about the $120 ticket the other day for making a left at a light that was green but happened to be labeled no left turn without an arrow? No reason not to be able to turn left, as long as it was green. There wasn't any oncoming traffic. Yeah we missed the sign, and for that we get to pay $120 to follow the silly rule. The tickets add up faster than you think.
Are you complaining that you got a ticket for committing an infraction?
It's one thing to complain about regulations that seem to make no sense to you; it's another for breaking those regulations, and then bitching that you got caught.
I'm by no means "perfectly vigilant" but if you're getting them with any regularity then that's just carelessness. That is something fixable by you, personally, rather than suggesting the systemic changes that you seem to want to see.
Personal responsibility for the small stuff, systemic change for the big stuff.
When the parking people patrol your car, specifically, every day, looking for any small mistake, you bet you'll get a ticket. The best is getting one for "illegally parked too far away from curb" when it's literally one foot away.
If you're arguing that tickets aren't a significant source of revenue for large cities, you may want to check the statistics. https://www.parkingpanda.com/blog/post/top-10-cities-with-hi...
Besides, in your original post, you said "Owning a car in a city ..." more than once.
But, in the spirit of charity, I actually went to the trouble of asking a couple friends who live in NYC and own cars, "hey do you get a lot of extraneous parking tickets?" According to them, no, it's not the problem you're making it out to be.
You'll have to do more to convince me that you're not just careless and want to blame someone else for it.
I'm glad your NYC friends are well-off, but different neighborhoods are different. The south side of various cities are completely different from north side. This isn't a new phenomenon, and it matters where your friends are. I don't think it's very wise to draw conclusions from a sample size of three.
Perhaps I'm an atypical example, but it sounds like my story resonated with a bunch of other people, so I'd bet the other way. That ~$50M/yr has to come from somewhere, and if the revenue started drying up, they'd simply invent more rules until it didn't.
You're not wrong about the carelessness, but given that I make sure to be careful where it matters, are you sure you want to reward the behavior you're defending? A life of papers and registrations, dotted i's and crossed t's is pretty annoying.
Yes, my plates were expired for one day, and I got a $60 ticket for it. Yep, I was somehow parked in a tow zone (that someone else tried to park in too, and I see multiple cars per month fall into the same trap) and so I got to pay over $400 when all was said and done. Yep, I turned left at a green light when there was no oncoming traffic even though the damn thing was marked "don't turn left without an arrow" and a cop was watching it like a hawk just to meet their quota.
Does that make it all my fault? Maybe. You can think what you want, but at least you aren't analyzed daily for any vulnerable patterns in your behavior to exploit.
Yup:
> UPS, FedEx and other commercial delivery companies pay a steep price for doing business in New York City, getting an average of 7,000 parking tickets every day and paying more than $102 million in fines in the city’s latest budget year.
> Atlanta-based UPS has a fleet of 1,000 trucks and receives about 15,000 tickets a month here. The company is the biggest offender in the city, paying $18.7 million in parking violations for the fiscal year ending June 30, according to city data. Memphis-based FedEx was second with $8.2 million.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14602712/ns/business-us_business/t...
> I turned left at a green light when there was no oncoming traffic even though the damn thing was marked "don't turn left without an arrow"
Dude.
Are we really in a situation where it's heretical to turn left when there's no traffic? Ok then.
If you didn't notice my other comment, we didn't see the sign. So maybe reserve judgement for whoever you like to judge.
The point of traffic laws are to mold behavior into healthy patterns, not to generate money for the city. That's the goal, anyway. If you're really defending a "don't turn left without an arrow under any circumstances," then I couldn't disagree more strongly with your stance.
You haven't done traffic studies. You don't know the traffic flow at that intersection. You don't know how often there were accidents before that sign was placed. You say that the point of traffic laws is to mold behavior into healthy patterns, but unless you're perched up above that intersection for a month, 24/7, taking notes, you have no idea what is or isn't healthy there.
It's a Chesterton's fence situation.
> If you're really defending a "don't turn left without an arrow under any circumstances," then I couldn't disagree more strongly with your stance.
I'm not. See above.
> Are we really in a situation where it's heretical to turn left when there's no traffic?
It's not heretical, but it is illegal. If you do illegal things, you can expect to eventually get caught. You're not fighting segregated schools here, this isn't a moral crusade.
> If you didn't notice my other comment, we didn't see the sign.
I actually didn't. I do apologize; you sounded totally unrepentant about it in the comment I replied to.
All it takes is for the city to outsource the parking patrol to some for profit company and let them take a cut of the fines. This is what happened in my relatively small city (population of ~150k). Next election pretty much nobody of the ones that were pushing for that got voted back in to the city government.
The total bill? $500
Shit happens everywhere, but owning a car in Brooklyn was a level of hassle I'm not prepared to ever deal with again.
Carbon offsets cost about $100/year or less.
Auto crashes supposedly cost a trillion a year in direct costs and lost time, but those costs are mostly absorbed by insurance, employers and individuals, so don't factor into the $2k/year figure.
Interested to see corroborating or contradicting data.
It doesn't help that so many of the signs related to parking are sufficiently complicated that I rarely have full confidence that I'm 100% legal.
The latest naked revue grab is switching a lot of the 2 hr. parking meters from ending at 6pm to ending at 8pm. It's not so much paying for the extra 2 hours of parking but that, when coming in for dinner and a show, I pretty much have to be parked before 6pm. (And I've been ticketed for feeding the meter.)
