The booming sharing economy is shaking up industries from music to office space. But there’s one key part of our lives that has remained relatively undisrupted. While websites such as Airbnb have enabled home owners to offer their properties up to a global audience of potential holidaymakers, and streaming services such as Spotify have largely confined trips to music shops to the history books, car-sharing remains pretty embryonic compared with the major players in rival industries.

The idea isn’t a new one, but there have been some false starts and only in more recent years has there been interest from businesses with deep pockets.

WhipCar, founded in 2009, described itself as the world’s first peer-to-peer car rental service, but went out of business four years later. Streetcar, which owned its own fleet of cars, started up way back in 2004 and was bought by Zipcar in 2011, which in turn was snapped up by rental giant Avis in 2013.

Only a few major rivals exist in the UK, such as easyCar, HiyaCar and DriveNow (launched by BMW and Sixt), but there are some burgeoning European and American players with increasingly bigger backers.