11 ms·

Car-sharing service HiGear shuts down due to theft of 4 cars worth $400,000

152 points by tfe 15y ago

ryanmarsh 15y ago
Sadly not surprising.
- mobileed 15y ago
  totally agree. In fact, I never heard of this company before this story and the minute I saw the tag line for their business, I thought oh that's dumb! Sort of surprised they didn't see this problem beforehand.... CEO must be really stupid or thinks potential investors are really stupid...
DevX101 15y ago
I briefly thought about starting a business like this a couple years ago. During this thought exercise I came to the conclusion that an embedded GPS would be essential to maintain security. Another idea would be making your social network your security system, by only allowing rentals to people within two degrees of separation on a social networking site.
- dmix 15y ago
  > by only allowing rentals to people within two degrees of separation on a social networking site Thereby increasing the chicken and egg problem ten fold
  - jerf 15y ago
    Not only that; what value is the middle man bringing in that situation, vs. "Hey, Bob, can I borrow your car for a while? Here's some cash."? Non-zero? Sure, but probably not enough to capture and survive on.
- slug 15y ago
  GPS would be useless for a determined thief, be it by simply jamming the GPS/cell signal or a RF sniffer to locate the (cellphone/whatnot) transmitter in the car and destroy it. From what I see, your social network sanction would be the only feasible option.
  - dennisgorelik 15y ago
    You probably meant "expert thief". Somebody who had 10000+ hours of expertise. Somebody who risked to get caught while gaining that expertise. There are not so many real expert thieves. That's why extended security measures do work: less experienced majority of thieves is caught outright, and more experienced minority of thieves is eventually caught due to unforeseen circumstances (unexpected witness, unexpected new security measure, etc.). For example, GPS transmitter can stay silent until it gets "You are stolen" signal. There could be more than one transmitter in a car. It may get activated only when on the move (and not in a garage) etc.
    - chrischen 15y ago
      Yea but it only takes one expert thief to tell his minions what to do.
      - ComputerGuru 15y ago
        You are overestimating the ability of people to listen to directions and think and adapt them for themselves. If it were that easy, none of us here would be complaining about hiring incompetent people :)
    - slug 15y ago
      "For example, GPS transmitter can stay silent until it gets "You are stolen" signal." That's true, but most electronic circuits emit stray radiation, switching or crystal references. Not only that, the hypothetical receiver needed for your stolen signal has a least a local oscillator with a nice and probably almost on clean signal. (I think in UK they used something like this to track people that didn't pay their TV tax, or even SS tracking WWII French resistance, but it might be an urban legend, although feasible, since stray LO frequency can propagate to the antenna and is sometimes used to check correct mixer/filter tuning). Or even more simple, get a big truck with metal cage for RF shielding and disassemble the car for parts, which is more profitable. They just need to get rid of serial numbers and such. I agree about the expert thief, but considering that [internet] criminal gangs go to the trouble of hiring experts to do the (hard) technical part, I would guess that gangs interested in stealing expensive cars would have no problem finding unscrupulous people to help them disable any security measure. Even the car share company devises a security measure, what stops someone from registering into the service with fake ID and knowing all about it to neutralize it?
asanwal 15y ago
I was surprised by the founder spending time in his letter to users talking positively about other players in the space (RelayRides, GetAround) and why their car sharing models should still work. He didn't have to do this, but it struck me as a nice and unexpected gesture.
- ww520 15y ago
  It's nice of him. The Valley or startup scene is a small world. If his company doesn't work out, he/they can always work for the others.
- usaar333 15y ago
  I've been considering renting my car out on those services (absolutely love the idea) and I do wonder what impact this will have on those two. There are some high-end cars on GetAround (I've seen at least an M3) and I imagine that people kicked out of HiGear may move to them.. creating the exact same problem.
m0nastic 15y ago
That's sad to hear, but I think he's right to realize that it's going to be really hard to deal with losses when the auto theft community gets wind of their business. I am always amazed by the efficiency and technological prowess that the kids I grew up with who steal cars apply to their trade (even if I wish they were involved in a better trade). One kid I grew up with now has a ring of six guys working for him, paying good benefits and matching retirement accounts, where all they do are steal Honda Civics. Just that model. I swear he's implemented Kaizen into his workflow.
- smhinsey 15y ago
  Are you joking about the matching contributions to a retirement account part? If not I would be really curious to see how that works in that context. Not that I'm expecting a textbook on the subject or anything.
  - m0nastic 15y ago
