I felt worse for these guys until I read to the end of the letter and found out about the "HiGear girls". It's not quite as bad as I thought because they don't seem to "rent out" these models like they do cars; I guess it was just a publicity thing. But still, having revealing pictures and even stats (measurements) of the women is pretty much the definition of objectification.<p>FOLLOWUP (responding to comments):
I'm not concerned about the women in the pictures. They freely chose it, and made enough money to make it worth it to them.<p>But things that reinforce the societal ideal that women's value comes from being conventionally attractive is much more deeply damaging than most people realize. It leads to the body image issues that the <i>majority</i> of young women grapple with. Anything that makes it seem like numbers define how attractive you are is especially bad, because it makes it harder for people to accept their own non-ideal bodies as beautiful. It encourages young women to spend vast amounts of their free time learning about and working on being attractive rather than, say, tinkering with computers. To some extent, it leads to income inequality between men and women (Girls grow up with the message that pleasing men, by being attractive among other ways, is good, so they tend to up more passive in many situations. This makes them less willing to negotiate for salary, less willing to go out of their way to take credit for their work, etc. It also leads to other bad things like being less willing to say no to sex.)<p>I like seeing racy pictures of girls as much as the next guy, but displays of women like this, especially right next to and in the same format as rental listings, encourages societal ideals that are at the root of most of the gender-related problems in our society.
That's sad to hear, but I think he's right to realize that it's going to be really hard to deal with losses when the auto theft community gets wind of their business.<p>I am always amazed by the efficiency and technological prowess that the kids I grew up with who steal cars apply to their trade (even if I wish they were involved in a better trade).<p>One kid I grew up with now has a ring of six guys working for him, paying good benefits and matching retirement accounts, where all they do are steal Honda Civics. Just that model. I swear he's implemented Kaizen into his workflow.
How can Techcrunch say "the group stole four cars totaling $400,000" and then immediately print a letter from the company saying "The total value of these cars was around $300,000"? Even though in this case it's ok if you read the letter, it is the kind of thing that makes me feel like I shouldn't rely on Techcrunch's reporting. It's really not a big deal but how did that happen? Why are the numbers different?
I was surprised by the founder spending time in his letter to users talking positively about other players in the space (RelayRides, GetAround) and why their car sharing models should still work.<p>He didn't have to do this, but it struck me as a nice and unexpected gesture.
I briefly thought about starting a business like this a couple years ago.<p>During this thought exercise I came to the conclusion that an embedded GPS would be essential to maintain security.<p>Another idea would be making your social network your security system, by only allowing rentals to people within two degrees of separation on a social networking site.
A surprisingly fragile business model. I've wondered how Zipcar et al. haven't been killed by this? Or have they just done a better job at figuring theft into their model as a cost?
They should remain in business, but add a fingerprint requirement. This would stop criminals from pretending to be law-abiding citizens. Documents and identities are easy to steal or forge, but in-person fingerprints that match those documents are much more difficult to forge.<p>Edit: This is why background checks without fingerprints are not very meaningful. The check may be on a clean identity, not the criminal.
For me, their main problem is that they relied on traditional bank accounts and government-certified IDs to check identities. And we all know those ID's are easy to fake. Collaborative consumption needs a stronger identity, certification and reputation platform, one that does not isolate reputation profiles into silos and doesn't rely on unscalable certification authorities. And that's exactly what we are working on with peertru.st<p>So if you are interested in this, let us know. This is the first pillar after all: <a href="http://blog.kodesk.com/2011/11/01/the-three-pillars-of-collaborative-consumption/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.kodesk.com/2011/11/01/the-three-pillars-of-colla...</a>
The services should act like Airbnb did when they experienced 'bad user behaviour'. Adding security/verification/security features (2nd degree FB connections, Twitter, camera shot, webcam shot...) and marketing them as a new core competency of the service. They did a bad press turnaround in less than 3 weeks.
a silly question, but isn't there any insurance on the said cars ? if the cars are lost/stolen etc. and they do have insurance, let the insurance company deal with law-enforcement or other 'out-of-band' mechanisms (too many hollywood movies) to retrieve the stolen property...
the problem seems to be with verification not the business model itself.<p>so they should just tweak it to make it work...there are hundreds of supercar rental companies, so just copy them.<p>.
Why don't they require the peers to provide them with a bank account and then check up with the bank?<p>It would require setting up a false bank account with enough money. That's harder than false ID and stolen credit card.<p>If the above isn't enough, add an income statement.<p>Then you get billed for how much you use the car.