Uber is launching Uber Rent, a rental car service with Getaround | Hacker News Reader

Uber is launching Uber Rent, a rental car service with Getaround

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144 pointsprostoalex96 comments

"Getaround sees its car rentals, . ..helping to move Americans away from private car ownership."

Except that it depends on private car ownership in order to have cars to rent. If you really want to get away from private car ownership, a service like Zipcar that maintains its own fleet would be a better way to go. But Getaround doesn't want the hassle of owning the cars either; it just wants to collect its cut and leave the hassle to others.

Getaround has a bunch of fake owner accounts with automated help lines which I think are actually owned-fleet vehicles.

I think these are actual users who have made so much money renting one car out that they made a business out of buying and renting multiple cars on the platform.

Bingo. Check out how many of the Porsches on Getaround and especially Turo are owned by the same people.

I recently rented a car from a gentleman who said he runs a business taking care of the hassle for others. Manages 10+ cars as his full time job.

That was the most pleasant experience I ever had renting a car for Turo/Getaround.

So the question becomes, why aren't they providing this level of service? Why is the experience so shitty for their vehicle providers that they have to go through a middle man to make it bearable?

Yeah, I have a lot of issues with Turo (mostly lack of customer service) but when I find people with specific fleets of vehicles I like (Jeeps usually) I aim for them as they usually make it stupid simple to pick up/drop off which is the huge benefit of Turo. That and renting more unique cars (like Wrangler Rubicons, Porsches if I'm visiting Woodside, etc).

Because the whole point of Uber-like services is to externalize the costs and actual work onto others as much as they can possibly get away with.

What they mean is that they’d like to see private car ownership reduce to the level where cars are utilized for much of the day (by their owners or their owners’ customers.)

What would you call the state of affairs where only 10% of people own cars and the rest make temporary use of those cars through rental? Would you not call that a dramatic move away from private car ownership? And that is a plausible if distant state of affairs which this enterprise is moving us towards. I think your objection is just a pedantic trick and not substantive.

>But Getaround doesn't want the hassle of owning the cars either; it just wants to collect its cut and leave the hassle to others.

What is a middleman? You make it sound like the "others" in that sentence are getting a bad deal compared to what could be, but what's the alternative? Someone build and maintains a ride sharing app for free as a charity to benefit middle class commuters?

A small fraction of Getaround cars are actually part of their own private fleet. These normally come with Zipcar-like negotiated parking spots. These are my favorite ones to rent when I can.

As far as I can tell, Zipcar was intentionally sabotaged after it was acquired by Avis Budget. Over the past few years the prices went up, the cars are dirty, often damaged, and the customer service got worse.

I may be an exception in that I can walk to several rental agencies from my apartment, but renting from an agency usually gets me a nicer car for 24 hours for the same price that I would get a zipcar for 3 hours. If I need a car for less than three hours usually it's cheaper with uber/lyft.

Edit: although they're still the most convenient for picking up furniture, as they have vans.

I wouldn’t be as quick to blame the downfall of Zipcar’s quality on deliberate sabotage. I began using them in 2009 and even back then it was cheaper in a number of instances to rent a car for more than short periods.

Where ZipCar excelled (I haven’t used it for a number of years) was being able to not own a car and effortlessly get one for an errand or quick trip.

These days I rent far more often, and even being part of elite programs and being very experienced with the process it is still far more of a hassle than simply approaching a car you’ve booked online, tapping your RFID card and driving away.

I think ZipCar theoretically still has utility for that type of use-case.

A big drawback also was the inability to select a one-way trip. Sometimes you want to get somewhere and stay for a while, and it’s simply not cost-effective (or efficient) to tie up a car for 3 or 8 hours vs. just driving there.

I believe this is a use case that Car2Go addresses, although I haven’t yet used that.

> These days I rent far more often, and even being part of elite programs and being very experienced with the process it is still far more of a hassle than simply approaching a car you’ve booked online, tapping your RFID card and driving away.

Really? The last time I rented a car in MIA, I showed up, was Enterprise Executive so I went and could choose any of a few dozen cars that had the keys already in the ignition. After that, I drove up to the exit at which point the person pulled up my reservation, scanned the car, and gave me the paperwork. I was out in less than 5 minutes from when I chose the car.

Return was just as easy, just pulled into the lot, someone scanned the car and sent me on my way.

Granted, it's not as easy as RFID and go, and I don't have that much experience with rentals because I don't use them often, but I wouldn't call it "far more" of a hassle, at least in my limited experience.

