Building Car Sharing With Blockchain

Time is money. It goes without saying that these days this phrase has a bit more significant meaning since in our high-speed world no one wants to waste a second especially if this second can bring you money or take it from you.

Maybe the idea of car sharing came partially thanks to this quote. Many busy people not willing to deal with costs and responsibilities associated with car ownership prefer car sharing. Just imagine: your usual itinerary is just the way to an office and backs home and all the remained time your car is standing lonely at the parking lot and just wastes the time that can bring you money! Yes, this is the essence of car sharing. While standing there with no use other people who are not interested in car ownership but have a need in a car from time to time could drive your car around and bring it back later meanwhile bringing you money. Sounds like a good idea, right? But here comes the question of security. Since there are so many cases of scams and deceptions nowadays, sometimes we can’t even trust ourselves. So how could this problem be solved? The answer is blockchain. You might think it’s a weird idea but give it a few minutes to learn how blockchain can be helpful here and find out live examples of how blockchain has been already used in the car-sharing industry.

Highly-Secure Blockchain and Smart Contracts

You have already learned in our new blockchain study that it’s unfair to consider blockchain with cryptocurrencies only. There are so many industries such as economics, healthcare, logistics, etc. that have already been improved with blockchain. The car-sharing industry is not an exception. As the main characteristic of blockchain is high security there’s no better solution than blockchain that can solve the problem of security in transportation sharing.

If we dive deeper into the working system of car sharing it has many components and actors, such as owners, customers, insurance companies, etc. Blockchain is a perfect type of technology to create smart contracts that unite all of them, proceed with payments and collect data being completely secure and anonymous. The technology can help with profile security because you can create a verified profile that is encrypted but can be used in a smart contract to make sure you are who you say. Smart contract will be able to track detailed information about the driver and route and make the whole process automated. Yes, the whole process is automated. You don’t even need to talk to an owner of a car, all the information about the owner, their car and the customer will be visible in their profiles. The car can be unlocked with the help of a smartphone app. Up to now, it’s been a bit difficult to create proper security to remotely unlock and start a car because it can be hacked. But blockchain is here to be a solution to all these challenges.

So, obviously, blockchain is reasonable in the car-sharing industry but if we talk about insurance companies and payment processing there are a few questions here. The main one is that there’s still need to track your actions and activities just to provide security and have some control over your actions, especially since today all the information is electronic. On the one hand, it’s right to keep your actions visible but, on the other hand, it’s your private information that would be good to be kept anonymous. So probably blockchain will lead us to this future without those middlemen between you and the end goal still providing high security and efficiency.

Existing Startups

Let’s have a look at the already existing blockchain use cases in the car sharing industry. One of them is Darenta Crypto Carsharing. It’s a decentralized autonomous car rental service, that is managed by neither people nor executives. Everything on the platform will be regulated based on the feedback of the users registered via smart contracts. If for any reason a car owner constantly ignores requests from a renter or just the service or the attitude is unsatisfying, the car owner is banned. Instead, if a car owner regularly rents out their car to renters and regularly receives positive feedback, their profile gets a higher ranking.

Users with a good reputation will receive bonuses in the form of the promotion through the social networks groups and will be able to earn tokens by posting their feedback enabling them to regulate the relationships on the platform by their own in the future.

HireGo is another example of a successful blockchain integration into the car sharing industry. The service provides a decentralized structure and user control, decentralized P2P insurance and many other benefits that make the platform efficient and easy to use. The HGO tokens and smart contracts will be used for all transactions. Users can convert from and to other currencies within the HireGo application. Besides blockchain, the platform is empowered with IoT which allows physical access to the vehicles governed by ownership of the requisite tokens.

Therefore, car sharing offers freedom and convenience helping you get rid of all the responsibilities and additional costs of owning a car. It helps you enjoy all the benefits of driving a car and having access to it whenever you want meanwhile setting you free of a headache that every car owner has. All this empowered with blockchain makes the whole system fast and secure than ever before. Time is money. It goes without saying that these days this phrase has a bit more significant meaning since in our high-speed world no one wants to waste a second especially if this second can bring you money or take them from you.