    No, I'm dead serious. Colin (the aforementioned kid I grew up with) figured it was easier to attract good talent and keep them happy if he treated his operation like a professional job. So, he employs his team through an auto-repair shop, where they're full-time employees with full benefits and he sets them up with a 401k (that he matches up to some percentage of, I don't know the number). That's pretty much unheard of among actual mechanics, never mind car thieves. And he gets to cherry-pick his team, and they like the stability and "legitimate"-ness of the operation. He's been doing it for a while, so his numbers must make it a good decision financially (he has elaborate spreadsheets of every facet of his business). The most "boss" I ever got to look to impress a girl was in college when a friend of mine went out to Boston on a Friday and ended up at the end of the night having her car stolen. She calls me all upset, and I think, "Maybe I can see if Colin can get her car back." So I call her an hour later and let her know that if she goes to a specific T-station parking lot, her car will be there. She calls me later and lets me know that, it is, indeed there, and there's a case of beer in the passenger seat with a note saying "Sorry". Nerdy, adolescent me felt like a puffer fish that had puffed itself up.
po 15y ago
How can Techcrunch say "the group stole four cars totaling $400,000" and then immediately print a letter from the company saying "The total value of these cars was around $300,000"? Even though in this case it's ok if you read the letter, it is the kind of thing that makes me feel like I shouldn't rely on Techcrunch's reporting. It's really not a big deal but how did that happen? Why are the numbers different?
- lukejduncan 15y ago
  Tech reporting itself is pretty bad. TechCrunch, Business Insider, etc are essentially tabloids.
- zacharytamas 15y ago
  I've noticed this too. There have been several cases in the past few months where when reading TechCrunch I was like "Wait, what?".
  - protomyth 15y ago
    The Red vs Arri lawsuit story they ran felt that way. It looked like it was cribbed off the Reuters report. It struck me like the author didn't actually read the papers filed in the lawsuit. The biggest issue was the lack of reporting on the accusation that Arri sabotaged a Red One on the set of a movie. The original report was written before court papers were available (I think), but the TechCrunch story was posted well after court papers were available. It just seems like they are getting sloppy nd not checking things.
    - zacharytamas 15y ago
      I'm sure there's pressure to put out articles as fast as possible verses the old days of publishing where a journalist might have weeks to work on their piece. With publishing on the web so easy these days readers tend to expect higher publishing frequency, but I'm sure we can't be the only ones who would gladly trade quantity for quality.
jackowayed 15y ago
I felt worse for these guys until I read to the end of the letter and found out about the "HiGear girls". It's not quite as bad as I thought because they don't seem to "rent out" these models like they do cars; I guess it was just a publicity thing. But still, having revealing pictures and even stats (measurements) of the women is pretty much the definition of objectification. FOLLOWUP (responding to comments): I'm not concerned about the women in the pictures. They freely chose it, and made enough money to make it worth it to them. But things that reinforce the societal ideal that women's value comes from being conventionally attractive is much more deeply damaging than most people realize. It leads to the body image issues that the majority of young women grapple with. Anything that makes it seem like numbers define how attractive you are is especially bad, because it makes it harder for people to accept their own non-ideal bodies as beautiful. It encourages young women to spend vast amounts of their free time learning about and working on being attractive rather than, say, tinkering with computers. To some extent, it leads to income inequality between men and women (Girls grow up with the message that pleasing men, by being attractive among other ways, is good, so they tend to up more passive in many situations. This makes them less willing to negotiate for salary, less willing to go out of their way to take credit for their work, etc. It also leads to other bad things like being less willing to say no to sex.) I like seeing racy pictures of girls as much as the next guy, but displays of women like this, especially right next to and in the same format as rental listings, encourages societal ideals that are at the root of most of the gender-related problems in our society.
- packetslave 15y ago
  "having revealing pictures and even stats (measurements) of the women is pretty much the definition of objectification." I imagine if the women in question didn't want to be objectified, they were free to not accept the money.
  - yanowitz 15y ago
    (Three replies essentially all said the same thing. I'll respond to this one.) Enslavement should not be the standard by which we assess the effect of such actions. Under capitalism, we should expect to see people trading their labor (or image) for money. The more interesting questions include: why is this marketing pursued? How does it fit into a tapestry of cultural "norms" that objectify and demean women? What effect does it have on all the people (men and women, boys and girls) who "consume" it? The origins and continued existence of "car chicks", "beer girls", and "booth babes" has nothing to do with empowering women by creating new labor niches. It is a reflection and extension of a sexist society and culture.
bane 15y ago
A surprisingly fragile business model. I've wondered how Zipcar et al. haven't been killed by this? Or have they just done a better job at figuring theft into their model as a cost?
- rdouble 15y ago
  Not many car thieves want to steal a Scion xB with a giant ZipCar logo on the side.
  - bane 15y ago
