Investigating the Use of an Online Peer-to-Peer Car Sharing Service

Online peer-to-peer car sharing services are increasingly being used for ena-bling people to share cars between them. However, our body of knowledge about peer-to-peer car sharing is still limited in terms of understanding ac-tual use and which opportunities and challenges present for those who use them. In this paper, we investigate peer-to-peer car sharing between car-owners and car-borrowers as facilitated by the Australian car sharing ser-vice Car Next Door. We conducted a study with 6 car-owners and 10 car-borrowers. Our findings, outlined in four themes, suggest that P2P car shar-ing fuels different goals for both borrowers and owners. While it is com-plementing traditional means of transportation car sharing is also in itself a mean of mobility, for example, for recreational purposes. Further, the shar-ing service plays a central role in supporting the users to make it more con-venient to share cars, for example, by letting borrowers find and book cars instantly reducing resources needed to borrow a car. We further discuss our findings and relate it to existing literature providing opportunities and challenges for future research and design on car sharing in HCI.