FlightCar (YC W13) lets car owners in San Francisco ditch their idle cars and get paid up to $400/mo

by Y Combinator8/5/2013

Got a car you don’t ever really drive? Wanna not pay for parking or worry about shuffling it around on the street every couple of days? Have an interest in actually making some money from that car that you’re not actually using while it’s sitting around on the street?

Well, car rental startup FlightCar might be able to help you out with the launch of a new program in which it keeps users’ cars for a month at a time and rent them out to travelers. The program, called FlightCar Monthly, is designed to appeal to a group of users who own a car in or near the city of San Francisco and find it kind of a hassle and want to profit off of that asset.

It works like this: car owners submit their cars to be rented from the airport, and someone from FlightCar comes and picks the car up and keeps it in the startup’s secure parking lot near the airport. Travelers are then able to rent that car during the month that FlightCar has it.

Depending on what type of automobile you have and how new it is, FlightCar is offering between $150 and $400 in guaranteed payments to rent the car out for the month. That is a slight deviation from the startup’s usual peer-to-peer plan, where travelers drop their cars off when flying out of town for blocks of time, and get free parking and a small bit of money if the car is rented out while they’re gone.

But let’s say the owner wants to get away for a weekend? What happens then? Well, car owners can use their car for free for up to four days per month, if it’s available during that time. If not, the company will offer users a car in the same class for use.

Read the full article on Techcrunch

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  • Y Combinator

    Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200). The startups move to Silicon