GM’s partnership with RelayRides could give serious boost to peer-to-peer carsharing
Thursday, October 6th, 2011
GM announced yesterday that it has partnered up with San Francisco-based RelayRides, a pioneer in peer-to-peer carsharing. RelayRides is like a decentralized Zipcar. Instead of owning its own fleet of vehicles, it enables individual car owners to rent out their idle vehicles for short periods to other individuals in their community — for example, an apartment complex or subdivision.
RelayRides has created the online systems that allow for this peer-to-peer transaction to take place, and it supplies/installs the in-vehicle device that allows strangers who have booked a car through the system to gain access at their scheduled times. This model isn’t permitted in every jurisdiction, as changes in insurance regulations — or clarity — is often required first, but RelayRides is starting in San Francisco and Boston, and plans to expand as regulations permit and demand for the service builds. I recently wrote about peer-to-peer carsharing and the whole trend of collaborative consumption in a previous post.
The GM partnership is important for the following reason: GM’s six million OnStar customers can potentially participate in RelayRides (at least the ones in San Francisco and Boston for now) without having to install a special device. That’s because the OnStar service already allows for remote entry into vehicles, so GM is working with RelayRides to allow those renting another individual’s OnStar-equipped car to access the car remotely through their mobile phones. “The integration makes all eligible OnStar vehicles immediately ‘RelayRides ready’ without having to install additional hardware,” according to a GM press release.
“RelayRides has always worked toward providing the safest, most advanced, peer-to-peer carsharing marketplace, where neighbors can help out one another by making their frequently unused car available to those who live nearby,” said RelayRides Chief Executive Officer André Haddad. “With the new GM relationship, RelayRides can leverage the OnStar technology to make carsharing even more convenient, with nothing more than a mobile app. Carsharing has never been easier.”
Does this represent a significant boost to the fledgling peer-to-peer carshare model? I think so. GM’s announcement brings credibility to the concept, and I fully expect the momentum to continue. Peer-to-peer carsharing — or sharing of any physical asset, for that matter — isn’t an easy model to perfect. It’s not like sharing music or movies or other digital files. These are real objects that other people can damage, crash, stink up, mess up, and return late. Clearly, carsharing won’t be for everyone and those who do participate are going to have to be realistic about how their vehicle may be treated by others. But for a certain segment of the population — and I would argue it’s not a small segment — this could be a very exciting development.


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Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.