    My understanding is (and I could be completely wrong in this) is that most low end cars are stolen for the parts, not the car.
    - jonknee 15y ago
      Zipcar's all have remote kill functionality and the ignition is tied to the RFID Zipcard. It's likely not worth the effort to defeat the tech to get the end result. It would be for a $100k exotic.
- rm445 15y ago
  A surprisingly fragile company. There are plenty of thriving car hire companies (and yes, you can hire high-end vehicles).
- troll24601 15y ago
  Because ZipCar owns the cars, they're able to take stronger precautions to track and to prevent theft. HiGear's model opened a wide range of attacks against the customer cars, some of them hard to tie to HiGear. I wouldn't be surprised if the total theft from HiGear is more than 4 cars, but that some of the other thefts either haven't happened yet, or weren't easily tied to the HiGear service.
signa11 15y ago
a silly question, but isn't there any insurance on the said cars ? if the cars are lost/stolen etc. and they do have insurance, let the insurance company deal with law-enforcement or other 'out-of-band' mechanisms (too many hollywood movies) to retrieve the stolen property...
- sounds 15y ago
  The insurance premiums will go up. The problem is that the cars are owned not by HiGear but by wealthy clients who want to rent out their car (instead of having it sit in a garage). The cars have sentimental value. They may be customized and difficult/impossible to replace. I suppose there are already businesses that don't use a Peer-to-Peer model. If it's just a matter of arranging rentals in a more traditional model, and only for wealthy customers, I don't even have to google -- it's been done before.
  - kd1220 15y ago
    It's been done before, but I think the result the same. I met with a guy who was a co-owner of a luxury car rental service in South Florida. He wanted help with implementing a tracking system, but I passed up the job. He started the company back in late 2008, and it had gone under some time early in 2011. I saw him again recently and asked why the business went bust. To paraphrase him: "High overhead and picky customers." Turns out people who rent exotic cars want the newest and latest cars, not older models (unless it's vintage/classics they're looking for, but that's another beast). So you have to keep your stable fresh. Trying to offload exotics is a pain, because there's a specific type of person who will buy a used exotic: a nouveau rich man with more pride than financial management skills. The kicker was when he told me that if he ever decides to launder money, he'll start another luxury rental place, because it would be perfect for that.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
vaksel 15y ago
the problem seems to be with verification not the business model itself. so they should just tweak it to make it work...there are hundreds of supercar rental companies, so just copy them. .
mrlinx 15y ago
The title had me thinking 400,000 per car. The article corrected me to 400,000 total. The founder email corrected me further to 300,000 total.
notatoad 15y ago
Why does a car sharing service that can't afford a $400k loss have 4 $100k cars.
- nano81 15y ago
  Misses the point. It's not the $400k loss that put them out of business, it's the realization that this will be an ongoing issue they will have to deal with as organized criminals target them, and they don't have a good solution. Their model is highly vulnerable, and they don't have an answer.
- ljf 15y ago
  They don't and didn't own the cars they rented.
xaxa2000 15y ago
another dumb vc sponsored idea fails, 290120 left...
shin_lao 15y ago
Why don't they require the peers to provide them with a bank account and then check up with the bank? It would require setting up a false bank account with enough money. That's harder than false ID and stolen credit card. If the above isn't enough, add an income statement. Then you get billed for how much you use the car.
jermaink 15y ago
The services should act like Airbnb did when they experienced 'bad user behaviour'. Adding security/verification/security features (2nd degree FB connections, Twitter, camera shot, webcam shot...) and marketing them as a new core competency of the service. They did a bad press turnaround in less than 3 weeks.
sarbogast 15y ago
For me, their main problem is that they relied on traditional bank accounts and government-certified IDs to check identities. And we all know those ID's are easy to fake. Collaborative consumption needs a stronger identity, certification and reputation platform, one that does not isolate reputation profiles into silos and doesn't rely on unscalable certification authorities. And that's exactly what we are working on with peertru.st So if you are interested in this, let us know. This is the first pillar after all: http://blog.kodesk.com/2011/11/01/the-three-pillars-of-collaborative-consumption/ http://blog.kodesk.com/2011/11/01/the-three-pillars-of-colla...
16s 15y ago
They should remain in business, but add a fingerprint requirement. This would stop criminals from pretending to be law-abiding citizens. Documents and identities are easy to steal or forge, but in-person fingerprints that match those documents are much more difficult to forge. Edit: This is why background checks without fingerprints are not very meaningful. The check may be on a clean identity, not the criminal.
- shabble 15y ago
  The costs of running a manned fingerprinting system would be pretty heavy and hard to scale, I imagine, not to mention inconvenient for users. Without some skilled operator attending closely, there are all manner of ways to fake fingerprints on both electronic and traditional ink systems. If it's going to net you a $100k car, the incentive is probably sufficient that someone would do it.

