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August 15, 2016

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Home » Business » Autotalk Special

Singapore firm offers long-term‘car-share’ rental

By Zhu Shenshen and Lu Nengneng | August 15, 2016, Monday | Print Edition

CAR rentals, probably the oldest example of the “sharing economy” in transportation, have jumped on the bandwagon of peer-to-peer lending in China.

PPzuche.com, a Singapore-based peer-to-peer car rental company with 1 million registered users, recently launched long-term service in Shanghai. That allows users to rent cars from private car owners for up to half a year. In the past, its rental services were just for a couple of days or even hours.

The platform allows car owners to make some money from vehicles sitting for long stretches in garages. They may be people taking long-term holidays or business trips, or people with more cars than they actually use.

The recently announced policy of legalizing car-hailing services and the scaling back of subsidies for drivers on car-hailing platforms may push more private cars into the rental market.

But can trust, the most critical issue involved in peer-to-peer sharing programs, be sustained over a long period of car rental?

Eddy Zhang, chief executive and founder of PPzuche, said the new service will target business executives and companies — customers with proven records of good credit.

Shanghai-based eHi Car Rental, a major player in the traditional car rental business, flirted with peer-to-peer business but decided it was too much trouble to operate. It shut down an experimental project at the end of last year, less than a year after its launch. 

The company had tried to operate it as an add-on service to its self-owned, and -managed fleet. But it was too hard to monitor the conditions of peer-to-peer cars and maintain a standard level of services.

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