Jesus, limited experience indeed!

That's how bigger airport car rentals work, you've obviously never rented a car outside an airport location. Non airport car rental locations usually take a lot longer to go through the whole process, no streamlined/staffless way to rent, and have limited hours and a much smaller staff. I think the one by my house is even closed on Sundays. If you have some jackoff in front of you who is fighting with the staff about being turned away for not having a credit card you end up having to wait for the staff to deal with that before they can process your rental[1]. I've also had to wait for the car to be cleaned in the past when they got unexpectedly busy.

On top of that airports are usually not located near where people live. The vast majority of people renting a Zipcar for a day trip are not going to want to go to an airport to pick up their car.

Airport rentals can get significantly backed up during busy times. I've gotten totally gridlocked in the rental car parking lot before.

[1] actually happened to me

I can see the parent's comment. Rentals are fine when you're flying in if you want your own transportation. In a city, the locations and their hours are usually pretty limited. I sometimes do rentals from a city location--usually to return to the airport--but it's always a bit of a hassle.

>These days I rent far more often, and even being part of elite programs and being very experienced with the process it is still far more of a hassle than simply approaching a car you’ve booked online, tapping your RFID card and driving away.

I don't have a car right now... and while I haven't rented a car lately, (I'm willing to pay extra for uber/lyft as it means I don't have to drive or deal with parking) I do pretty regularly rent a uhaul van, as the on demand hauling solutions are less convenient and/or more expensive, in my opinion.

The uhaul process is app-based and can be done at the last minute with your cellphone. They do want a cellphone photo of you and of your license, which is then verified quite slowly, but I don't have to personally interact with any humans to get my uhaul van, and it's usually pretty quick.

Zipcar no longer offers reasonable customer service, which means you may not be able to unlock your car, report problems, or extend a reservation. If you call, it will be at least 10 minutes of holding, not so nice when you are locked out of the car you paid for. If your rental car has problems, you want to be able to contact someone who can help. Even if you do get a person on the line, you will find them not very willing to help in any way. Getaround is not much better, but if you already know the car owner, it can be good.

The Enterprise in my office building (Emeryville) seems to often have full size pickups to rent.

Also had issues even back in 2008 with broken zipcars, got pulled over once when the headlights wouldn't turn on.

> Except that it depends on private car ownership in order to have cars to rent.

That's not at all a contradiction. If you only drive your car to work every weekday, and I only drive for out-of-town weekend trips, then services like Getaround (as well as traditional rental car companies to some extent) make it so that we don't both need to own a car.

Zipcar is decidely not the same thing as Getaround. It involves a weeks long process of getting verified, getting your key fob in the mail, etc. and then you can only use the specific run down beat up cars that they own. You then have to find some way of getting to their nearest parking lot, and some way of getting back when youre done. The few times Ive used Getaround it was amazing. Just open the app, put in your CC, and unlock a car from your phone.

I have the exact opposite criticism. My experience has been Zipcars tend to be better maintained, and it's great to know that you'll have a parking spot to bring the car back to.

With Getaround, you have to street park. In some areas (esp crowded ones like SOMA / Mission) that can easily add 15-30 minutes to the end of your trip.

The long-term strategy works, though - "Not driving uber right now? Let somebody else drive your car"

The car manufacturers could probably do it more effectively.

These models work if you have a small portion of users contributing (in this case providing cars). This is true for services like Wikipedia, etc.

I don't think Zipcar owns the cars. Their model may not be as low touch as Turo or Getaround where you can just list your car. But the cars on the Zipcar platform are owned by other people that have lent it out to Zipcar through a more thorough process.

It’s pretty clear now that Uber’s goal is to own the solution to “I need transportation”, not just be a fancy taxi company. It’s ambitious for sure.

I need transportation:

For 5 minutes, and cheap? Grab an Uber Scooter.

For 30 minutes, with sunshine? Grab an Uber Bike

For 30 minutes, quickly? Grab an UberX/UberPool/UberBlack, etc.

For a weekend? Grab an Uber Rent.

If you frame their goal in these terms, it gives you a pretty good idea what other sort of deals we’ll see coming down the road (boats, aircraft, scooters, etc.)

I can't wait until I can order a horse/camel via app.

Also, Uber Train, Uber Spaceship, Uber Rollerblades ondemand rental, Uber-Nike running shoe sharing, and of course the coveted Uber Slippers for those lazy Sunday afternoon trips to the kitchen...

I am still unsure how I fell about the Uber Sofa for the essential null-travel events.

