In the news this week there has been some buzz over the site GetAround.com. Despite what the name suggests this is not the newest internet dating site for lonely singles. No, GetAround.com is actually a peer-to-peer car sharing company based out of San Francisco. What exactly does peer-to-peer car sharing mean, you ask? Well, the site allows its users to make some extra cash by sharing their unused cars for an hourly or daily rate. Those not fortunate enough to own a car, but still want to “get around” can browse cars in their area that are available to rent for anywhere between $3 to $20 an hour. So far you can GetAround in San Francisco, Austin, Portland, San Diego, and as of today, Chicago. According to the site’s statistics, at least 10,000 people have already cashed in on GetAround by renting their car to a complete stranger.
So does letting someone you’ve never met before drive off with the most expensive thing you own, make you a little nervous? That’s because—if you’re a rational human being—it should.
Let me break this down for you. Warren Buffett is the second richest man in America. Warren Buffett owns Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway insures every car rented through GetAround.com for up to 1 million dollars in damage. Sounds pretty safe right? I’m pretty sure most people aren’t putting up their Ferraris on GetAround.com and you would have to try pretty hard to do a million dollars-worth of damage with someone’s 02 Honda Civic (unless, of course, you crashed it into a row of parked Ferraris). However, Warren Buffett didn’t become the 2nd richest man in America by paying out every insurance claim ever written. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t be covered if something happened to your car while it was “Getting Around”, but it’s just something to think about before you let a complete stranger take your baby for a spin.
The premise behind GetAround.com, as their website states is to, “empower people to travel more efficiently and cause a shift from personal to shared transport.” Well they make it sound pretty noble don’t they? It’s hard to argue with a cause like that. In fact, GetAround.com touts a bunch of catchy phrases about helping the environment, reducing your carbon footprint, and easing congestion in crowded urban areas. GetAround.com claims that each car share takes 13 other cars “off the road”—a number that is based on a study done in 2009 by UC Berkeley researchers. I read the study myself, and not only found that the number was really between 9 and 13 but the researchers admit that results WILL VARY across different services. Furthermore, the phrase “off the road” actually refers to families owning a car and has nothing to do with actual driving habits.
So does GetAround.com really accomplish what it claims to setting out to do? Let’s sort through this with a little bit of logic: If I don’t own a car, and thus have to walk, ride my bike, and use public transportation to get around, that makes one less car on the road. Now if my neighbor Joe, who works nights and only drives the car after 6pm, decides that he will rent his car to me for $50 a day so that I can use it to get to work from 8am to 5pm. Now, instead of Joe’s car sitting in his garage all day where it stays off the road, it is now being used by me to get to and from work, adding to the congestion of the morning and evening commute and in no way helping the environment. Even if Joe normally drove during the hours of 8 to 5, but decided to give that freedom up to share his car, just because I’m driving it instead of Joe, in no way improves congestion or reduces emissions.
Now this is a neat little example used to support MY argument, but this is not an unlikely scenario. I can see how GetAround.com may encourage people not to go out and purchase a new car, but I don’t think that the people who are likely to use a program like this are necessarily the type of people that are in the market for a new car in the first place. The bottom is line is that even if car sharing keeps people from buying new cars, it doesn’t keep them from driving. I’m no scientist, nor am I a statistician for that matter, but it seems to me that congestion and emissions are a direct result of the number of people who drive a car every day, not the number of people who own cars. In fact, isn’t the premise behind GetAround.com to identify the people who are rarely using their car and offer them an incentive to rent it out to people who don’t own car? So how exactly does putting inactive cars to use supposed to reduce emissions and traffic congestion? That is not a rhetorical question—I would actually like to know.
When I did research into the car sharing, the phrase, “each car share car takes 13 cars off the road” was plastered all over the internet. So a couple of researchers do a study into car sharing, one that they themselves admit was relatively inconclusive, and next thing you know car sharing’s reduction of congestion and emissions becomes an undeniable fact? I like the idea of community and sharing, but touting your program as socially responsible without any kind of proof is…well, irresponsible. If you’re reading this and you can prove me wrong, please, I welcome the challenge. Until then, I’m sticking to my guns.
