Australian start-up Car Next Door will be rebranded and launched into the United States next year in a bid by new owner Uber to shake-up car rental and car ownership.
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The tech giant's move will come 10 months after Uber acquired Car Next Door in a deal reported to be worth about $50 million.
The Australian company, which will become known as Uber Carshare, lets users rent their vehicles to drivers by the hour or day using an app.
Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi, visiting Sydney this week, said he had been impressed with Car Next Door's growth in Australia over the past year and wanted to replicate its success overseas.
"When we bought Car Next Door it was always with a goal of expanding it globally," he said.
"The Uber brand is global, we operate in more than 600 cities all around the world, and we can take this product and expand it city by city."
Mr Khosrowshahi said fewer Americans were choosing to buy cars and the new service could help Uber make the case for "replacing car ownership" and getting more vehicles off roads.
"Owning a car used to be an American dream. That's not true any more. You can just push a button and get a car," he told AAP.
"(Uber Carshare) will start in urban centres where car ownership is prohibitively expensive but ultimately we think this can become a mass-market product.
"Shaking up markets is part of what Uber does."
The Car Next Door app will be rebranded as Uber Carshare on November 8, but will operate separately from Uber's ride-sharing app. Its US launch is scheduled for mid-2023.
More than 1.1 million people have used the service in Australia and New Zealand since its 2013 launch and its successful 2016 pitch on the TV show Shark Tank.
Unlike rivals, such as GoGet, Car Next Door does not own or maintain its fleet. Instead, users list their vehicles for hire on its platform or look up nearby vehicles to rent, accessing keys in a lockbox.
Co-founder and chief executive Will Davies said despite the Uber rebranding, his goal to disrupt the "one person, one car mentality" and take vehicles off the road remained unchanged.
The service was most commonly used by people looking to "rent a van if they've got a couch to pick up" or following a car breakdown, he said, but users were also choosing it over traditional holiday car hire firms.
"Increasingly, and while rental cars have become more and more expensive, we're getting people who use us to go away on long weekends," he said.
"We had by far our biggest period in Queensland over winter with people from NSW and Victoria renting cars for the weekend."
In Australia, car registrations climbed to more than 20.1 million in 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, even though the average distance covered by each vehicle fell by more than 1000 km between 2014 and 2021.
Australian Associated Press
