There are various models of car club, and which works for you will depend on why you want a car club and your groups commitment/appetite for doing some work.

What mattered to us was a stake in the car club, a say (and a potential financial share) in the development of the platform, working as part of a Europe-wide community of practice, the potential to integrate with other car clubs across Europe to allow our users access and vice versa, the freedom to set prices to meet our local objectives around transport poverty, strengthening our communities know-how and can-do networks. We are also relatively rural – certainly not in the “hot spots” that larger operators identify as the first places where they will deploy car clubs that run (and fail) within tight commercial-only parameters. The market would get to our communities late. This way we can be leaders.

But this will not fit everybody.

You could instead:

Facilitate a larger player:

The easiest thing to do is to facilitate for a regional or national car club operator. Unless you are in their “sweet spot” they will seek assurances – guaranteeing incomes – to establish a car club in your area. They have been known to abruptly pull out when their hosts can no longer do that (community car clubs do also fail to be fair). Some places have been very pleased with the results from these larger operators as when it works, it means very little work is needed by the hosting organization and a larger organization creates a sense of security around the provision of a service. You will help them identify locations, make the case for them to local stakeholders such as councils or businesses, carry out surveys, distribute flyers offering discounts, and generally drum up business for the operator to ensure they meet their commercial necessities.

You will have less, if any, flexibility to offer prices to meet local needs. You will not have a share or a stake in the platform. Any additional resilience will come from having a dependable service, but the community is not gaining know how or developing networks of can-do.

In the bigger cases, you will join potentially multinational operations that will grant their users access to cars around the world.

These operators are: Co-Cars, Co-Wheels, Enterprise … and more likely to come from the vehicle hire sector

Evangelise for a sharing platform:

There are various platforms that allow you to “AirBnB your car” – in other words, users make their cars available to other people on the platform when they are not using it. It is simple and straightforward and because it is using existing assets, has low capital costs. This is harder to do with electric vehicles because individuals are less likely to have the rapid charging needed to make a car available quickly for someone. But a dedicated host could keep it topped up or only available when they know it will be.

This is an interesting model that may well gain some traction – our platform can facilitate exactly this. The challenge for us is figuring out how to do insurance around this option. In this setup you have no ability to set your prices.

There is a potential resiliency gain in people meeting people and building relationships around that.

There are places that have put a community car on the P2P platform as a way to gain some flexibility and chose the type of car they put out there. This has allowed them to bypass the insurance challenge as the platform provides its own insurance – quoting each user independently.

P2P car share platforms: Turo, HiyaCar

What we did: - join a platform cooperative

• What IS a platform cooperative:
• A platform cooperative is a platform that is owned, operated, and decided upon by the users of the platform. We are familiar with extractive platforms like Facebook where users’ information is mined to sell adverts to provide profits for distant investors. Users “say” is expressed through constant testing on the users to uncover the ways in which to use their behaviour, needs and desires “against” them. Or we know of AirBnB where distant investors are the beneficiaries of a platform that does benefit asset owners and people looking for temporary accommodation but at the detriment of some of the local areas where it operates and drives up the price of assets, while keeping 16% of the value. Neither hosts nor guests have any say in how the platform develops.
• In a platform co-op, members are shareholders and so have a financial stake in the platform, a governance say, benefit from the scale of collective purchasing, and a direct relationship with the people building the platform.
• A stake and a say