If you're a frequent car rental customer and are part of some of the bigger companies' loyalty programs (Avis Preferred, National Emerald, etc.) and typically rent from airport locations, than the rental experience can actually be really great.

But in a lot of use cases, specifically for people living in big cities that don't own cars, the experience is slow and expensive. To use me as an example, when I was living in New York I wanted to go skiing in Vermont and needed a car for the weekend. On the several occasions I used one of the big car rental companies, I'd pay in excess of $80/day for a midsize sedan, trek to a branch which was often far from where I lived, and wait in line to sign a bunch of paperwork at a desk. Another thing I found problematic was that I never new exactly which model I was going to get until I got there.

Peer-to-peer services solve certain aspects of these problems but were, in my experience, inconsistent--sometimes the car was nearby and great and other times it was far away, dirty, and the host was unresponsive.

We're trying to combine the scalability and variety you get with peer-to-peer services and the consistency you get with direct-to-consumer car rental.