Uber and Lyft race way ahead of car-sharing services
Hailing a Lyft or Uber has become so normal those companies pretty much have become verbs, kind of like "googling." But no one is asking, "Wanna Getaround to dinner?" It's clear car-sharing hasn’t become as popular as ride-hailing, and it may stay that way.
Car-sharing, which involves renting someone else's car or borrowing a car from a fleet, has some major roadblocks. It's inherently difficult to get people who already have cars to take someone else's vehicle. For car-less folks, renting a car means driving yourself -- and parking, not drinking, staying focused, following traffic rules, and more.
With ride-hailing, even if you have a car, ordering a Lyft is a smaller, supplemental cost with fewer responsibilities. We'd rather a stranger drive us around than drive a stranger's car.
Cox Automotive, which owns Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, released its latest alternative car study Thursday. After surveying 1,250 Americans, it found ride-hailing use has increased 77 percent since its last survey back in 2015. Car-sharing only saw a 17 percent increase.
Getaround is one of the peer-to-peer car-sharing companies hoping to keep pushing through. It's now in 66 U.S. cities and recently raised $300 million in a funding round led by SoftBank, the same company betting big on Uber.
We'd rather a stranger drive us around than drive a stranger's car.
Getaround founder and CEO Sam Zaid said that he believes every car will be a shared car eventually. In the meantime he wants "to make it easier to share" or find a car when you need it.
Zaid acknowledged car-sharing is a "noisy" market with several players trying to rise to the top, including Zipcar, Turo, and Car2Go. Traditional car maker General Motors is even in the space with its car-sharing service, Maven. There's no one name that sticks out as the Uber of the car-sharing world yet.
Looking at the different car-sharing apps, monthly user numbers indicate growth and a crowded list of apps used for car-sharing. Turo had 1.7 million monthly active users, Car2Go (which rents out cars from a fleet) saw 759,000, and Getaround had 276,000. That's up 153 percent since May, based on an analysis from Apptopia.
A study from AlixPartners this year found car rentals clearly fall into a "leisure" activity, not an everyday option to get from place to place. And 35 percent of survey-takers said they replaced car rental services with Lyft and Uber rides -- not a good sign for car-sharing.
Turo CMO Andrew Mok said that ride-hailing and car-sharing services work side-by-side. Instead of getting people across town (like an Uber ride to the movies), Turo let's you borrow someone's car for a few days for a weekend getaway or business trip. You wouldn't road-trip in a Lyft.
"Folks will always use Uber and Lyft," Mok acknowledged. So Turo is targeting people looking to rent for longer periods of time.
This muddled ecosystem of car-sharing and ride-hailing is why HyreCar is focused on car rentals for the ride-sharing driver community. CEO Joe Furnari said that his company focuses on a more niche market as car-sharing starts to break into communities beyond the major metro areas. "There's still a lot of room to grow there," Furnari said.
Even so, car-sharing isn’t as widely accepted as ride-hailing. The study found that 75 percent of respondents consider ride-hailing services to be at least somewhat accessible, compared to 38 percent for car-sharing. Looks like the technology has a long road ahead of it.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
