. “You’re buying the car for more, you’re fueling it for more, there’s more demand—it’s very logical for prices to increase,” Allinson says.
Xavier Collins, vice president of Truo, says that convenience is another benefit of going peer-to-peer, with many people able to find a car a short walk away rather than at a rental lot on the edge of town. That convenience is fine if you’re already in a city, but what about people flying in for a holiday? HiyaCar currently focuses on local renters rather than tourists, saying support for vacationers will hopefully be added this year, but the other two companies do target fliers.
Apps like Truo, Getaround, and HiyaCar have the same benefit as Airbnb and other so-called sharing-economy platforms: They don’t own anything. “The cars on the platforms don’t belong to the company,” says Even Heggernes, a vice president at Getaround Europe. “The shortage of cars occurring everywhere is not something that really affects us.”
HiyaCar has one solution to the continued lack of supply: Top up the system with its own vehicles. With 150,000 registered users, HiyaCar has just 2,000 cars, of which 350 are part of its car club system. They aren’t owned by HiyaCar, but by carmakers, who are guaranteed a minimum income, and the aim is to fill in cars where there isn’t yet enough supply, what the company calls the “cold-start problem.