FlightCar is a car-sharing company. We take your car and give it to someone else for a bit, and you get a cut. The idea is to erase an enormous chunk of money from both the rental industry (our prices are approximately half the average) and parking industry (we actually pay you to leave your car with us). So if you’re willing to let someone else take the wheel for a few days while you’re not using it, everyone wins.

But can we really claim greendom? Are we in fact helping the environment?

Yes.

In the past few years society has come up with numerous methods to keep cars off the road. The environmentally conscious have a plethora of options to avoid getting behind the wheel. Citizens of any major city can take the bus, use the train, ride a bike, join a carpool, or simply walk. The hope here is to reduce greenhouse emissions caused by a running car. But what about starting even earlier in the process? How can we reduce the number of cars needed?

One of the only publicly-funded studies addressing automobile manufacturing revealed that even producing fully electric cars still damages the environment substantially, and we’re not exactly producing the lightweight materials needed to make these green machines as fast as we’re mining for them. Not even close. This is where we hope to step in and do the most good.

It doesn’t end with our model, either. Many drivers that make the switch from a personal vehicle to services like ZipCar theoretically should drive the same amount, right? They totally don’t. Having to go through the process of renting out a car makes choosing public transit or biking that much easier. Who’s to say what other unintuitive consequences like this one apply?

FlightCar’s goal is not necessarily to bring down the number of drivers on the road at any given point, although we’d love to see a future where people drive less. Rather, we’re trying to lower the number of cars built. Our mission is to slay (or at least maul, maybe bludgeon) the dragon that is car-manufacturing. Typical car-rental companies acquire thousands of standard vehicles at each location around the country. If the industry followed a model more similar to FlightCar’s, there’d be no need for auto-manufacturers to build so many cars, and we could all use more fresh air.

- Julian