FlightCar (YC W13), the Airbnb for Cars, Launches at San Jose International | Hacker News Reader

FlightCar (YC W13), the Airbnb for Cars, Launches at San Jose International

mercurynews.com

13 pointsedward16 comments

Not sure if anyone here has used FlightCar, but definitely consider them next time you need to rent a car.

I reserved my car on my phone at my layover in San Diego, received an email that provided a link that I should click once I got to SFO.

Got to SFO, clicked the link and I was provided a realtime map of where the driver was in route. The black car picked me up, took me to the FlightCar offices five minutes away and I rented a compact car for $119 for the entire week.

Fantastic experience.

$119/wk for a compact car is pretty expensive though, at least where I am used to renting cars at. Did you check something like PriceLine as well?

I just checked Priceline, SFO, compact 2/15 - 2/22. The lowest I get is $160 and then it jumps to $240 for the week?

I always do the "name your price" and get a full size car for $98 - $105 a week. Smaller sized cars should be much cheaper.

AAA estimates that it costs roughly 40 to 97 cents per mile to own a car (depending on the type of car and how much you drive)[1] so I'm having a hard time seeing that a lot of people will let random strangers abuse their cars for 5-20 cents per mile. Because let's face it, nobody treats rental cars as well as their own cars.

[1] http://exchange.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/your-driv...

couple huge problems that come to mind immediately.

1) owner risk. you are letting a complete stranger rent your car for x days. You have no control over how good of a driver they are or how many miles they will drive. as mentioned in other comments (and a fact that my dad, who owns a brand name car rental franchise CONSTANTLY harps about) is that people who rent cars treat them like crap. Rental cars lose value almost 3 times as fast as cars driven by their owners.

2) insurance complications. My current insurance doesn't even let my girlfriend drive my car, technically. If the person that flightcar rent my car to gets in to an accident, not only am I liable, but my insurance won't cover it.

3) uber/lyft is a much less risky method of using my personal vehicle for extra income, plus I maintain control of my car. Why take on that extra risk for such little return? doesn't make sense. I'd rather be an uber/lyft driver to make the extra $$.

4) return not worth the risk. article states $15-20 parking fees per day that would be avoided. lets say i'm gone 1 day, thats $20 cost. An uber from my place to the airport is currently $10 each way, so $20 bucks total. I can either park for 1 day or take an uber for the same cost. Anything longer than a 1 day trip would be dramatically cheaper taking the uber, so I don't park there. I'm not letting a stranger rent my car to save $20.

thoughts?

Another challenge I could see is the chicken and eggs cold start problem. Until there are enough people willing to rent their cars out, the supply would be minimal and no one would even consider this when flying. I can't see any easy way to bootstrap this marketplace. Uber could bootstrap their marketplace because there are a lot of repeated business in downtown, and even then it took a huge amount of capital to do that.

Maybe it's Thursday late afternoon blue, but I am seeing less and less start ups from YC that really make me go "wow, what a neat idea to solve a problem that's been bothering me". Now all I am seeing is a lot of solutions going around looking for a problem.

Today's actually FlightCar's two year anniversary of opening at an airport lot (SFO), and we're now open at ten airports nationwide, so the initial bootstrapping has long since happened.

Hi, I work at FlightCar, some quick replies:

1) If the renter drives more than 100 miles per day, we'll charge them $0.45/mile overage and return almost all of that to the owner. So it's not entirely uncontrolled.

2) FlightCar insures the renters, if they aren't already primarily insured by e.g. a credit card they own. It doesn't come out of your insurance.

3-4) FlightCar also pays out per-mile driven on top of the free parking, which you seem to have missed, but I think it's fine and sensible that many people don't consider the risk worth the reward (especially if their car is new); of course, everyone said the same thing about Airbnb at first too.

In January 2014 I rented a 2006 Mercedes S-Class at SFO for $20 per day from FlightCar. Pretty amazing.

AirBnB for Cars ... So, you pay to sleep in a car ?

Edit: OMG it's worse than my sarcastic initial thought. I drive my car to the airport and they rent my car to random fools to abuse and sift through my glove box.

I can see renting out the second mortgage investment houses. But who the hell has an investment car?!

God just give the VC cash for this to the GPG project.

I'm not exactly thrilled at the ingenuity here either but lots of people leave their car at the airport for a week, two weeks, sometimes more in long-term parking. If you could wipe out that cost by letting someone use your car, why wouldn't you? Or if you want to avoid the usual rental rigamarole, why wouldn't you? Seems pretty sensible to me, if not particularly original.

It's weird that your thoughts jumped straight to an 'investment car.' Many people only use their one car occasionally, opening it up for rental, and two-car households can save or even make money by renting out one when it's not necessary to use both.

Do people not realize that a car is consumable good. There are many costs which people are not considering when renting out their cars including tires, brakes, oil changes,and of course the incalculable wear and tear that will bite you in the ass later. The rates for these "rental" cars are just screwing the car owners and raking in cash for the platform.

/rant

Owners earn 5-20 cents per mile. So an average of 12.5 cents, works out to $30 per 6000 miles. Just considering the oil, it doesn't sound appealing as a full synthetic oil change costs about $60. If you consider the savings from free airport parking around DFW for 6 months, that's 182 days x $7 = $1274. I'm still reluctant.

$0.125/mile seems pretty low. For comparison, the US Government reimburses employees $0.545/mile [1] for official travel in a personal vehicle. I wonder how many miles/day it would take for the cost of wear and tear to exceed the savings in parking fees.

[1] http://www.gsa.gov/mileage

> Owners earn 5-20 cents per mile. So an average of 12.5 cents, works out to $30 per 6000 miles.

Not sure how you got this -- 12.5 cents * 6000 miles = $750, not $30.

(Disclosure: I work at FlightCar.)

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