Rent your neighbour's car

SADLY WHIPCAR HAS NOW CLOSED

If you own a car that spends days at a time outside your home without moving, is it time to consider offering it for rent to those living nearby and slash your motoring bills? Or alternatively, you could sell your car and use your neighbour's instead, for a fee.

Faced with ever rising bills, Londoners have been using online service Whipcar, that is promoting car sharing in a whole new way.

So how does it work? To hire a neighbour's car users simply log on and input their postcode, and up pops a map showing cars available nearby, and the hourly and daily price. You state the dates and times you want the car and it is then up to the owner to decide whether it's convenient.

Entering my mid-Ladder postcode, I came up with fourteen possibilties nearby, from a Mercedes C class at £120 per day to a Peugot 207 at £22 per day.

Those hiring agree to pay the advertised charge, plus a £3 booking fee to WhipCar. The comprehensive insurance covering the rental period is due on top. This will vary according to car, driver's age, and the duration, but is typically £5-£6 a day. You pay for the petrol you use. You have to be aged 21-70 and have held a full licence for at least a year, with no more than two accidents in the past three years. This is all checked before you are accepted. You agree with the owner how and when, and off you go.

While the car is being hired out it is comprehensively covered by WhipCar's own insurance policy – so if the car is written of by a hirer it will not affect the owner's insurance policy, and raise premiums as a result.

At the end of each rental both parties get to rate each other with eBay-style feedback, which soon roots out any bad renters.

I spoke on the phone with Gardens-based car owner Matt who's been renting his car through Whipcar since the start of June. 

Matt rents his Ford Zetec at £23 per day and after a slow start he's now approaching one rental a week. 

He's had one incident where the feels the renter may not have completely filled up the gas and thinks he also made a stain on the car seat. Matt told me that he hadn't had a chance to check the car back in so only picked up on these issues after it was too late. "To be honest, even if I'd noticed, it's still difficult to deal with. I wasn't sure enough if the stain was him or not. It might have been one of my friends and I didn't notice it."

Matt's explanation as to why he didn't pursue the issue also raised the web-wide issue of inflated feedback scores, "I don't want to damage a relationship for small things. Even with scoring, I would normally err on the side of overscoring so as to maintain a positive relationship."

For all that, Matt's a committed Whipcar user for the time being, "It's a great way of making money from an asset that normally lies idle. Some of my friends have said they love their cars too much to ever rent them out. I'm more practical about my car. If you can accept the possibility of a little wear and tear, I'd strongly recommend it".

BTW, if doing business with nice people is important to you, I can certainly recommend Matt from that point of view and I'm grateful to him for sparing the time to chat on the phone.

whipcar.com