Most of the car s built-in and OnStar functions are active, particularly emergency crash notificatio

Move over, Zipcar, you ve got competition: RelayRides makes car rental even more personal. Car rentals range from a big company such as Hertz or Avis to by-the-hour rentals such as Zipcar to peer-to-peer or carsharing rentals such as RelayRides, by far the dominant player in the fledgling P2P industry. You re renting somebody else s personal car, located nearby, for the afternoon or weekend. Anybody with a smartphone can do it. If the car owner has a GM car with OnStar installed and running, OnStar guides you to the car and then remotely california car rentals unlocks the car. It s the first application using OnStar s OpenAPI that was announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. It s built on HTML5. A hands-on test with RelayRides and OnStar execs looking on showed RelayRides is drop-dead simple.
RelayRides california car rentals works like this: From a web browser or smartphone, you log onto the RelayRides site and search for a car near you. The owner gets to approve the rental; there s a ratings california car rentals board where owners and renters keep each other honest. Car owners set prices individually, mostly around $10 per hour. The most common rental is let s-get-out-of-town-for-the-weekend, says RelayRides founder Shelby Clark. Rentals can be as long as three months, if the owner is willing, for instance temporarily posted on the other coast. You decide if you want a tiny Honda Fit, plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt, mainstream Chevrolet Malibu, or upscale Audi or BMW (more like $30 an hour), see a photo of the exact car, and click on the Reservation button.
california car rentals The rental takes about a minute to set up. Renters have already been pre-screened for valid licenses and excessive traffic violations (two speeding tickets or one monster speeding ticket and you re out, ditto a single DUI or vehicular manslaughter conviction). You re directed to the car, although in my case it was a matter of walking outside the Classic Car Club press conference in Manhattan california car rentals and seeing which Cadillac XTS or Chevrolet Volt in the line of parked cars was my rental. Press the Ready to Unlock button on your smartphone and within a minute the demo car automatically unlocks. The ignition key is hidden inside the car (you re told where), you fire up the car, and drive away.
Most of the car s built-in and OnStar functions are active, particularly emergency california car rentals crash notification. The owner can report the car stolen (to RelayRides, not OnStar) and OnStar can track the car or invoke vehicle slowdown if it s deemed california car rentals stolen, but the owner apparently can t track the car s ongoing whereabouts via OnStar Family Link, OnStar s premium service to insure you know where loved ones are at all times. There are gray areas such as whether OnStar california car rentals could track speed and rat out the renter if he went faster than 80 mph.
When you re done, you park the car near the pickup location, go back to the RelayRides phone app, and tap the End Reservation Lock button. The OnStar telematics system on GM cars handles unlock and lock, along with sending the car s exact location to your PC or smartphone, and to the owner when the reservation ends. Even a texting phone works with RelayRides after setting up the reservation california car rentals from a PC; you send or reply to a text indicating you re ready to unlock or lock. If the rental vehicle isn t OnStar-equipped, RelayRides installs a $500 black box (the owner pays about $100, Clark says, to show commitment to the process) that does the same GPS location and unlock/lock. It s possible to rent a car without the black box, but that means a person-to-person key handoff and possible discomfort for some parties ( his license is clean but how do I know he s not wearing an electronic ankle bracelet? ).
Six million GM cars, the ones built since 2005 with the digital version of OnStar, with active OnStar subscriptions, could be RelayRides california car rentals cars immediately, says OnStar VP of business development Nick Pudar, and another nine million GM cars are RelayRides-ready with OnStar installed but not currently active. That makes GM cars the biggest possible component of the RelayRides fleet. RelayRides and GM have a mutually exclusive relationship currently: No other automaker with on-board telematics can directly california car rentals link to RelayRides, and GM won t partner with any carsharing companies besides RelayRides. Currently then are thousands of cars in the RelayRides fleet, in 46 states. You can drive the cars into and out of Canada but you can t rent there. Drive into Mexico? california car rentals No way, Jose.
Part of the RelayRides schtick sorry, vision is making you love them for being human-scaled and eventually reducing the number of cars needed in urban areas. Cars spend most of their time parked. If entire neighborhoods converted to peer-to-peer ride sharing, Clark says, you d need only one car where there are a dozen now. That s based on research by UC Berkeley professor Susan Shaheen california car rentals . A car renter would save about $500 a month compared to owning and insuring a car. A car owner can make $250 a month renting out his or her car, some make two to three times that, and Clark says the Boston owner of a six-year-old Honda Civic worth $5,300 earned $4,600 in nine months. Of course, your earnings mileage may vary.
Is it good for the community and the environment? Yeah But I know I sure as hell wouldn t do this with my own car. What about maintenance costs, even just basic stuff like tires? When people california car rentals drive a rental, they usually drive it harder than if it were their own car, so brakes, suspension etc are going to wear out faster as well. Your relatively new car will be turned into a worn out old POS fast, and for a whole 250$ a month! That is if they don t just destroy it outright. Without a rental california car rentals company doing a once-over when it is turned back in, you could have broken parts underneath from someone taking a speed bump at 60mph/going offroad and you wouldn t even know untill later. Also, a 2006 civic is worth roughly double what they quote, but I guess yours might be worth that after the beating 100 strangers give it.. Finally, I know it touched on it in the article, but I would imagine (from dealing with insurance companies in the past) that anything related california car rentals to this crash-wise would turn into a hellish california car rentals nightmare once they get involved. california car rentals You would have 2-3 companies involved at a minimum.
There are enough checks and balances that this could work. In early stage at least, the sense of community is powerful. You bring the car back dirty, you get marked down on ratings. The owner overstates the condition of the car, he gets marked down. RelayRides stands behind the accident repairs. RR needs to go beyond $1M in liability insurance. They know it and need to get past the hemming and hawing stage and do the right thing.
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