152 points by tfe 15y ago

ryanmarsh 15y ago

Sadly not surprising.

mobileed 15y ago
totally agree. In fact, I never heard of this company before this story and the minute I saw the tag line for their business, I thought oh that's dumb! Sort of surprised they didn't see this problem beforehand.... CEO must be really stupid or thinks potential investors are really stupid...

DevX101 15y ago

I briefly thought about starting a business like this a couple years ago. During this thought exercise I came to the conclusion that an embedded GPS would be essential to maintain security. Another idea would be making your social network your security system, by only allowing rentals to people within two degrees of separation on a social networking site.

dmix 15y ago
> by only allowing rentals to people within two degrees of separation on a social networking site Thereby increasing the chicken and egg problem ten fold
- jerf 15y ago
  Not only that; what value is the middle man bringing in that situation, vs. "Hey, Bob, can I borrow your car for a while? Here's some cash."? Non-zero? Sure, but probably not enough to capture and survive on.
slug 15y ago
GPS would be useless for a determined thief, be it by simply jamming the GPS/cell signal or a RF sniffer to locate the (cellphone/whatnot) transmitter in the car and destroy it. From what I see, your social network sanction would be the only feasible option.
- dennisgorelik 15y ago
  You probably meant "expert thief". Somebody who had 10000+ hours of expertise. Somebody who risked to get caught while gaining that expertise. There are not so many real expert thieves. That's why extended security measures do work: less experienced majority of thieves is caught outright, and more experienced minority of thieves is eventually caught due to unforeseen circumstances (unexpected witness, unexpected new security measure, etc.). For example, GPS transmitter can stay silent until it gets "You are stolen" signal. There could be more than one transmitter in a car. It may get activated only when on the move (and not in a garage) etc.
  - chrischen 15y ago
    Yea but it only takes one expert thief to tell his minions what to do.
    - ComputerGuru 15y ago
      You are overestimating the ability of people to listen to directions and think and adapt them for themselves. If it were that easy, none of us here would be complaining about hiring incompetent people :)
  - slug 15y ago
    "For example, GPS transmitter can stay silent until it gets "You are stolen" signal." That's true, but most electronic circuits emit stray radiation, switching or crystal references. Not only that, the hypothetical receiver needed for your stolen signal has a least a local oscillator with a nice and probably almost on clean signal. (I think in UK they used something like this to track people that didn't pay their TV tax, or even SS tracking WWII French resistance, but it might be an urban legend, although feasible, since stray LO frequency can propagate to the antenna and is sometimes used to check correct mixer/filter tuning). Or even more simple, get a big truck with metal cage for RF shielding and disassemble the car for parts, which is more profitable. They just need to get rid of serial numbers and such. I agree about the expert thief, but considering that [internet] criminal gangs go to the trouble of hiring experts to do the (hard) technical part, I would guess that gangs interested in stealing expensive cars would have no problem finding unscrupulous people to help them disable any security measure. Even the car share company devises a security measure, what stops someone from registering into the service with fake ID and knowing all about it to neutralize it?

