Voiturelib<\/a> announced a fund-raising round of \u20ac2 Million \u2013 investors included Alven Capital & Index Ventures. The service, which counts 5,000 cars actively available to rent in France alone and more than 50,000 registered users as of September, allows everyday Joe\u2019s like you and me to rent cars from other everyday Joes, who put their car up for rent on the site. Voiturelib seemed to be in a stage where it is ready to grow, & with the capital it just received, I sat down and talked with Paulin about what exactly the future holds for Voiturelib and P2P car-sharing in general.<\/p>\nBackground: professional car rental, Zip Car & American competitors<\/h2>\n
The first thing Paulin made perfectly clear is that P2P car-sharing will never entirely remove car rental agencies appealing to travelers and movers: \u201cwe\u2019re never going to have the bandwidth to have as many cars available for rent at the Airport as a traditional car rental agency,\u201d says Dementhon \u2013 but that doesn\u2019t mean they can\u2019t take them down a peg. Previous startups like Robin Chase\u2019s Zip Car demonstrated that a car parked in a parking lot could be my car \u2013 at least for a little while.
\nOther collaborative consumption startups have already cleared the way for the P2P mindset. P2P marketplaces like LeBonCoin & Zilok allow you to buy & sell everything from a microwave to your car. The real estate rental department has been steadily drifting towards a P2P marketplace in the past few years \u2013 in France, site\u2019s like PAP, LeBonCoin, Craigslist, and FUSAC offer students an alternative to the hefty sum they\u2019ll have to commit to a rental agency. Sites like Airbnb have disrupted the short-term rental marketplace, as well \u2013 or more, created it. As these barriers drop, consumers seem more & more at ease with renting out other objects; and Voiturelib seems proof of that.
\nMany competitors exist in this space, and there\u2019s no getting around that; however, Dementhon is confident that they\u2019ve got the leg up:
\n\u201cSo many startups in the space went hardware-first, offering to install devices in every user\u2019s car. While there is a definite eventual need for this, we\u2019ve chosen to go software-first, and it seems that many of our competitors are leaning away from hardware, realizing that the initial investment is too heavy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hourly rentals: the next frontier<\/h2>\n
Currently, users on Voiturelib can rent their car out on a per-day basis: the car-owner and renter agree upon a time to meet and exchange keys, check the car, etc. This has permitted thousands of car-owners to make use of their oft-unused cars, and has even got some people buying cars and putting them on Voiturelib permanently. It\u2019s got a lower minimum capital investment than real estate, and there are no pesky requirements that a car-owner must drive their own car while they\u2019re paying off their loans, as with primary residences in France.
\n\u201cThe future is hourly, and it is the connected car.\u201d say Dementhon, though the future might yet be over the horizon. Dementhon\u2019s vision for P2P car-sharing demands a high level of trust between renters and car owners; though, Voiturelib\u2019s car insurance insures every car-owner, and with debit cards on file for anyone who rents, the risks associated with car-renting have been severely diminished. Once this trust is achieved, Dementhon feels, there is a greater vision of being able to rent a car for 3 hours, to make an Ikea trip, without ever having to meet with the driver. This is where the aforementioned hardware may come in; however, Dementhon pointed out that with carmakers beginning to talk more & more about the connected car, extra hardware may not necessarily be needed.
\nFor now, Voiturelib is working on getting more cars, more renters, and taking their now stable marketplace (there is a fair balance of cars and renters) and scaling it up to becoming the<\/em> destination for P2P ride-sharing in France.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just last week, P2P Car-sharing service Voiturelib announced a fund-raising round of \u20ac2 Million \u2013 investors included Alven Capital & Index Ventures. The service, which counts 5,000 cars actively available to rent in France alone and more than 50,000 registered users as of September, allows everyday Joe\u2019s like you and me to rent cars from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":64787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10564],"tags":[2695,3403,3287],"class_list":["post-5464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tech-2","tag-alven-capital","tag-drivy","tag-index-ventures"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Documents-and-Settings_Fouquoire_Bureau_Voiturelib-e1348738295473.jpg\" "\\"voiturelib")
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