Second, idle cars have a lot of value to owners. The car in my garage right now is giving me optionality and convenience, and that is worth a lot. In fact, I may exercise that optionality after posting this comment!
Another issue with car sharing is that a fair bit of the depreciation is going to be mile-based rather than time-based. A "good" renter is going to put fairly minimal wear and tear on a bedroom. A good car renter is still going to put miles on a car.
Once you capture that cost and add it to your profit, it's unclear to me why you'd expect to be competitive with an outfit like Zipcar which is probably a generally better experience for the renter in any case.
Somebody damaging a wall: the drywall can be replaced and the whole room repainted, the end result is a nicer room.
Somebody damaging the side of your car: it's never going to look quite the same as it did before and the resale value is going to be impacted when it shows up on a Carfax report, etc.
I agree that a lot of "routine" house damage is probably easier to deal with than similarly routine damage to a car. But the outlier incidents with housing are probably worse. Assuming Turo or whoever honors their obligations, at worst you just buy a new car.
ADDED: I can't imagine renting out either in any case.
Bad things do happen with housing rentals even if they're rare (whether they're intentional or unintentional doesn't really change the final result). e.g. https://twitter.com/GPellegrini/status/867540860782739458
Personally I'd never want to rent my stuff out through either service.
I use Zipcar for everyday boring stuff. RelayRides and Turo when I want a nice car to drive.
Already insurance companies and even leasing companies have special provisions (i.e., additional costs) for Uber/Lyft usage.
The possibility that you may be regularly giving another person control of your vehicle would likely be unsupported by default.
I wanted to buy a new Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, but as you may know those are enthusiast vehicles and not without their quirks, so I wanted to live with it awhile and really be sure that was what I wanted. Also I was going elk hunting in Idaho for 2 weeks and I didn't own a car so I thought, how perfect?
The trip and the Jeep were great, but it got me thinking about the economics of the whole thing. I noticed that my "host" I was renting from had about a dozen identical Jeep Wranglers on Turo, not multiply listed but completely different vehicles. I realized that the "Uber landlord" model was already taking hold here. I did the math - Wranglers are some of the lowest depreciating vehicles right now even with heavy mileage, and even with 2-3 days of rental a month the owner would likely break even at the end of the loan. Interesting business.
That said, off-road vehicles will tend to be taken off-road and beat up a bit. It's unclear whether the insurance covered by Turo covers the vehicle being used off-road etc. Of course, if someone is running this as a business, they can presumably get their own commercial insurance.
It's been about a year, and I'm pretty seriously considering buying a used car. There are some use cases that Uber and Lyft don't cover, and my only option is to go rent a car, which requires some lead time, etc. Being able to get a car valet'd to my door would be nice, but what I'd really like is to find a neighbor that has 2 cars that they use to drive to work, but would be willing to let me use an extra car of their's on the weekend (for a fee of course). Our city has car2go, but the cars a really tiny, and you can only park them in a small part of the city.
[1] https://www.car2go.com/US/en/ [2] https://reachnow.com/en/seattle-wa/
Maybe as it gets more widespread one could lean on the service more but my experience led me to believe that I wouldn't want to depend on it.
One only has to not pay attention for 30 seconds at the wrong time to do the same to an auto.
Other than that, it seems weird from the car owner's perspective.
It also allows you to test the car you always wanted. After a week spent driving a powerful convertible I have decided that I don't want one.
I thought this article was really strongly negative for no obvious reason. Clearly it's a challenging market and the challenges are newsworthy but there must be many positive experiences as well, since that's what I've had and presumably I'm not literally the only one.
I keep the app in my phone and will definitely use them again, it's especially great when you want to drive a specific or unusual vehicle and/or are doing a linger rental.
If your attention slips in an airbnb and drop a mug and the handle breaks off, well, that's a few dollars and an apology to the owner.
If your attention slips in a car and get in a fender bender and even if no one is injured that's a mess with insurance and at least several hundred dollars of repair.
So that was the experience for me as a customer. With airbnb it's completely different. I feel I often get more from the things I want (e.g. kitchen access is very common in airbnb's, no Airbnb ever tried to charge me for wifi) and the prices are often massively cheaper than hotels.
They have been a much easier option than a traditional rental car company.
They meet you at the airport.
You can rent hybrids.
You deal with a consumer who owns the car not a customer service rep who could care less about their job.
My complaints are that the app and website have terrible user experiences. Terrible is an understatement.
They were cavalier with my drivers license data going so far as to email it around to vehicle owners as an image. Though I emailed their CEO and he stopped that years ago.
Still, I'm a big fan of Turo.
GetAround is my second choice. They have much more restrictive mileage limits so I stay away.
FlightCar shut down because it offered monthly parking at the SFO airport for free, on the condition that you rent your car out for them. I did this because I wanted to keep my car, but I did not want to pay $400/month for a parking spot in SoMa, and my car hardly got rented out.
They eventually started doing some shady things like moving some of the cars to Oakland behind owners' backs. I ripped them a new one when I found out they did this to mine, but still stayed with the service because it was such a sweet deal.
When FlightCar finally kicked the dust, I went to pick up my car and saw a lot full of barely-used other cars from other people presumably exploiting the monthly parking in a similar way that I did.
Does anyone know how successful these companies are? What kind of volume do businesses like Turo see?