Yawn, wake me up when UberSPACEHOPPER comes out.

Uber Sofa. Brilliant.

I think the best thing about Uber Sofa is the ability to pay surge prices to get the best spot.

You guys laugh, but an Uber for snatching up a guaranteed last minute seat on demand at any event or queue would be amazing. I’d love it.

I feel Uber is not just about transportation, it’s about private services, to make you feel part of a privileged elite with no time to waste.

And I'll note that they've already done UberJET as a gimmick a couple of times, and even UberCHOPPER: http://fortune.com/2016/06/17/uber-uberjet-romania/

As interesting and PR-friendly as it is, it seems to add a lot of complexity at a time where Uber is already struggling. My impression is that troubled companies usually benefit from focus on the core.

UberRocket for Mars, UberGalactic for interstellar space travel. All coming by 2020.

And for a day of lazily floating down a river, UberTuber.

> It’s pretty clear now that Uber’s goal is to own the solution to “I need transportation”, not just be a fancy taxi company.

No. They have ceded their primary purpose, stake out a land grab for autonomous vehicle customers, and are now chomping whatever table scraps are left over to shore up valuation so the investors can exit without taking a bath.

There seems to be a flurry of activity from Uber recently. I wonder if the failure of their self-driving tech as evidenced by the pedestrian death and the subsequent suspension of their self driving program spooked them. The HN take on Uber's valuation seems to be that their current model of paying people to drive does not justify their valuation, but becoming the dominant ride service with self driving cars does. With their crash and Tesla's crash, maybe people are questioning just how soon real, usable self driving cars will actually be available, and Uber is scrambling to try to jump into new markets to try to prop up their valuation.

These kinds of deals don't materialize in 2 weeks. It's more likely that this has been in the works for months and is now finalized/announced.

I don't work at Uber or anything, so this is a guess based on past experience elsewhere, but I'm pretty confident that this didn't get cooked up in the wake of their most recent incident.

What you say is true, but I could well believe that Uber was already looking at the progress of their self-driving tech and wanting to hedge their bets. Plenty of reasonable people [1] believe we won't have true autonomous taxis anytime soon.

[1] E.g., MIT robotics professor and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

This is true. Any competent business is looking at hedging its risks and diversifying its offerings. I was just disagreeing with the hypothesis that this was cooked up in the wake of the most recent crash. The turnaround on that would be way too fast.

They had to be in the works previously - These sorts of deals require more time to negotiate than has passed since the pedestrian incident.

They probably shut down the self-driving thing because they literally stole all of their code from Google.

You have no idea. This isn't Reddit. Please stop with the low effort speculative muck.

To be honest, the recent accident makes me believe they really didn’t. Waymo’s lidar tech seems more advanced but that might just be marketing.

But like the other person said, your claims have no evidence so please don’t act like it’s fact.

I don't think Dara would have come to office on a Monday and said "ooh, shoot, self driving cars not working. Let's buy a bike sharing startup and car rental startup and we will be all good.. with an evil smile at the end". Only a journo would think something like that :)

I think he is turning around the company and these are definitely part of new strategy.

This could potentially be crushing for Turo which seems to struggle to get noticed, maybe Zipcar as well.

zip car is crushing itself. they only recently started allowing rentals over 24 hours. most require round trips. or if not a round trip, return to a zip car parking spot. it’s just slightly less inconvenient than a traditional rental car at a higher price. i have a really hard time imagining when zip car would be the best choice for any driving needs

FWIW Zipcar is owned by Avis Budget Group which also owns Avis, Budget, and Payless Car Rentals. So, from a pure data perspective, I think they have enough information to determine pricing that makes them money.

Correct - ZipCar is not cheaper than traditional rentals, but it gives me something that Hertz, Enteprise, etc for some reason cannot commit to: no BS and time accuracy.

I don’t want to wait in line or deal with their representative upselling me a thousand addons, I don’t want to think. I’d rather show up and hop into a car, a-la ZipCar, without having to spend 20 minutes talking to anybody or figuring out what insurance I should choose.

I know a couple in SF who don't have a car and, AFAIK, they still use Zipcar and a competitor. My understanding is that one of their common cases is running around on a weekend to shop. One of the advantages over rentals is they can pick one up closer to their place.

I do have to believe that the (subsidized) Uber and Lyft rides has had an impact on their business.

And this is a business that probably didn't end up being as big or disruptive as people thought it would be in the first place anyway.

