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couple huge problems that come to mind immediately. 1) owner risk. you are letting a complete stranger rent your car for x days. You have no control over how g

couple huge problems that come to mind immediately. 1) owner risk. you are letting a complete stranger rent your car for x days. You have no control over how good of a driver they are or how many miles they will drive. as mentioned in other comments (and a fact that my dad, who owns a brand name car rental franchise CONSTANTLY harps about) is that people who rent cars treat them like crap. Rental cars lose value almost 3 times as fast as cars driven by their owners. 2) insurance complications. My current insurance doesn't even let my girlfriend drive my car, technically. If the person that flightcar rent my car to gets in to an accident, not only am I liable, but my insurance won't cover it. 3) uber/lyft is a much less risky method of using my personal vehicle for extra income, plus I maintain control of my car. Why take on that extra risk for such little return? doesn't make sense. I'd rather be an uber/lyft driver to make the extra $$. 4) return not worth the risk. article states $15-20 parking fees per day that would be avoided. lets say i'm gone 1 day, thats $20 cost. An uber from my place to the airport is currently $10 each way, so $20 bucks total. I can either park for 1 day or take an uber for the same cost. Anything longer than a 1 day trip would be dramatically cheaper taking the uber, so I don't park there. I'm not letting a stranger rent my car to save $20. thoughts?

boomzilla 12y ago
Another challenge I could see is the chicken and eggs cold start problem. Until there are enough people willing to rent their cars out, the supply would be minimal and no one would even consider this when flying. I can't see any easy way to bootstrap this marketplace. Uber could bootstrap their marketplace because there are a lot of repeated business in downtown, and even then it took a huge amount of capital to do that. Maybe it's Thursday late afternoon blue, but I am seeing less and less start ups from YC that really make me go "wow, what a neat idea to solve a problem that's been bothering me". Now all I am seeing is a lot of solutions going around looking for a problem.
- cjbprime 12y ago
  Today's actually FlightCar's two year anniversary of opening at an airport lot (SFO), and we're now open at ten airports nationwide, so the initial bootstrapping has long since happened.
cjbprime 12y ago
Hi, I work at FlightCar, some quick replies: 1) If the renter drives more than 100 miles per day, we'll charge them $0.45/mile overage and return almost all of that to the owner. So it's not entirely uncontrolled. 2) FlightCar insures the renters, if they aren't already primarily insured by e.g. a credit card they own. It doesn't come out of your insurance. 3-4) FlightCar also pays out per-mile driven on top of the free parking, which you seem to have missed, but I think it's fine and sensible that many people don't consider the risk worth the reward (especially if their car is new); of course, everyone said the same thing about Airbnb at first too.

boomzilla 12y ago

Another challenge I could see is the chicken and eggs cold start problem. Until there are enough people willing to rent their cars out, the supply would be minimal and no one would even consider this when flying. I can't see any easy way to bootstrap this marketplace. Uber could bootstrap their marketplace because there are a lot of repeated business in downtown, and even then it took a huge amount of capital to do that. Maybe it's Thursday late afternoon blue, but I am seeing less and less start ups from YC that really make me go "wow, what a neat idea to solve a problem that's been bothering me". Now all I am seeing is a lot of solutions going around looking for a problem.

cjbprime 12y ago
Today's actually FlightCar's two year anniversary of opening at an airport lot (SFO), and we're now open at ten airports nationwide, so the initial bootstrapping has long since happened.

cjbprime 12y ago

Hi, I work at FlightCar, some quick replies: 1) If the renter drives more than 100 miles per day, we'll charge them $0.45/mile overage and return almost all of that to the owner. So it's not entirely uncontrolled. 2) FlightCar insures the renters, if they aren't already primarily insured by e.g. a credit card they own. It doesn't come out of your insurance. 3-4) FlightCar also pays out per-mile driven on top of the free parking, which you seem to have missed, but I think it's fine and sensible that many people don't consider the risk worth the reward (especially if their car is new); of course, everyone said the same thing about Airbnb at first too.