The sharing economy continues to roar on, with PricewaterhouseCoopers estimating the global revenue will soar to $335 billion in 2025, up from $15 billion in 2014.
And peer-to-peer car sharing, while still niche, might just be the next segment of the sharing economy to explode.
But first, people need to be aware of its existence. Peer-to-peer car rental services such as Getaround and Turo provide an alternative to renting a vehicle from a big-name company and allow people to book cars from local hosts.
CivicScience has asked U.S. adults since May about their experience using peer-to-peer car sharing services, and the study found only 2% of respondents have tried car sharing, while 55% had never heard of it.
So while overall numbers for car sharing are still obviously low, there are bright spots in the study: 3% plan to try the services.
Car Sharing by Age and Gender
For starters, Gen Z were 125% more likely to have tried car sharing compared to the next closest age group, Millennials. Gen X and Baby Boomers, as of now, do not seem particularly interested in the concept.
Drilling down a bit deeper on the age question, the split seems to appear at age 30 for purposes of this study. People under 30 were much more likely to have tried and liked car sharing, and are overwhelmingly more likely to want to try it in the future.
Men were more likely to have tried car sharing – and more likely to try in the future – than women.
City Folks and Lyft Users Like Car Sharing
Unsurprisingly, city dwellers were much more apt to have given car sharing a whirl, and they were also twice as likely to have enjoyed the experience, compared to people who live in the suburbs or in rural areas.
Interestingly, Lyft users were more likely than Uber users to have tried either Getaround or Turo by a 42% margin, and were also more likely to say they’d try it in the future.
With car sharing still in its relative infancy, it’s difficult to get a true handle on how far it will go. But preliminary research shows young male city residents as a potential target audience, and certainly many segments of the economy have grown exponentially with that population as their target audience.