asanwal 15y ago

I was surprised by the founder spending time in his letter to users talking positively about other players in the space (RelayRides, GetAround) and why their car sharing models should still work. He didn't have to do this, but it struck me as a nice and unexpected gesture.

ww520 15y ago
It's nice of him. The Valley or startup scene is a small world. If his company doesn't work out, he/they can always work for the others.
usaar333 15y ago
I've been considering renting my car out on those services (absolutely love the idea) and I do wonder what impact this will have on those two. There are some high-end cars on GetAround (I've seen at least an M3) and I imagine that people kicked out of HiGear may move to them.. creating the exact same problem.

m0nastic 15y ago

That's sad to hear, but I think he's right to realize that it's going to be really hard to deal with losses when the auto theft community gets wind of their business. I am always amazed by the efficiency and technological prowess that the kids I grew up with who steal cars apply to their trade (even if I wish they were involved in a better trade). One kid I grew up with now has a ring of six guys working for him, paying good benefits and matching retirement accounts, where all they do are steal Honda Civics. Just that model. I swear he's implemented Kaizen into his workflow.

smhinsey 15y ago
Are you joking about the matching contributions to a retirement account part? If not I would be really curious to see how that works in that context. Not that I'm expecting a textbook on the subject or anything.
- m0nastic 15y ago
  No, I'm dead serious. Colin (the aforementioned kid I grew up with) figured it was easier to attract good talent and keep them happy if he treated his operation like a professional job. So, he employs his team through an auto-repair shop, where they're full-time employees with full benefits and he sets them up with a 401k (that he matches up to some percentage of, I don't know the number). That's pretty much unheard of among actual mechanics, never mind car thieves. And he gets to cherry-pick his team, and they like the stability and "legitimate"-ness of the operation. He's been doing it for a while, so his numbers must make it a good decision financially (he has elaborate spreadsheets of every facet of his business). The most "boss" I ever got to look to impress a girl was in college when a friend of mine went out to Boston on a Friday and ended up at the end of the night having her car stolen. She calls me all upset, and I think, "Maybe I can see if Colin can get her car back." So I call her an hour later and let her know that if she goes to a specific T-station parking lot, her car will be there. She calls me later and lets me know that, it is, indeed there, and there's a case of beer in the passenger seat with a note saying "Sorry". Nerdy, adolescent me felt like a puffer fish that had puffed itself up.

po 15y ago

How can Techcrunch say "the group stole four cars totaling $400,000" and then immediately print a letter from the company saying "The total value of these cars was around $300,000"? Even though in this case it's ok if you read the letter, it is the kind of thing that makes me feel like I shouldn't rely on Techcrunch's reporting. It's really not a big deal but how did that happen? Why are the numbers different?

