Car And Fleet Management
There’s a new competitor in the car leasing business, and it’s not who you’d expect. It’s you. Stemming from the success of the American rental car giant, ZipCar, Buzzcar aims to take a different approach to the idea of how car rentals should be handled. Zipcar was based on the idea that people didn’t need to necessarily have a car all year round to take them to the grocery store once a week. And it came ZipCar. It was an easy-to-use service that people could subscribe to that would allow people to rent cars for just an hour or two at a time. All you had to do was hop onto a website, say what time you needed the car from and when you were going to bring it back and it would spit back a very reasonable price. Insurance, gas, and everything was included. This plan worked great for those who lived where ZipCars were installed (read metropolitan areas). For those of us in the rest of the world though, ZipCar was just another token of urban living that we regular-folk wouldn’t get to enjoy.
A New Approach
The developer who came up with the idea of ZipCar is back with another revolutionary car idea. Instead of buying a fleet of cars and planting them around the country, she turned to allowing everyday citizens to be her fleet management team. BuzzCar allows average drivers to rent their cars out to strangers in their community for a few hours at a time. If someone needs to take a road trip out of town, for just a modest fee of about fifty or sixty Euros, BuzzCar users can lend their car to someone else to take out of town while not using it. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme for those renting out their vehicles, but it’s some nice pocket money.
Insurance
Insurance was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome with renting cars to strangers. After almost a year and a half of negotiations, BuzzCar was able to figure out how to get car leasing insurance for everyday people without them having to change their current insurance plan. When you register with BuzzCar, you’re essentially signing a temporary insurance contract that gives you coverage to drive a borrowed car and lend your car out. While the plan is far from perfect, and will of course take some modifying as it’s seen how much people are spending on insurance-related claims, for now, it’s a great solution that does the job just fine.
France Exclusively
And here comes the bad news…BuzzCar is only available in France at the moment. They have plans to expand their services to the rest of continental Europe shortly, but for now, you have to live somewhere within France to avail of the insurance and driving discounts that come with the service. The fleet management solution works so well in France because of the short distances people have to drive. Although France is a relatively large country, many people live close to a major city center and have access to excellent public transportation. Unlike in the United States, driving is more of a luxury than a necessity.
When BuzzCar finally does manage to expand to the rest of the continent, it’ll make a big splash. Making a few extra Euros each month just by owning a car is a crazy idea. But with eco-friendly movements all over the place, it’s no surprise that people are trying to take full advantage of the service. Instead of paying for petrol, insurance, and car maintenance fees year-round, they only have to pay for a car in “real-time” when they use it, just like Zip Car.
Both of these services have a time and a place. Still, as the move towards carpooling becomes more and more commonplace, we’ll likely see more startups trying to copy what ZipCar has done and raise the bar on competition in the industry as a whole, benefitting both drivers and renters alike.
