Why own a car, when you can go get?

That's the slogan of one company providing an alternative to car ownership. Here's our experience with them.

Why not just have our own car?

Another time I'll write a full post about that, but suffice to say that car ownership is a pain in the neck. The servicing, the maintenance, the repairs, the parking, the traffic, the registration, the insurance, the cleaning...

For my wife and I, about 98% of our transport needs can be done on foot, by bike, by train, bus or ferry. Maybe 99% if you include rideshare. So we choose to avoid the pain (and cost) of car ownership.

However, car use (I think of it separately from car ownership) can be handy in certain situations. We had one of those situations last weekend. Here's how it went.

Booking a car

My wife signed up for GoGet, and booked the car online for the time window she needed it.

As a first-timer, she received her little membership card in the mail. On the day of the booking, GoGet sent her a reminder email about 20 minutes before the booking started.

Grabbing the car

The reminder email also gave the exact location of the car, which was about 250m from us.

It was easy to find with the orange branding.

As soon as the booking started, we could swipe the membership card over the built-in sensor behind the windscreen, to unlock the doors.

Inside, the car key itself was attached to the car on a retractable cord. Handy for never losing the key. :)

There's also a fuel card attached if the car need refilling. GoGet pays for the fuel, but we're charged a per-km fee to cover our usage.

Summary

GoGet seems most suitable for short, occasional uses within the city. Convenience trips more so than long driving.

There are also other options available including rental cars, Car Next Door and rideshare. This post is not intended to be an add for GoGet.

On this occasion my wife chose GoGet for the ability to have the car overnight and because car rental prices are a bit high right now. Also it was an advantage to pick up the car just around the corner, rather than at a rental company location.

Psychology of cost

It seems expensive when you first look at the hire cost. But the idea is that it's a replacement to owning a rarely-used car.

So while the hire cost may look high; when compared to paying for registration, insurance and servicing etc, it's quite affordable - if used only occasionally.

I guess that we're essentially splitting the cost of car ownership with the other users. Much better than having to pay the whole lot, when we rarely need a car.

Comments

What to do with 128 pens?

I never need buy a pen again. Ever. The pen round-up. I searched the house for pens and gathered them up. We had 128. Woah - that's more than I expected. Then it was test-time. (You can get a lot done watching summer sport ;). Good ones went on the table. Broken ones in the box. Pen operations I saved a few 'broken' pens, by taking working insides and matching them with functional outsides. Particularly much-loved pens, for sentimental reasons, were given a life-extending 'ink transplant'. Final Tally We ended up with 67 broken pens and 61 good ones. And about 10 pencils. What to do with 67 broken pens? In my city Biome recycles pens . It's as easy as taking them into the store and dropping them into the giant collection box. Decluttering and recycling together - I love it. A lifetime of pens An average pen writes 45,000 words. So that dedicated shopping list pen on the fridge could write a 20-word shopping list for 43 years. Our 61 pens repre...

How to waste a year's wages

A friend recently asked me why it is that so many people (on good incomes) are struggling to save. Often the big three money areas are housing, transport and food. In one sense these are necessary items. But what we spend on them is often way more than necessary. I crunched some numbers on how much extra my wife and I could spend on these things - if for some reason we wanted to burn our money. 1. Housing Our apartment is fairly nice, but also cost-effective. I've mentioned how choosing it saves us $1,800 per year , compared to a similar one we saw. The high end of 2-bedroom apartments in our suburb is $305 per week more than our apartment. Not $305 per week. $305 per week more than ours is. I cannot get over that. Sure it's new and modern-looking, but that's a lot of money. It's an extra $15,860 per year above what we pay. 2. Transport The Australian Automobile Association lists the costs of owning and running a car. It includes many often-overlooked c...

Why millionaires don't "feel" rich

We're wealthier than ever - so why don't we feel like it? Australia has gone almost three decades without recession. The stock market recently hit a record high. Our wages are record highs. Home loan rates are at record lows. We live in one of the richest countries in the world at the richest point in history. So what's wrong? Comparison Wealth is relative. So what do we compare to? Where we expect to be? "When your wages growth is only 2 or 3 per cent, you don't feel as well-off as when it's going up 10 per cent. That's that nominal distortion that people often suffer from" , says economist Shane Oliver, and that "expectations have grown a lot faster than reality." We're earning more than last year, but we want even more. So compared to our imaginary situation, we see ourselves as worse off. What we see around us? Shane Oliver again. "If you think about it - Australians today are a lot wealthier. They're living far ric...

But wait... there's less!

Search This Blog