At that point, why would I own a car? Insuring against vandalism is all very well financially, but if my car needs to be repaired after a random person takes a ride in it I'm still going to be without my car for a few days.
At that point, why wouldn't I just pay the car manufacturer for "car use on demand"? Suddenly I don't have to care about having a garage at home, repairs, upgrades, etc. etc.
I can see the argument for still owning your own car, but owning it and renting it out seems like a half way measure that will satisfy no-one.
Assume you want to go to work at 9am and all your neighbours too. Is it okay for you to wait an hour until a car is free to drive you to work? Or imagine in previous times you bought a car when you got a bonus payment, now you pay the car-service each months - imagine you get sick and now can't afford to pay for the monthly car service, if you owned the car you wouldn't have to worry about that, as it would have been your asset without a fixed monthly payment.
Renting might be convenient, but in the long term owning something is cheaper and more convinient.
Why would the rental company not just scale up to match morning demand? Even if a car is only used for an hour a day the cost of having it parked up somewhere for the rest of the day would be very low.
And you're talking about a car as if buying it is a one-off expense that'll never be added on to. That's not true at all - insurance, maintainence and repairs are all ongoing costs that you'd be similarly unable to afford if you lost your job.
Re: morning demand: The same could be said for public transport or taxis. And do they increase to match the morning demand? Often not, you have to squeeze in to catch the public transport and wait for a taxi.
Insurance, maintenance and repairs are not monthly fixed costs. You can pay insurance e.g. once a year. And maintenance/repair really depends.
Why would car insurance be a once a year cost but car service would not? I don't see any reason why a company couldn't charge once per year. That said, many consumers are unable to pay for a year of anything upfront and choose to pay monthly. Like car insurance.
> And maintenance/repair really depends.
Which is a huge problem! Again, if you don't have a ton of money a surprise repair bill can absolutely wreck your finances.
Also, pretty much every public transit system I know scales up service during peak times and winds it down at other times of day. This isn't a new concept.
Not really. Most systems run extra buses/trains/etc during the morning and evening rush hour. This is true even in smallish US cities that have lackluster service.
It's certainly possible that public transit is still crowded despite this, but I've never heard of anywhere that doesn't even try to scale to match demand.
At that point, why wouldn't I just pay the car manufacturer for "car use on demand"? Suddenly I don't have to care about having a garage at home, repairs, upgrades, etc. etc.
I can see the argument for still owning your own car, but owning it and renting it out seems like a half way measure that will satisfy no-one.