lukejduncan 15y ago
Tech reporting itself is pretty bad. TechCrunch, Business Insider, etc are essentially tabloids.
zacharytamas 15y ago
I've noticed this too. There have been several cases in the past few months where when reading TechCrunch I was like "Wait, what?".
- protomyth 15y ago
  The Red vs Arri lawsuit story they ran felt that way. It looked like it was cribbed off the Reuters report. It struck me like the author didn't actually read the papers filed in the lawsuit. The biggest issue was the lack of reporting on the accusation that Arri sabotaged a Red One on the set of a movie. The original report was written before court papers were available (I think), but the TechCrunch story was posted well after court papers were available. It just seems like they are getting sloppy nd not checking things.
  - zacharytamas 15y ago
    I'm sure there's pressure to put out articles as fast as possible verses the old days of publishing where a journalist might have weeks to work on their piece. With publishing on the web so easy these days readers tend to expect higher publishing frequency, but I'm sure we can't be the only ones who would gladly trade quantity for quality.

jackowayed 15y ago

I felt worse for these guys until I read to the end of the letter and found out about the "HiGear girls". It's not quite as bad as I thought because they don't seem to "rent out" these models like they do cars; I guess it was just a publicity thing. But still, having revealing pictures and even stats (measurements) of the women is pretty much the definition of objectification. FOLLOWUP (responding to comments): I'm not concerned about the women in the pictures. They freely chose it, and made enough money to make it worth it to them. But things that reinforce the societal ideal that women's value comes from being conventionally attractive is much more deeply damaging than most people realize. It leads to the body image issues that the majority of young women grapple with. Anything that makes it seem like numbers define how attractive you are is especially bad, because it makes it harder for people to accept their own non-ideal bodies as beautiful. It encourages young women to spend vast amounts of their free time learning about and working on being attractive rather than, say, tinkering with computers. To some extent, it leads to income inequality between men and women (Girls grow up with the message that pleasing men, by being attractive among other ways, is good, so they tend to up more passive in many situations. This makes them less willing to negotiate for salary, less willing to go out of their way to take credit for their work, etc. It also leads to other bad things like being less willing to say no to sex.) I like seeing racy pictures of girls as much as the next guy, but displays of women like this, especially right next to and in the same format as rental listings, encourages societal ideals that are at the root of most of the gender-related problems in our society.

packetslave 15y ago
"having revealing pictures and even stats (measurements) of the women is pretty much the definition of objectification." I imagine if the women in question didn't want to be objectified, they were free to not accept the money.
- yanowitz 15y ago
  (Three replies essentially all said the same thing. I'll respond to this one.) Enslavement should not be the standard by which we assess the effect of such actions. Under capitalism, we should expect to see people trading their labor (or image) for money. The more interesting questions include: why is this marketing pursued? How does it fit into a tapestry of cultural "norms" that objectify and demean women? What effect does it have on all the people (men and women, boys and girls) who "consume" it? The origins and continued existence of "car chicks", "beer girls", and "booth babes" has nothing to do with empowering women by creating new labor niches. It is a reflection and extension of a sexist society and culture.

bane 15y ago

A surprisingly fragile business model. I've wondered how Zipcar et al. haven't been killed by this? Or have they just done a better job at figuring theft into their model as a cost?

rdouble 15y ago
Not many car thieves want to steal a Scion xB with a giant ZipCar logo on the side.
- bane 15y ago
  My understanding is (and I could be completely wrong in this) is that most low end cars are stolen for the parts, not the car.
  - jonknee 15y ago
    Zipcar's all have remote kill functionality and the ignition is tied to the RFID Zipcard. It's likely not worth the effort to defeat the tech to get the end result. It would be for a $100k exotic.
rm445 15y ago
A surprisingly fragile company. There are plenty of thriving car hire companies (and yes, you can hire high-end vehicles).
troll24601 15y ago
Because ZipCar owns the cars, they're able to take stronger precautions to track and to prevent theft. HiGear's model opened a wide range of attacks against the customer cars, some of them hard to tie to HiGear. I wouldn't be surprised if the total theft from HiGear is more than 4 cars, but that some of the other thefts either haven't happened yet, or weren't easily tied to the HiGear service.

