The Art of Living Car-lessly

Between high-speed algorithmic securities trading, corporate unbundling and now, automobiles, the markets appear to be sending a signal that tangible assets are all anchors and ownership is for suckers. And maybe they're right. JL

Jonathan Margolis reports in the Financial Times:

The market is evolving ownership alternatives. A new one is “fractional car ownership”. General Motors, Ford, Audi and BMW are all reportedly trialling plans for several people to share leasing a car. It works with private jets...
I first realised that owning a car in a city is slightly demented when a friend in Manhattan lent me her Upper West Side apartment for a month. When I arrived, I discovered the catch to her seeming generosity — the keys to her Jeep Cherokee and a breezy request to “look after it”, starting with “Please move it for street cleaning after 5pm today”. It took two parking tickets in week one to learn that car sitting, certainly in New York, is way more onerous than pet sitting. Ticket one was for not moving it (I fell asleep), number two, seven days later, for moving it — to a lovely but forbidden spot by a fire hydrant.The endlessly tedious West 76th Street experience, plus the ever-accumulating irritations of car ownership in London, convinced me to sell my old Saab before heading to the US for a few months last year.
Even when you’re legally parked in my borough, the council can move your car whenever they fancy it, charge £200 for the helpful tow-away, and then £40-a-day storage. But now I’m back for a while at what is nominally home, I thought I’d buy another car. Except I haven’t, and I’m not sure I will.
Technology — mostly in the form of Uber and Zipcar — has finally made it viable for city dwellers not to own a car, as well as cheaper, less stressful, healthier (you walk more) and only marginally less convenient, perhaps as long as you don’t have small children.
Not owning a car is also giving me a feeling, not wholly delusional, that I’m doing something to make cities better, and to put cars to more sensible use. I’m no great friend of the Earth — we’ve met — but is there anything dumber, really, than good machines being left idle 95 per cent of the time?
Disruption is overstated, overrated and overhyped. A commenter, TKR, made the point, however, that what disruptive tech does marvellously is exploit unemployed resources like our chronically underused cars.

And both Uber and Zipcar are classic disruptive technologies, made possible by computing, internet-connected smartphones and GPS. We don’t sufficiently celebrate the genius of our technology; summoning an Uber in Istanbul last year, it struck me that it was like an implausible prediction in an old BBC Tomorrow’s World show.

This actually is Tomorrow’s World.
Uber needs no introduction; it has disrupted the licensed taxi trade to the point where if you mention it to a traditional cabbie in most cities, he may want to disrupt your face.
Zipcar is a slick, US-based, all-inclusive, app-controlled car rental system that charges by the half-hour and has made conventional car rental companies, with their tricks, sneaky surcharges and billowing paperwork, look lame and obsolete.
Car sharing is not new. It started in the US during the second world war as a rationing measure. The publicity poster at the time read, “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler! — join a car sharing club.” Today, carpool lanes are common in the US and Australasia.
But Zipcar and similar competitors do not require you to share your car with anyone. It’s your personal travelling cocoon to sing and pick your nose in if you wish. You just outsource the misery of ownership.
Zipcar needs some planning at weekends — there aren’t that many cars to go around, so I book early. And it’s not cheap. I paid £75 for a 24-hour rental one Saturday.
But I generally spend £70 a week on Zipcars and Ubers — not bad compared with fuel, insurance, road tax, resident parking permits, congestion charge, servicing, maintenance, cleaning and depreciation.
The downsides of our month, so far, of living car-lessly are minor. There’s someone using my closest car who leaves the driver’s seat at a weird angle and the radio on a naff station. Not a huge deal. I also miss using my own car as a mobile storage unit for junk of various kinds.
But I detect a real momentum gathering behind non car-ownership. It’s almost becoming a status symbol, different from old-style, greener-than-thou one-downmanship.
The market is also evolving ownership alternatives. A new one on me is “fractional car ownership”. General Motors, Ford, Audi and BMW are all reportedly trialling plans for several people to share leasing a car.
It works with private jets, so why not?