Here at Car and Driver , We've Been Running a Car-Sharing Program for Six Decades

From the March 2017 issue

You hear a lot these days about “car sharing,” the vehicle-usage model that allows people in a network to borrow cars as they need them. It’s the part of the post-ownership society that sounds most to me like a psychological substitution for wife swapping. But car sharing promises to increase per-vehicle efficiency, as the typical car or truck spends around 95 percent of its life just sitting around.

Here at Car and Driver, we’ve been running our own car-sharing pilot program for well on to six decades. It’s called the “car board,” and it allows editors to sign themselves out in a different car each night, depending on what’s in our lot. While successful in many regards—who doesn’t want to spend an evening in a new Lamborghini Huracán?—it is also a complete pain in the ass.

For one thing, you can’t leave items in any car. For me, that means schlepping my watchmaking loupes, Connect 4 game, and espresso machine into the office every day. And God forbid anyone leaves sunglasses or gum in a vehicle—they’re as good as gone, snapped up by one of the wolf-raised miscreants I like to call my co-workers. Egg salad, however, always seems to escape the purview of these janitorial endeavors.

Secondly, Bluetooth. I currently have the passkeys for 57 cars in my phone. An embarrassment of them are for Corvettes and AMGs, Rs and Vs. Sounds great, right? What’s the big deal about having so many cars linked to one’s phone? Well, how about this scenario: You arrive at work midway through a sensitive and ostensibly private conversation with your urologist. You park next to someone who’s just arrived at the office lot in the car you drove the day before. She’s sitting there, minding her own business, making notes in the car’s logbook. Then her car’s Bluetooth picks up your very personal and graphic conversation with your medical professional. I’m not saying this happened, and neither is she. But I’d imagine that small talk in the break room would be awkward for you both from there on out.

There’s a reason each of us still owns at least one ­personal vehicle that never shows up on the car board. Sharing has its ups and downs.