Living in San Francisco is awesome. Owning a car, on the other hand, is not. When parking spots are a luxury and apartment rentals that come with a garage are basically unheard of, owning a car is often an expense that just doesn’t, well, make sense. What about those days when you want to drive to Napa, or go to the famed Alameda flea market, or hey, go crazy and take a trip down to Costco? Taking a taxi or renting a car would be a hardship at best and bank-breaking at worst. But, thanks to peer-to-peer car sharing, all you need is a credit card, a valid driver’s license and the Wheelz iPhone app for you to borrow a local’s car and get on the road.
Learn about how it works after the jump.
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Basics
Wheelz is a peer-to-peer car sharing service that was originally developed to help college students get around. Since its inception it has expanded and can now be found in San Francisco, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Los Angeles (Downtown and West Side), Claremont and Pasadena. The app is free, and users can choose to either loan out their car or borrow other Wheelz users’ cars.
How it Works
Sign up is a little more thorough than other apps; in fact, it’s a multi-step process. For the purpose of this review, I’m sticking to the borrowing side of the app, versus the loaning side.
Once you download the app you will need to enter your credit card information, driver’s license, billing information and confirm your phone number. After you have been confirmed to have a valid license and billing information, a Wheelz DriveCard will be mailed to you (or you can pick one up at one of the Wheelz pickup locations.) Then you are good to go.
Borrowing a Car
After you have signed in, the main screen of the app will feature a map with car icons pinpointing available cars. This is the Search screen.
So many cars to choose from.
The cars are divided by blue and orange car icons. The orange means that you can book instantly and the blue icons mean that you can request access. Basically, the orange identified cars are ready to go, and the owners of the blue identified cars would like to make the choice if they want you to borrow their car. Fair enough. When you tap on a car icon, a pop-up will show a thumbnail of the car, the type of car, the ratings for the car and the price per hour. The price is determined by the car owner, with prices ranging from $7/hr for a 2001 Lexus IS to $35/hr for a 2006 Audi S4 (in my area).
It’s really easy to filter the listings in order to find what you need.
To filter the available cars, tap the top left Filter button to open a new screen. You can sort the cars by location, price and make. You can also filter the cars by the time that you want to borrow the car for. Another option that is available is to show all cars in the area.
Well, aren’t you all nice and shiny!
If you see a car that you are interested in, you can tap the pop-up to open a new screen with the car’s details. The new screen will feature photos of the car on the top half of the screen. You can also swipe horizontally to view more photos. Immediately under the car photos is a large button to either Book Instantly or Request Access. Under that icon is your ideal reservation and what time the car is actually available to be reserved for.
Each car has a home zone, which is the area that the car needs to be parked within after your reservation is over.
There is also an estimated cost and three tabs: Features, Description and Instructions. Features is the car’s most notable features, Description is the car’s basic description and Instructions is any information the borrower needs to know about the car and parking it. There is also a home zone on this page that shows the streets the owner is comfortable with the borrower parking their car on when they return it. And finally, there is the car’s rating and a thumbnail picture of the owner.
Other Features
In addition to the Search section of the app, there is also a Reservations, My Drive and My Account section.
I’m finally going to be able to take home more groceries than I can carry.
Reservations shows you what your upcoming reservations and My Account basically has all of your information: photo, Member ID number, Driving Credit and rating.
You can honk the horn from within the app! Obviously, this is a big plus for people who forget what their borrowed car looks like.
My Drive is used when you are about to begin or are in the middle of a reservation. This aspect of the app is what is different than other peer-to-peer car sharing apps. This actually lets you use your app to Lock, Unlock and locate the car (you can honk the horn to help you find the car!) Cars can be unlocked by tapping the Unlock button, using the DriveCard to activate the sensor on the windshield or texting Wheelz. When your reservation is currently active, the timer on this screen will show you how long you have left and there is also an option to add more time to your reservation or end the reservation early.
The Wheelz DriveKit
The Wheelz DriveKit comes in every Wheelz equipped car, and while this isn’t specifically a part of the app, it’s a cool feature of the Wheelz program. Every Wheelz car has one of these kits in the glove compartment, where the car’s keys are stored. The kit also includes a Wheelz GasCard that can be used to fill up the car. Even if you are filling up the tank, you will only be charged for how much gas you actually used during your reservation.
Final Thoughts
I won’t lie, I love car-sharing. I’ve been a big fan of GetAround (a similar service) for ages. The two big differences between the two services is that GetAround is in more locations and Wheelz has instant bookings compared to GetAround where the owner has to approve every potential booking. One of the problems that I have run into with GetAround is that I will ask to borrow up to five people’s cars for a specific time frame and all of them end up saying no, mostly because their availability calendars haven’t been updated. This is where Wheelz comes out as a clear winner because so many of their cars are available for instant bookings. The UI for both apps is pretty similar. Functionally, they are similar as well, except I find that in Wheelz I sometimes tap the car icons in the map version of Search and the car information does not pop up, which is a little buggy. Overall, it’s a pretty solid app, and I wish I knew about it when I was living in LA for a few months and refused to get a car (now that was an ordeal!)
I, for one, am a huge proponent of peer-to-peer car sharing, but I know many have their doubts. It’s going to be interesting to see how this new way of thinking progresses, as well as the apps that make it possible.