Hiyacar is now an accredited car club

Hiyacar is now an accredited car club in London and the UK, allowing members access to locally parked cars paying by the minute, hour or day. The scheme helps people give up their cars, whilst allowing them to undertake occasional car travel within the city as and when they need to.

What is the difference between car clubs and peer to peer?

We have previously spoken about the difference between car clubs and peer to peer schemes but the main difference is essentially the ownership of the car:

• A car club vehicle is typically rented out directly to a driver - which is why it is commonly referred to as ‘business to consumer’ (B2C). 

• With ‘peer to peer’ (P2P) schemes, the car is privately owned by a member of the community but can simply be rented out or ‘shared’ with neighbours in the local area through platforms like Hiyacar.

One of the biggest misconceptions about such a car club in London is that they add more cars to the road, however, research suggests that for every shared car, there is a reduction of between 9 and 15 cars on the road. Some studies have even indicated up to 25,000 fewer vehicles on the road thanks to London car clubs alone.

Why did we get accredited and what difference will it make to you?

For drivers, cars will be better located, so rather than collecting a vehicle from a stranger’s driveway, they will be more readily available on a main street. And for our owners, a car club in London offers the features that drivers in the local community look for: QuickStart, instant book and available when and where drivers need them.

To put a car club in London where cars in the areas we don’t currently have enough owners, we need to work with local councils to get permits and if you are not an accredited car club, that becomes impossible. Thanks to all the hard work CoMoUK has done with the government, a large number of local authorities now support car clubs by providing access to permits for accredited companies.

To become an accredited member of the CoMoUK a vast array of criteria has to be met. This ensures that we are providing a service that is safe while also enforcing standards to ensure a car club in London gives drivers the service they expect.

Alongside safety and service standards, the vehicles have to meet strict emission standards, the latest CoMoUK report found that car club vehicles emit over 33% fewer CO2 emissions per kilometre than the average British car.

So what does it all mean, really?

Don’t worry, we aren’t changing our stripes, selling out to the man or going over to the dark side, but we have teamed up with some new and exciting partners to create “Hiyacar car club” and here is why.

The purpose of our car club in London is to connect drivers with a car whenever and wherever they need one, and this means we need to have enough cars in the right areas. Peer to peer is still front and centre in our future and we want to make sure that we provide a solution that enables owners to support drivers in their local communities. However, peer to peer is a relatively new concept and vehicle owners are still coming around to the idea of letting other people drive their cars. On the other hand, drivers already love the idea of having convenient access to a car on their street. With 38 million+ vehicles in the UK, most of which are parked more than 90% of the time, we want to avoid putting more on the road.

This is where a car club in London come into play; these cars are placed in areas where we don’t have enough owners to meet the demand from our drivers. That doesn’t mean we are going to stop looking for owners in these areas, in fact, it’s the opposite - the cars we deploy will have our new branding on, which we know is one of the main reasons for people joining Hiyacar car club in London and elsewhere, that goes for drivers and owners!

We don’t want our platform to be another go to market route for companies into local communities, so we have been very selective in our partnerships and will continue to do so. We teamed up with Toyota UK at the end of 2019 to test this concept and it has been a great partnership so far. Toyota led the way in supporting our NHS free hire offer during Lockdown which then prompted our owners to get involved and we want our car club in London to do the same.