by
Tim O'Reilly
The advance of technology has made Zipcar’s advances, remarkable as they were at the time, rather quaint. Where Zipcar required cars to be returned to the same location from which they were rented, newer entrants into the space, like Car2go, use modern location-tracking technology and allow customers to leave the car wherever they like. And taking the “peer” model even further, services like Getaround allow users to put up their personal cars for rental. And while the car must be returned to the original location (more or less), location-tracking technology means that users can simply find a car that is located close to them—the entire city becomes the storage lot for the excess capacity of unused vehicles for rent.
HOLY HELL
he's so breathless about the idea of the city having Cars everywhere. But here’s the thing: it should have been this way ANYWAY. Better public transit and municipal cars, the reason it sounds unthinkable is cus of capitalism and more specifically neoliberalism??? So it’s an innovation that replicates what would have been normal in a different political context, frames it as innovation, while privatising the hell out of it