When San Francisco's Getaround was looking to expand to the East Coast earlier this year, the startup, which enables people to more easily share their cars with each other, was looking for a city where owning a car is expensive and fraught with especially severe hassles. No surprise here: The startup landed in Washington, D.C.
Getaround joins the longer-running RelayRides, another peer-to-peer car-sharing company, in offering its service in D.C. After RelayRides launched in the District, the city rapidly shot to near the top of the company's busiest cities.
P2P car-sharing in some ways are a natural evolution from models like Zipcar and Car2Go, which use their own fleets of cars. They also are probably more appropriate bearers of the "sharing economy" label—than say, Uber or Lyft—since their models actually involve people sharing with each other. (For money, of course.)
Part of why Getaround chose D.C. has to do with its similarities to San Francisco. The population of young professionals that isn't interested in owning cars—but still wants them on occasion—matches up in both cities, said Getaround co-founder Jessica Scorpio, who's been visiting D.C. this week
People in D.C. and San Francisco also share an interest in seeing how technology can improve the car-rental system, Scorpio said. Getaround's integration of tech into its system comes at almost every level, with LoJack-style tracking of cars, the ability to prevent the car from starting without proper permission and the ability to join without any kind of membership all appeal to the urban millennial sensibility, Scorpio said. The company advertises its cars at rates starting at $5 an hour.
So far, a bit over 100 cars in the area are listed on Getaround, and Scorpio said demand for those vehicles has outstripped the supply; a main goal of her visit has been to increase the number of car owners joining up with the service.
"We're laser-focused on signing up more people and getting more inventory," Scorpio said. "We're scaling at a rate where we're ready to handle any situation."
One way Getaround hopes to expand its inventory is through partnerships with car manufacturers and dealers. Ford Motor Company announced in June that D.C. would be one of the cities where it would run a pilot program to enable people to lower the cost of their monthly car payments by allowing their cars to be listed for sharing on the platform. Getaround also has a similar deal with Audi Arlington.
Getaround also guarantees that listing a car on its platform will bring in at least $5,000 in 12 months, which could definitely be a lure to even more of a variety of car owners. Even now it's not that it's all Audis and Fords on the platform. Scorpio touted the two Tesla cars available on the D.C. platform as emblematic of the kind of customers her company is looking for.
"Every car should be sharable."
RelayRides has been operating in the D.C. area since 2012. And while Getaround and RelayRides share some similarities, Scorpio contends that they have a different market focus—with Getaround being for on-demand, shorter-term rentals than RelayRides. RelayRides' system does offer more for multi-day rentals than Getaround, and the company has made deals with many major airports to make it easier for people flying out to rent their cars out on RelayRides days or weeks at a time. And Ford isn't alone in looking to partner with a car-sharing startup partner. General Motors made a deal with RelayRides back in 2012 offering similar financial benefits to people buying cars.
For all car-sharing companies, though, the real competitor is private car ownership, Scorpio said. To compete with that rival, Getaround has a staff of 10 in D.C. out of about 100 total employees, and is looking to hire more soon, Scorpio said. She's optimistic that she will be able to convince plenty of people in D.C. that Getaround is the wave of the future once they get a taste of what it's like.
"Every car should be sharable," Scorpio said. "And we're trying to set a gold standard for car-sharing."
