in entrepreneurship, Learning

Drivy. Renting a car on carsharing

All the car rental companies I have used, and I have used 10s of different ones, try to rip off clients. My latest 15 day rent cost me 90€ and I got 3k km. Ford Focus. Even though I checked that I take from one airport and return in another train station I was additionally charged 50€ one way car relocation and 9€ airport fees at the counter. Still good price 140€ for 15 day rental. Also I was offered full insurance, which I did not take, for a whooping 20% of maximum franchise cost – it is worth buying it if I have an accident more than every fifth time during my rental. I believe that upselling the insurance, is the profit margins of insurance companies as many of users do not do the math or don’t have 1.5k at the checkin. When I wanted to extend my rental agreement for 7 days I was offered 290€, that is how I found the Drivy – aka airbnb for cars. The experience was awesome. First I have tested the hybrid car that I wanted to test and second the company is transparent in rental/insurance and that makes them great – no feeling of being ripped off.

Drivy open – is the third thing i like about this company – start renting the car without interaction to a person.

I am working with online marketplaces most of my professional life – more than 15 years already – so I though listing some cars there, as the numbers given by Drivy seemed too good to be true and if they are true it is possible to scale this business to 1000 cars.

I analysed for some time and came to conclusion that it is best to buy a 2-3 year old car, where you can install drivy open.

So I bought a car 2016 (2 year old) 50k km Toyota Yaris for 7850.

First 2 weeks I have parked it next to my house, while I did not have the open system installed I got many requests but didn’t respond in time or at some points the renters seemed suspicious and I didn’t accept them manually. After i got the drivy opened installed (29€ / month) I rented the best parking place for such rentals, just between two main train stations of Valencia.

First month I kept lower price to get traction/reviews and the first 3 weeks were promising. November 28th the car got into accident.

monthRevenue after feesinsurance + parking + opendepreciationNETwithout depreciation
2018/11181135150-10446
2018/1224129150-255-105
January75129150-204-54
February223129150-5694
March2514415057207
April14044150-5496
these were the price settings that were suggested by drivy for my car

In March i have moved the car close to my house – did not pay for the parking – used the car 3-5 days a month – and had quite good revenue.

I have finished the experiment in May.

My notices:

  • I could not achieve 50%  revenue claimed by Drivy advertising
  • I could not achieve 50%  revenue claimed by Drivy advertising
  • people leave cars clean as requested
  • minimal help needed – if to scale i believe one person could handle 100 cars
  • if you want to maximize the revenue, you can list the car on multiple platforms – but this requires more manual which i do not want to do as this is not my goal. If i decided to go all in and hire people this would be definitely thing to do

I do not see this as a viable business, but this is a good revenue source from the utility you own but do not use at the moment.

If you want to rent out your car use OWE044 invitation code. We both get 100€ Amazon gift card

If you just want to rent the car from Drivy just use this link and you will get 30€ off from your first rental

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