HyreCar brings ride-hailing rental business to New York City
A company that does for people’s cars what Airbnb does for people’s homes has started operating in New York City.
HyreCar, whose platform is aimed at lining up everyday car owners with drivers for ride-hailing services such as Lyft and Uber, started serving New York City and the rest of the state as part of a soft launch last month after a change in regulations allowed them to move forward. The company, headquartered in Los Angeles, now operates in 29 states.
“A lot of people didn’t realize they could go out and rent a car to drive for Uber,” said Joe Furnari, the company’s chief executive. Furnari joined HyreCar in 2015 after trying to use Craigslist to squeeze some money out of an idle vehicle by renting it.
“I had a car in the garage collecting dust. And my wife [was] putting pressure on me to either sell the car or do something else with it,” Furnari said. He received a reply from an Uber driver but found out that without insurance in the driver’s name, the arrangement wouldn’t pass muster for the ride-hailing service. HyreCar insures owner and driver alike.
Drivers who are at least 21 can rent a vehicle through HyreCar for a day, a week or a month. In Los Angeles, the average weekly rental through HyreCar runs about $230, but people offer their vehicles at rates ranging from $140 to $275 a week. There’s no required minimum or maximum rental period, so both sides have maximum efficiency, Furnari said.
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Furnari said the company sees itself not as a competitor with the ride-hailing giants but as complementary to them. Uber also offers rental arrangements to drivers, and Lyft features HyreCar on its website as a partner in making vehicles available.
“The reason we founded the company is that we saw people doing rentals off the books in a gray market already,” said Abhi Arora, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “We wanted to create an open market.”
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