BORROWING a car is no small favor to ask a friend, much less a total stranger. I find it to be the most grueling test of boundaries of trust.

My discomfort all started with a little fight I had with my friend Alex. After kindly lending me his BMW5 sedan for the Spring Festival holidays because my own car was forbidden from the street for not having a proper car plate, he recently ambiguously ignored my requests to borrow his car again. His sudden change of attitude baffled and irritated me.

Asked about whether he thought I was becoming overly reliant on use of his car, he confessed he was actually afraid that I was at risk of overstretching myself. A rookie driver like me, with only a few thousands of miles of experience behind the wheel, apparently made him nervous. While he was away for the holidays, he nervously worried about whether his beloved one could return in one piece.

“But you said you have faith in me,” I said.

“I said that to boost your confidence, and also mine,” he replied. “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have loaned you the car in the first place. It was the first time I loaned it to anyone.”

I decided to accept his explanation with no hard feelings. At least he was being honest.

I recall a survey that found the majority of luxury car owners in China regard their vehicles as something more than just a transportation tool. The cars, to them, are special. According to the Hurun Research Institute, 36 percent of people look at their cars as friends, 16 percent as lovers and 15 percent as workhorses.

It would be judgmental for me to equate someone’s declining my request to borrow a car as choosing the car over me. Maybe Alex was just torn choosing between two friends he cared about equally. As I tried to overcome my own insecurity, I realized I had no right to question the risk concerns of others.

I have heard stories about how smashing a friend’s car in an accident can also crash the friendship.

That experience sort of happened to a friend of mine named Tingting. She loaned her brand new Buick Regal to an old acquaintance. It was returned with serious damage caused by an accident and accusations from her friend that the car’s bad performance was to blame.

“The latter was harder to accept,” Tingting told me. “At the time, I decided to live with that and maintain the friendship. But later, other things occurred that made me wonder if she had changed or that I didn’t know her very well from the start. We finally went our separate ways.”

Still, Tingting remains magnanimous. She is still willing to loan her car to friends.

“I’m glad you haven’t lost confidence in people,” I told her, marveling at her kind, trusting nature.

That leads me to wonder how the “sharing economy” may change perceptions. Somewhat akin to the leasing of houses on Airbnb, some online sites allow people to rent their cars out by the day, making some money while beating depreciation.

Peer-to-peer car rental

My auto journalist peer Mr Shen has what I would consider perfect peer-to-peer car sharing resources. His family owns six cars, and at least four of them sit idle in a parking garage every day.

I asked him if he has ever considered lending some of those cars out through a peer-to-peer platform, which could reduce his 7,000 yuan-a-month parking fees. He replied that he couldn’t care less about the potential income given the risk of having his cars stolen by some random driver contacted online.

What has long been a headache for traditional car rental companies is now permeating peer-to-peer sharing platforms. How should risks be assessed and managed?

Peer-to-peer platforms have ambiguous legal responsibilities for a car that goes missing. Sadly, car rental theft and fraud is quite rampant in China. Many car owners go on odysseys looking for their lost cars in the black markets of other provinces, only to find that they have to pay a “ransom” to get them back.

After browsing all the mainstream independent peer-to-peer car-sharing platforms, I decided to sign up for an account on PPzuche.com and get some first-hand experience as a renter so that I could have a road trip for weekends again when my own car was still grounded at home. I found the prices less attractive than I had imagined, especially when I had no idea what kind of conditions these cars might be in.

Still, I decided to give it a go. I rented a six-year-old Mazda MX-5 roadster at a price of 400 yuan a day. I was a bit surprised that my application, showing me as a female driver with limited driving experience, was no deterrent to the car owner, Mr. Guo.

When I returned the car safe and sound, I asked him about his trust in me.

“You didn’t look like a bad woman driver to me in your photo for the renter’s profile,” Mr Guo said. “I trusted my instincts.”

Following one’s hunch is always a bit of a gamble. I may look like a safe player but my driving companion is not.

I invited Alex for a ride in my rental car because he is a fan of sports cars. After riding shotgun, with his hair blown out of style by the wind for half an hour, he said he didn’t think the experience was worth the money. He said I was driving it like it was a “tractor” instead of a high-performance car.

Though no one except me was supposed to drive the car according to my agreement as a renter, I agreed to let Alex have a go behind the wheel. Suddenly, everything changed. It felt like we were in one of those stunts in “Fast and Furious” movies. We cut our way through traffic with maddening acceleration, braking, and overtaking. While Alex was busy bringing out the best performance in the car, I just sat there speechless.

“Where did you learn to drive like this?” I finally dared ask.

“Just now,” he said, with his hand set to pull up the handbrake for a drift. He was just teasing.

So we ended up using someone else’s car to let loose the adventurous, reckless devils in our hearts, but I do feel a bit guilty looking back on it. I almost made Mr. Guo suspicious when I told him the car was great except that it tended to shake at higher speeds.

“How fast were you going? 130 kilometers an hour or 140?” he asked, with a certain alarm creeping into his voice.

I chose to play dumb though I sensed he knew this car too well to be fooled. But he didn’t really seem to care.

What mattered was that I had brought his car back intact — a small victory for both of us trusting someone else as a good driver.