> they only recently started allowing rentals over 24 hours

???? Zipcar has allowed you to rent a car for more than one day for years. I know people using them for 3 day weekend trips a decade ago. Explicitly remember them trying to budget their miles as you only got 180 miles per day, which you can burn up on distant destinations.

I've been using Zipcar for many years. It used to be great. In the last couple of years their service has really declined (probably since the Avis acquisition). In the last year I had so many issues. Once the car wasn't present and no on knew where the car is. They wanted to relocate me to a car two towns away. Another time the car was broken and they didn't bother doing anything about it. Cars are often dirty with pets hair. And they are really cheap about refunds, you need to call and argue with them. I now use Zipcar only when I have to. Will probably not renew my annal membership when it expires.

This is not correct. Maybe this does not apply to every single city that Zipcar operates in, but they allow 4 or 5 day rentals (can't recall which) in both Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon. I have done this many times going back as far as 5 or so years.

I think you are also really down playing the convenience vs. traditional car rentals. Many car rental companies have moved to the model where they offer you a certain class of vehicle, and when you get there (which may mean traveling for 30-60 minutes to a place like the airport) to pick it up you are choosing from a random smattering of vehicles, which may be close to what you are expecting or not. I certainly don't appreciate when I get an "upgrade" to a giant SUV because they were out of the compact sedan that I really wanted. With Zipcar, if you live in a city, you can find a car in your neighborhood and know exactly what car you are getting, down to the color. You can also choose vehicles with other upgrades like roof rack or state parks pass. Zipcar also makes it easy to have multiple drivers use the car. Let's say I want to let my wife or brother drive during part of our trip. No problem, they are both Zipcar members as well, so they can just drive the car. They don't have to be there when I pick up the car to show their license and get added as drivers on that specific rental.

For me personally there is also a huge benefit to Zipcar offering cargo vans as a rental option. I'm a hobbyist woodworking and having quick access to a van to pickup lumber is great! None of the other Zipcar like services that are available to me offer this. I could of course get this from a traditional rental car company, but with the problems from the previous paragraph.

I think my point is really that Zipcar hits a sweet spot that no competitors seem to be addressing directly.

i tried to use zip car for a multi day rental in vancouver. i talked to people at zip car and they said that is not allowed this was 2015

If you live in SF, its much more more convinient to hop to a zipcar/getaround car block away from your house for a day trip to Napa, than first go the airport/downtown, where it takes additional 30-60mins to do the whole travel+process+traffic. Plus you have to do it on the way back and fill the tank (zipcar gas and tolls are free). Also the SF rental shops usually close after 6/8pm so you cannot drop the car off after that.

Since person anecdote, I've used Turo in the Seattle area with great success. Rented a small van to move some stuff for work. The van was a $7 lyft ride away from my place, I picked up the keys, took a photo of the odometer. Used the van for 2 days, refilled with gas, street parked it at the owner's place, took another odometer photo and some shots of the exterior on my phone, done.

Way faster than using Enterprise or similar traditional van rental.

This kind of makes sense. If the car owners are at some random place in the city, Uber could drive them there for pick up and offer ride backs.

At least in SF, there are (were) tons of cars all around the city for rent with Getaround. I had 10-15 within easy walking distance from my last apt there. I even had my couple of favorites that I rented on a regular basis to take off for the weekend.

So you can rent a car on Uber and then use that car to Uber people around?

I interpreted this as being an option for riders, not drivers.

Not quite. This article is about riders being able to rent cars for their own personal trips. There is a separate flow for partners to be able to rent a car from Getaround to drive for Uber [1], which has been around for about a year.

[1] https://www.uber.com/newsroom/getaround/

Uber already has discounted weekly rentals through Hertz, Uber Xchange short-term car leases from select dealers, and Uber Financing where the driver buys a new car from Nissan/Toyota/Hyundai at special pricing with unlimited maintenance included and the monthly finance payment comes out of their monthly Uber check automatically.

Yes, even through getaround. Uber does provide this as a service for drivers.

But this announcement is about a rider side product.

It seems that the value of Uber/Lyft is their names, and the setting up markets of drivers that have had some sort of verification, and providing a unified mobile hailing interface for customers to use. I don't see the part of their businesses that couldn't be done as well by some decentralized or non-profit entity, except perhaps the identification and verification of drivers and their vehicles.

App install, notifications and credit cards info are a huge part of their value along with their brand.

Hard to believe Uber did this without some sort of equity ownership in Getaround...

I don't know how popular Getaround is in other parts of the country, but I get the impression they are struggling in Chicago.

