Looking back at 2011, one the biggest areas of change has been sharing cars (sharing the ownership of cars rather than the equally important lift sharing). Cars represent a huge opportunity for sharing because of the number of very expensive assets which spend the vast proportion of their time unused. Shared ownership of cars used to be relatively difficult to manage. Until recently most shared cars were in private syndicates, predominantly set up to own sports, classic or super cars.
Often the owners had found each other through car owners’ clubs. Because the cars are used infrequently, it is relatively easy to work out when the owners can use the car. The owners are also usually relatively wealthy and relieved simply to reduce the costs and responsibilities of ownership, so apportioning costs is fairly straightforward.

Car clubs like Zipcar and City Car Club have been gathering momentum for some time in the UK, USA and across Europe: the recession has definitely helped them. Car clubs bring people together around a car and manage all aspects of the shared ownership. But they generally operate in cities and suburbs. There are small car clubs in towns and rural areas, but few survive long.

A different model was required if car sharing was to hit the mainstream and I believe this has recently emerged with peer-to-peer rental. This allows people to advertise their car for hire by the hour, day or month. Like ebay, Couchsurfing and many collaborative consumption services, these systems depend upon reviews to develop the necessary trust systems. The owner reviews how well the renter looks after the car: cleanliness, tidiness, petrol as agreed, timeliness of return. Similarly the renter reviews the owner: was the car as advertised, clean, tidy, available etc.

RelayRides in the USA and WhipCar in the UK have forged the peer-to-peer car sharing way forward. In the USA, RelayRides led a change in the law in California to enable peer-to-peer rental: previous laws classified it as normal car hire and effectively made it impossible. HiGear is also pioneering peer-to-peer rental of luxury cars in the USA.

Finally the major car manufacturers are now getting involved. They probably hoped they wouldn’t have to, but they realise that car sharing may become mainstream and if they aren’t part of it, they will suffer. They also know that a shared car is often a person’s first car and they will be looking to hook them to their brand for life. Daimler has a new electric car club called car2go; Ford supplies many cars to Zipcar; BMW and Sixt car rental have created DriveNow car club (German); and Renault supplies Hertz On Demand (a hybrid of car hire and car club).

For more about sharing cars.

We’ve a great new boat sharing case study, Andrew A has sold a share in his Fairline Phantom 48 based in Mallorca, to create a new private syndicate using Net Lawman’s contract templates.  Read about it here.

I’ve just finished reading “What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. It’s thought-provoking and highly readable. Many of its peers are the former, but rarely the latter, and for this reason I’ll admit that I was putting off reading it, even though it’s a must-read for me. So I was pleasantly surprised when I read it cover to cover in a day: couldn’t put it down.

What distinguishes it from so many earnest tomes telling us to reduce waste, reduce consumption, be good and wear a hairshirt, is that it understands that this revolution has to be lead by consumer demand and great design, and that excellent profits are there to be made by companies who understand this. Given the enormity of the issues facing our planet, it is also hugely optimistic.

It lays out the context for the need for change: why we’re in this un-sustainable mess and why it doesn’t need to be this way. Then it leads you through the major ways we can reduce consumption:

• product service systems – such as car clubs like Zipcar and ridesharing like Liftshare
• redistribution markets – such as ebay, freecycle and swapping sites like swishing
• collaborative lifestyles – co-working (such as Jelly), finance (such as Zopa) and websites like landshare, parkatmyhouse and yours2share.

I found the sections on trust particularly useful and I’m waiting to see the first reputation platform emerge, bringing together our reputations on ebay, zopa, couchsurfing, relayrides etc. Ironically the only area of sharing that wasn’t really covered was the creation of private syndicates and sharing of large assets between small groups of private individuals similar to the sharing enabled by yours2share.

If you want to do your bit for the planet, understand the part that a large chunk of the internet plays in this, or find out where your company should be heading, it’s well worth reading.

I’ve just added a post to Shareable.net’s excellent website about every aspect of sharing.  It is an introductory piece explaining the basics issues to be discussed when you are creating a new private syndicate, called How to share the big stuff.

I often comment on articles about fractional ownership and timeshare: they aren’t the easiest conscepts to understand and their are many misconceptions.  However this recent article on ehow is probably the most misleading and garbled I’ve seen in a long time.  Unfortunately there is obviously a limit on the number of characters in a comment, not that they tell you.  So I thought I’d repeat my reply in full here.

Timeshare means buying the right to use a property for a lengthy period, usually 20-30 years, where the “rental” payment is made at the beginning. Timeshare also includes schemes where the purchaser is buying equity, but for three weeks a year or less. Timeshares usually incur a sizeable annual management fee. All timeshare schemes are carefully regulated. This is because the buyers need to be sure that the development will be suitably managed and maintained over the life of their purchase. The regulations also protect people against some of the poor selling techniques that gave timeshare such a bad name.

Although timeshares are generally for property (real estate) the concept can easily be applied to other assets such as boats and the recent update to the European laws on timeshare specifically includes reference to other asset types.

Fractional ownership means that a groups of private individuals have got together to buy an asset: this could be real estate, but also boats, cars, mobile homes and aircraft are commonly joint owned. These owners could be friends or family, or strangers using service like yours2share. They could also be strangers put together by commercial agents selling properties, boats etc. In the latter case, the sharers usually pay a small premium. As explained above, once the number of sharers goes above 13, which translates to less than four weeks a year, the scheme is considered to be timeshare.

Some fractional ownership developments also have management and maintenance fees: in others this is entirely up the owners. Many timeshare and commercial fractional ownership developments have systems to let unused weeks or allow owners to swap their weeks.