WhipCar closes down P2P carsharing operation in Britain. What does it mean?

On 10 Nov. 2010, World Streets ran an article under the title "The P2P carsharing saga continues: The WhipCar story" by the young entrepreneurs introducing their  new WhipCar P2P carsharing start-up, which story you can find here - http://wp.me/psKUY-13b.  After more than two years of hard work in developing an entirely new, uncharted market for Britain, they have just decided, in their words that: "we have discovered there are still barriers to widespread adoption of peer-to-peer car rental in the UK. As a small team with limited resources, we have taken a good long look at these scaling challenges. And, after much thought, we have made the extremely difficult decision to close WhipCar."

Let's have a look at what they have to say in terms of lessons learned, and at the end of this short piece share with you a couple of thoughts on the meaning of this in the broader context of carsharing and P2P.

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P2P Carsharing galloping ahead in the USA

As we have seen in a certain number of articles over the last year or so -- click here to review -- the totally unexpected dark horse of carsharing which has emerged and is presently galloping with surprising speed in quite a number of places around the world is the concept of peer-to-peer (think do-it-yourself) carsharing.  Here is a good resume of the present state of play of P2P in the United States that has just appeared in a popular American newspaper.  And since carsharing. is a critical components of the overall sustainable transportation package for cities -- you can bet on it! -- there is good reason to stay on top of that if you are a decision-maker, entrepreneur, competitor  or source of counsel in our sector.

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Stop press! Carsharing is apparently not dead after all.*

We always enjoy a good knock-up on World Streets. Keeps us thinking. After yesterday's piece in which Nicolas le Douarec undertook to stretch our minds and challenge us to consider carsharing from some other perspectives, including apparently in a coffin, we hear today from an old friend Michael Glotz-Richter from Bremen who has been orchestrating carsharing in his city and trans-European collaboration in the field for the last decade, running an EU program which currently goes by the somewhat mystifying acronym of momo (see below). Here is what Michael has to say about yesterday's reported corpse.

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Carsharing is dead, long live . . . car rental?

We have been reading and hearing quite a bit in the French media, and in particular in the context of the city of Paris's ambitious planned Autolib project, that "carsharing is dead in France". Which came as something of a surprise given that our own read of the evidence does not at all square with this position. So we asked Nicolas le Douarec, who has something of a record in bringing carsharing to Paris, what he thought about that death warrant. His heady response follows.

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Interview: Sharing is important on the World's Streets

On a cold gray Paris winter day Ms Lesley Brown, editor of Mobility magazine, came to World Streets to interview the editor about his noisily stated views on the importance of sharing in the future of the transport sector. Her article made it into the pages of Mobility on 20 January, which you can read in the original here or just below.

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The P2P carsharing saga continues: The WhipCar story

WhipCar is a very recent British start-up in the still little known peer-to-peer car owner/rental business.  World Streets recently interviewed the group's founders and managers, Tom Wright and Vinay Gupta, to get at their side of this unfolding rather surprising 21st century alternate car story.  (And the first thing they told us was that it's not quite carsharing. Let's have a look.)

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Thread: Is peer-to-peer carsharing going anywhere?

"Peer-to-peer carsharing" (P2P C/S) sounded to me for quite some time like a new mobility concept that was unlikely to go very far. The idea that, instead of a perfectly functional car rental service or a local carshare operation for people who might need a car for a bit, there might also be a niche in the market for people willing to share their own cars on a regular basis with others (for the most part strangers!), sounded to me at least like a well-intentioned 1970's peace-and-love idea warmed over. But . . . I have of late been talking to some people who are more open in their thinking about P2P than I am/was -- including several who are actually trying to make it work. So I am beginning to revise my thoughts. In a very big way, in fact. Let's follow this thread together.

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