Say you’d like to make a few extra bucks by driving for ride hailing services Lyft and Uber or on-demand delivery services like Postmates, but your old car won’t pass muster with these companies. Or maybe you don’t want to put the miles on your personal car. Or maybe you don’t even have a car of your own.
That’s where Evercar comes in. It maintains a fleet of shared vehicles in Los Angeles and, as of September, San Francisco and Oakland. All the vehicles are preapproved by major on-demand and ride hailing companies, while drivers need only submit an application and a $25 nonrefundable fee. Once you’re clear, Evercar will give you the documentation you need to sign up as a driver with a service, as well as access to the fleet and instructions on how to use the cars. Then you can use an Evercar for whatever service you like for $5 to $8 per hour, depending on your location, which covers fuel, maintenance, and insurance with no mileage limits.
You can’t take an Evercar home, unless you reserve it for that time and pay the $8 an hour to have it sit in your driveway, which defeats the service’s purpose. But you can pick up and drop off an Evercar from its home garage any time of day, so night owls can definitely apply.
The service is headquartered in Los Angeles, where it began, and where it has 1200 members sharing a fleet of more than 100 vehicles, which they’ve driven more than a million total miles. The fleet is mostly Toyota Priuses, with a smattering of Nissan Leafs available in LA.
The number of cars in the LA fleet as of May 2016 was only 43, which shows how quickly the company is growing. According to a press release, Evercar already has financing in place to buy up to 3,000 more vehicles in the next year, some of which will be EVs for the Bay Area, plus further bulking up of the Los Angeles fleet and expansion of its services.