Would you like to earn cash from your car? You can with Fleet. Recently I spoke to Richard Herlihy from Fleet about the company’s new car sharing app.
Fleet is a brand new type of car-sharing app that lets Irish car owners rent out under-used vehicles to make extra money on the side and help cover their running costs. In turn, Fleet users get to rent cars as and when they need them, ranging from the affordable to more luxurious models for special occasions.
We’ve made the entire process as simple as possible. Everything is done in-app: browse a range of cars across Ireland, pick the one you like, and submit a request. Once a booking is confirmed, you simply meet the owner, survey the car, collect the keys, and sign-off for insurance in the app.
We offer a very different type of experience to traditional car hire. We have no fixed location: the cars on Fleet (122 currently and growing) are spread throughout Ireland, from big cities to small towns.
Secondly, we can promise you a far better service than the hidden fees and massive deposits that sometimes riddle car hire. The app’s built-in rating system and tight-knit community help you pick and choose owners or drivers to your heart’s content. The best (and friendliest!) users naturally rise to the top of the food chain. The map feature we recently added also now lets you see which cars are available in your neck of the woods, helping you connect with local owners.
Lastly, Fleet offers an enormous range of flexibility not possible with traditional car hire. Nearly every type of car is represented, from convertibles and SUVs, to hybrids and electrics. Many of our owners also offer delivery and collection for extra fees.
This is the most appealing thing about Fleet: it’s free to list as many cars as you like! We only charge a commission when you confirm a rental. In addition, the burden of the service fee and insurance price is paid by the renter – owners get to pocket at least 95% of the fee they list for. Lastly, the app’s competitive marketplace means many popular cars are available for as little as €25-€40 per day, insurance included.
Every car rented through Fleet is fully covered by our insurance partners, AXA. This means that from the moment you hand over the keys, your car and its temporary driver are protected by a special peer-to-peer insurance policy and 24 hour breakdown assistance. Any claims made during a Fleet rental will have no effect on your existing insurance.
In addition, we vet all drivers on the platform before they’re able to issue a booking request: users are checked for penalty points and must be aged 25 or over and claim free before they can rent any car on the platform.
Fleet has over 100 cars listed for hire around IrelandAll cars shared through Fleet are expected to be returned in the same condition they were received in. So, for example, if a car is shared with a full tank of petrol, that’s how it must be returned. In addition, we give owners the option of adding a cleaning fee charge for each rental to cover extra costs.
Currently, we have a mix of standard models from Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi. However, lately we’ve seen a number of garages in the Dublin area putting up a range of new hybrid and electric cars for test drive, including Yuko’s new on-demand car-sharing club.
Though the platform is currently limited to cars no older than 13 years, we’re planning to expand the app to cover classic cars and more exotic models in the very near future.
We’re just in the process of rolling out the app to Northern Ireland. Ireland is the perfect size to incubate our model, so as things continue to go well here, we’re planning to begin trials in the rest of the UK in 2018. We’re also exploring numerous technologies that we’re hoping to integrate into the platform such as keyless access and GPS technologies.