I want to own my car, not rent a shared one via an app

Iwas thinking, as I stepped into the Zipcar tethered at the end of my street, whether it is really any great surprise that new car registrations plunged by 5.6 per cent last year. Who wants to own a car – or much else for that matter – when we can revel in the great sharing economy, in this instance by renting a vehicle by the hour via the Zipcar platform?

Well, actually, no. There is no Zipcar in my village, and I doubt there ever will be one, for all the hype we have been fed about the sharing economy. In future, we are told, we will share cars via smartphone app, sublet our rented homes by the day when we are not using them and stream all music without actually owning it.

But it was another side to the sharing economy that caught my eye recently: a photograph of a huge pile of Chinese bicycles waiting to be scrapped. They had belonged to a bike-sharing company that had gone bust as a result of vast over-supply. So much for sharing as a means of making more efficient use of machinery.

Then there was the company that allowed Chinese city-dwellers to hire umbrellas by the half hour – an experiment that ended when 300,000 umbrellas went missing. I could have spotted the flaw in its business model a mile off, given that it relied on trusting people to return the umbrellas when their half-hour was up. I remember a “green bike” scheme in Cambridge in the 1990s that folded after many of the bikes ended up in the River Cam.

There is nothing new about a sharing economy: we have always hired equipment – everything from sandblasters to champagne glasses – when it makes no economic sense to buy it. There is, however, a simple lesson to remember: when hire businesses are backed by hefty deposits and proper contracts – as London’s Boris bike scheme is – they can work. But when they are based on trust, they come unstuck.

The hype over the sharing economy tends to ignore how we actually live. Most of it comes from people in densely-packed urban centres. If you live in a rural area, the economics of hiring a car are very different. I might not spend much time behind the wheel of my outright-owned vehicle. But my journey today involves visiting the dump, then driving to a remote furniture workshop, then diverting to do some food shopping. I might be out for several hours. Do I want to be fiddling around with a smartphone in each location on the off-chance I can find a car to share, or do I want to get straight in my vehicle and go? There is no choice, really.

Like other owners of diesel cars, I have heard government threats to tax our vehicles out of existence and am hanging on to mine until there is a reasonable supply of affordable second-hand petrol hybrid cars on the market. That is the real reason, I am sure, why car sales fell sharply last year. But yes, I will be buying my own once again and, no, I won’t be relying on hailing one by smartphone.