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I'll second nlh's comment. My relevant credentials: I've worked on the car rental side of a couple leading travel industry businesses. I know a lot about how it

I'll second nlh's comment. My relevant credentials: I've worked on the car rental side of a couple leading travel industry businesses. I know a lot about how it works behind the scenes. Plus I've been renting cars, as a consumer, for over 20 years. I think the traditional car rental business today pretty much Just Works (tm). It doesn't have any huge flaw. Or rather, what flaws it does have, I don't see how this startup's feature set is solving. I think the basic idea is exciting, and I wish them the best. But I think it's full of prickly complications that won't get magicaly solved by being able to throw up a sexy Rails website or by having an electronic widget in the vehicle. It doesn't really need this sort of technical solution, more of a people/legal solution. Their solution is orthogonal to the actual problem(s), is what I'm trying to say, if that makes any sense.

kroo 16y ago
But I think it's full of prickly complications that won't get magicaly solved by being able to throw up a sexy Rails website or by having an electronic widget in the vehicle. This is absolutely true, which is one thing that makes (working at) this company so interesting/challenging. On one front, without technology development, you can't scale without a lot of capital investment -- even the custom technology used by zipcar is cost prohibitive (around the $1000 price-point, and requires several hours of professional installation). While we support swapping keys with the renter, we don't want to open both parties up to the inconvenience and liability of handing your keys over to a total stranger. The carkit provides greater choice to the owner as to how they want to rent out their car (allowing them use a smartphone instead of the physical key), and empowers them to keep better track of how it is used when rented out. On the other, as you put it, technology doesn't solve all these prickly complications -- there are serious operations, customer support and business development problems that must be met in order to make this work. Insurance is a critical piece in the puzzle, and one that our team has been working on for a year and a half now. We are confident in our insurance partner and the custom policy we have worked together to create at this point -- and we will continue to work with our provider to ensure that we can continue to provide coverage as our company grows.

kroo 16y ago

But I think it's full of prickly complications that won't get magicaly solved by being able to throw up a sexy Rails website or by having an electronic widget in the vehicle. This is absolutely true, which is one thing that makes (working at) this company so interesting/challenging. On one front, without technology development, you can't scale without a lot of capital investment -- even the custom technology used by zipcar is cost prohibitive (around the $1000 price-point, and requires several hours of professional installation). While we support swapping keys with the renter, we don't want to open both parties up to the inconvenience and liability of handing your keys over to a total stranger. The carkit provides greater choice to the owner as to how they want to rent out their car (allowing them use a smartphone instead of the physical key), and empowers them to keep better track of how it is used when rented out. On the other, as you put it, technology doesn't solve all these prickly complications -- there are serious operations, customer support and business development problems that must be met in order to make this work. Insurance is a critical piece in the puzzle, and one that our team has been working on for a year and a half now. We are confident in our insurance partner and the custom policy we have worked together to create at this point -- and we will continue to work with our provider to ensure that we can continue to provide coverage as our company grows.