They definitely need Uber's support here

I'm a pretty frequent car renter (Turo) and haven't heard of Getaround at all.

GetAround is big in SF. I did an interview there about 5 years ago and I also used their services supplementing ZipCar. The cars for GetAround were a lot nicer, but the experience of getting the keys was sometimes tricky if there wasn't good wifi.

Same. I’m a weekly renter, I’ve googled around for competing services, and have literally never heard of Getaround.

Just as a counterpoint - I’ve never heard of Turo but have used Getaround probably 30 times.

Touché.

I just tried Getaround but hasn’t launched in my area yet.

They might have analyzed them as an organization and even though they are not big and doing well, they might have seen them something that will integrate well within their current business process & org.

I imagine most Getaround car owners didn't imagine that their cars would be rented for commercial purposes, ground to the absolute maximum usage and having potentially dozens of strangers enter per day.

Hopefully this feature is opt in, but given my experience working for and using Getaround, I know it probably isn't.

> I imagine most Getaround car owners didn't imagine that their cars would be rented for commercial purposes

...but isn't this what Getaround is already? An app you can advertise your car for hire on? Uber just helps you get more of the hire-outs you were already looking for?

Renting your car to your neighbor for a weekend in Tahoe is different from renting your car to Yellow Cab.

The community/neighborly/collaborative consumption angle was heavily advertised by Getaround, and while this is technically still within the terms, I think it is disingenuous.

You could just delist your car if it's an issue

Good, anything to kill Turo is welcomed. I dislike Turo being itself. Horrible customer service and user experience. With more players and competition, the consumer wins.

Hahaha you haven't used Getaround, have you

Any guesses whether this means subsidized rentals, in accordance with their winner-take-all model, to price-out competitors like Zipcar?

On a related note, does anyone know about Zipcar’s business model? Are they focused on unit economics / profitability instead of growth? I’ve been using it ever since they marketed on our college campus with student discounts 5 years ago, but there hasn’t been much updates to the web UI. Maybe this is for the better.

Avis bought them and they've been much lower profile as a "hot hip company" since then. In retrospect, they were a fairly niche play and Uber/Lyft seems to have taken what wind there was in their sales largely out. Based on pricing that people have told me, it doesn't seem to be discounting for growth.

That’s interesting because for my use-cases, ridesharing and on-demand car rentals are substitutable goods. Ever since I moved to SF where ridesharing is noticeably more cost effective, I’ve shifted my more towards ride sharing. If prices on car rentals goes down with this Uber deal, I see myself shifting back in the other direction.

It’s not so much in a city: ridesharing is a superset of usecasses for me that eventually led me to cancel my zipcar, since they only served the road trip case that a proper car rental does just as well. Having to walk to the car and return it in the same place is a huge hassle, and then having to drive the thing and gas it up puts it much closer to competing with rentals to me.

One use case where I default to Zipcar is picking up furniture / big items. Also, I like hiking in Muir Woods but there is no cellphone signal there. You can book a trip to, but not a trip from. Another one is when I want some privacy.

So Uber is a middleman car rental agency that outsources all risk to the real car owners, while taking a nice profit?

As a non-car owner and an occasional renter, I find Zipcar is cheaper because it includes insurance. Regular rental companies charge about $20 per day ($10 each for liability and collision) extra.

Zipcar has a fixed mileage ceiling per day, so for long hauls regular rentals may be better.

Getaround also includes insurance

You never want to actually lend your car to randoms -- as anyone who has ever driven a loaner car (fleet), these cars are ruined. People drive like maniacs -- its not their car!

This is a sure way to get your car messed up.

Will Uber allow their driver to rent a car and then serve users? this way drivers can avoid commission cut to Uber. I am sure Uber is not naive.

Uber already has rental programs for its drivers (see upthread). But how would this allow a driver to avoid commissions to uber?

I think this is their answer to Turo?

I enjoyed the response I saw from some wag on Twitter: "So when can I rent a train?" Soon, I would guess, as long as Uber gets its cut.

https://www.amtrak.com/charter-your-private-train

Amtrak just announced they were shuttering that program at the end of March: http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/amtrak-will-no-longer-op...

Aw, poo.

Sigh.

Yet another Rent-A-Car service that people won't use. I'm tired of these countless companies taking up reserved spots in parking lots.

Edit: I ride my bike to BART and use it to get into the city 90% of the time. However, it's been raining a lot in SF recently so I've been forced to drive a couple days. Literally half the available spots at my parking lot of choice are reserved for these services. Most of the time they are empty.

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