“I used to have a work car in my previous job and now I work from home. So instead of buying a car straight away, I thought I’d try using a car-share company and see if it worked.
At the time I was living in Brunswick and there was a car through a car-sharing company less than 10 minutes walk from my house. Once I started using car share I found it was just so perfectly suited to what I needed.
I started out paying $50/month which worked out to be about 5 hours of driving time. Now I’ve been using it for about 18 months and I’ve changed to a plan that that costs $200/month (or 20 hours) because I’m using it a lot on weekends to look for a house”.
The average cost of running a car is over $12,000 a year and many people find they are paying for their car to sit in their driveway.
The beauty of car share is that you can pay by the hour. So say you need to pick someone up from the airport you could book a car for 2 hours, and save anywhere from $50-100 on taxi fares.
There are designated car parks for car sharing so when you have finished with your car, there are no hassles with finding a park.
As well as being an affordable alternative to owning a car, convenience and flexibility are car share’s big selling points for Sasha.
“I generally find there is a car available when I need one and so far cars have been located near where I live both here in Kensington and in Brunswick.
I can book the car for an hour or two and extend the booking if I need to. Even now while I am paying the highest rate [$200 month] its still only $2,400/year – that’s just so much cheaper than owning a car.
It’s worked for me so far but I’m looking to move to Footscray so hopefully there are some there otherwise I will be really disappointed!”
Story by Sarojini Krishnapillai