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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Buy up a few parking lots in a few major metros and let people unlock the cars with an app on their phones as short term rentals.

The vehicles will probably end up as a loss, but it's going to get a lot of press. Then start selling them. Make the parking lots into car dealerships. Put them in college towns where people are just starting to get real jobs and have money to spend, and are also very online.

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Do you mean sell the cars to students? It's same problem: they will probably prefer very used cars from known brands over slightly used cars from an unknown brand.

Sell cars to people a few years out of college who are now trying to signal their membership in the middle class.

This comment just rings so true to the behavior of a bunch of my peers over the past few years.

Has it ever been different?

One advantage of selling people their first car is that they might be slightly less likely to have strong opinions on brands. Need every advantage you can get.

And yes they are more easily to fall pray to money pit brands.

They're already selling their cars at a loss, according to the article. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would buy a Vietnamese electric car if it was 25-50% less than a Japanese/American/European one. Thats certainly how Korean cars managed to break into the US market.

This is clever, but I think you could get a similar result with fewer dedicated internal staff (better for a company with no US ops) by leasing or selling vehicles to e.g. ZipCar.

Zip car is essentially what I mean. Just adding the additional press bump by trying to draw a comparison to the scooter shares, or docked bicycles.

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