signa11 15y ago

a silly question, but isn't there any insurance on the said cars ? if the cars are lost/stolen etc. and they do have insurance, let the insurance company deal with law-enforcement or other 'out-of-band' mechanisms (too many hollywood movies) to retrieve the stolen property...

sounds 15y ago
The insurance premiums will go up. The problem is that the cars are owned not by HiGear but by wealthy clients who want to rent out their car (instead of having it sit in a garage). The cars have sentimental value. They may be customized and difficult/impossible to replace. I suppose there are already businesses that don't use a Peer-to-Peer model. If it's just a matter of arranging rentals in a more traditional model, and only for wealthy customers, I don't even have to google -- it's been done before.
- kd1220 15y ago
  It's been done before, but I think the result the same. I met with a guy who was a co-owner of a luxury car rental service in South Florida. He wanted help with implementing a tracking system, but I passed up the job. He started the company back in late 2008, and it had gone under some time early in 2011. I saw him again recently and asked why the business went bust. To paraphrase him: "High overhead and picky customers." Turns out people who rent exotic cars want the newest and latest cars, not older models (unless it's vintage/classics they're looking for, but that's another beast). So you have to keep your stable fresh. Trying to offload exotics is a pain, because there's a specific type of person who will buy a used exotic: a nouveau rich man with more pride than financial management skills. The kicker was when he told me that if he ever decides to launder money, he'll start another luxury rental place, because it would be perfect for that.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

vaksel 15y ago

the problem seems to be with verification not the business model itself. so they should just tweak it to make it work...there are hundreds of supercar rental companies, so just copy them. .

mrlinx 15y ago

The title had me thinking 400,000 per car. The article corrected me to 400,000 total. The founder email corrected me further to 300,000 total.

notatoad 15y ago

Why does a car sharing service that can't afford a $400k loss have 4 $100k cars.

nano81 15y ago
Misses the point. It's not the $400k loss that put them out of business, it's the realization that this will be an ongoing issue they will have to deal with as organized criminals target them, and they don't have a good solution. Their model is highly vulnerable, and they don't have an answer.
ljf 15y ago
They don't and didn't own the cars they rented.

xaxa2000 15y ago

another dumb vc sponsored idea fails, 290120 left...

shin_lao 15y ago

Why don't they require the peers to provide them with a bank account and then check up with the bank? It would require setting up a false bank account with enough money. That's harder than false ID and stolen credit card. If the above isn't enough, add an income statement. Then you get billed for how much you use the car.

jermaink 15y ago

The services should act like Airbnb did when they experienced 'bad user behaviour'. Adding security/verification/security features (2nd degree FB connections, Twitter, camera shot, webcam shot...) and marketing them as a new core competency of the service. They did a bad press turnaround in less than 3 weeks.

sarbogast 15y ago

For me, their main problem is that they relied on traditional bank accounts and government-certified IDs to check identities. And we all know those ID's are easy to fake. Collaborative consumption needs a stronger identity, certification and reputation platform, one that does not isolate reputation profiles into silos and doesn't rely on unscalable certification authorities. And that's exactly what we are working on with peertru.st So if you are interested in this, let us know. This is the first pillar after all: http://blog.kodesk.com/2011/11/01/the-three-pillars-of-collaborative-consumption/ http://blog.kodesk.com/2011/11/01/the-three-pillars-of-colla...

16s 15y ago

They should remain in business, but add a fingerprint requirement. This would stop criminals from pretending to be law-abiding citizens. Documents and identities are easy to steal or forge, but in-person fingerprints that match those documents are much more difficult to forge. Edit: This is why background checks without fingerprints are not very meaningful. The check may be on a clean identity, not the criminal.

shabble 15y ago
The costs of running a manned fingerprinting system would be pretty heavy and hard to scale, I imagine, not to mention inconvenient for users. Without some skilled operator attending closely, there are all manner of ways to fake fingerprints on both electronic and traditional ink systems. If it's going to net you a $100k car, the incentive is probably sufficient that someone would do it.