There's no fundamental reason a zipcar - profit should be more expensive than a personal car. After all, if it's an equivalent car, you'd expect equivalent purc

There's no fundamental reason a zipcar - profit should be more expensive than a personal car. After all, if it's an equivalent car, you'd expect equivalent purchase cost, financing costs, insurance, taxes, fuel etc. The only difference is that Zipcar has a much stronger market position than an individual consumer, and thus can get better contracts & economies of scale for things like purchasing, financing, maintenance and insurance. And there's no reason to think profits are a very significant part of the pricing. It's a competitive market and Zipcar has never turned a profit in the past 20 years. There's overhead both for Zipcar and for consumers, e.g. to arrange for repairs on cars. Consumers are just doing 'unpaid labour' by arranging a car to get repairs for example and pay in 'opportunity costs', while Zipcar will pay staff to arrange such repairs, and charge the customer ultimately to pay their staff. But economically there's no difference, opportunity costs are still costs. And again, I'd expect Zipcar to get economies of scale, dedicated professionals working with optimised processes and tightly negotiated contracts on the overhead, to do better than an average joe having to arrange the same repairs. So while I won't argue the $240 bill you referenced, or calculate exactly the equivalent costs of a personal car, I hope you'd agree there's no fundamental reason equivalent use of a car via a sharing service should be more expensive. I do hope you agree that it should be as cheap, or cheaper for two reasons. One the economies of scale & professional approach to car ownership, being more efficient. But two, that some of the costs (like manufacturing the car) don't scale with usage, and thus become way cheaper when spread over multiple users. If you only use a car 1 out of 10 days, there's no way I can see how a personal car can get close to as cheap as a shared car. So apart from personal convenience & psychology around personal ownership, I think car sharing wins as an economic model long-term. Just like we share airplanes, hotels etc. Now convenience wins because there's not a car available everywhere and always. But as soon as every car has self-driving tech, given the amount of cars I see around me in a city that are just sitting there, I think in urban centres car sharing will become the norm. In less dense places personal cars will likely remain.