GetAround: An Airbnb For Cars

It’s not often that Chris Sacca, founder of Lowercase Capital has such a public aha moment on stage, but new startup GetAround elicited just this reaction from him after delivering a highly successful presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt’s second day in New York City. GetAround lets you rent your neighbor’s car and solves several gaps in the market:

• On average, cars are driven only 8% of the time. GetAround now lets car owners earn money safely during the downtimes.
• Cars on the road typically have open inventory i.e. empty seats, which is not only an inefficient use of resources but is also detrimental to the environment. A P2P car-sharing network reduces a car owner’s carbon footprint by 40%.
• Renting a car can be time consuming and painful. But not any more if you’re a smartphone owner and decide to take GetAround’s app for a drive.

GetAround rentals include insurance for liability, collision, property damage, and uninsured motorists. It also gets around the tricky question of driving ability by pre-screening drivers and allowing both the renter and the buyer to rate each other after each transaction. For those VCs like Chris Sacca who passed on investing in Airbnb, a YCombinator breakout P2P network for vacation rentals, this could be another chance to invest in a new crop of P2P startups. While the GetAround app clearly needs some more work and can be unstable, it is a great idea and sure to get interest from investors.

Other notable startups in the first wave of P2P networks have included Craigslist, Angel List, Bump and Square.

GetAround

TechCrunch Disrupt

Originally published on Seedwalker

image by susan catherine