Now We've Seen Everything: Several New Websites Let You Rent Your Car to Tourists When You Don't Need It

How big a leap is it from renting a spare room in your apartment to renting use of your car when you don't need it? Airbnb ( www.airbnb.com ), iStopOver ( www.istopover.com ), and others deal with those spare rooms. Now, amazingly enough, Getaround ( www.getaround.com ), RelayRides ( www.relayrides.com ), and London's WhipCar ( www.whipcar.com ) permit you to earn extra money by renting your car out to others. And it permits those renters to save big bucks on car rentals at a time when auto rental charges by the traditional companies (Hertz, Avis et al) are skyrocketing.

The average cost of renting a car through these unusual internet services? They claim that cost to average $8 an hour (but some older cars are offered for as little as $4 and $5 an hour), perhaps $45 a day. Persons with cars to rent post photographs and vital statistics of their cars onto the websites listed above. Their cars must be fully insured, but the renter does not need to have car insurance; that's because the websites claim a one-million dollar insurance policy per car on all the car rentals made through them.

Some of the above companies use the term "collaborative consumption" for the services they provide. One of them claims it is like "Airbnb for cars". Others use such slogans as "neighbor-to-neighbor" car rentals, or "carsharing." They certainly offer a means whereby owners of cars can earn an income -- sometimes a considerable annual sum -- from an under-utilized car. But equally important (and at the risk of repetition), they enable renters to pay far less than they would to Hertz, Avis, or Enterprise (or to ZipCar, in the case of hourly rentals).

They also help keep down the number of cars currently on the streets and highways.

Each such service, incidentally, also claims to vet the safety record of the persons who seek to rent cars through them; they are able, they claim, to search public records to eliminate people who have a history of irresponsible driving.

A final point: although each such service seems to emphasize hourly rentals on their websites, they also offer rentals by the day, the week, or the month, and in a large number of major American cities (or throughout the British isles in the case of WhipCar).

Although I had an initial reluctance to discuss them (because of the insurance question, which they all claim to have solved with their million dollar policies), I have been encouraged by the fact that each of the companies is the subject of an increasing number of newspaper and magazine articles by journalists who have studied their records and their growth. Nevertheless, I can't yet speak confidently about them, and must warn you to undertake your own investigation.