FlightCar

» see flightcar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

FlightCar sold one observation: an airport parking lot is a fleet of cars that nobody is driving. You drove to a lot near the terminal and handed over the keys on your way to the gate. While you were gone the company rented your car to somebody who had just landed, and paid you by the mile it was driven. If nobody wanted it, you still got the parking for nothing, which was the part that made people try it once.

Shri Ganeshram was at MIT when a friend put him in touch with Rujul Zaparde and Kevin Petrovic, who were roommates at Princeton. All three were 18. They opened the first lot near San Francisco International in February 2013, with Zaparde as CEO, and ran the whole operation out of it. By the middle of that first year the San Francisco side was taking in around a thousand cars a month and keeping about eighty on the lot at any one time, with roughly thirty staff split between San Francisco and Boston.

None of this could have happened where I live. The model is priced against American airport parking, which costs enough per day that handing your car to a stranger starts to sound sensible, and it needs an insurance market willing to write that stranger a policy. FlightCar never operated outside the United States. Parking at a Turkish airport has never cost enough to make anyone think this hard about it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Money arrived quickly. FlightCar raised more than $40 million in three years and reached twelve airports, with a payroll that went past ninety. The pitch worked on both ends of the deal: owners got free parking and a check, renters got a car cheaper than the counters inside the terminal. Drop-offs at the San Francisco lot climbed from about 600 a month in May 2013 to about 1,000 within weeks, and rentals over the same stretch went from 1,000 to 1,400.

~ the lawsuit ~

San Francisco sued in the summer of 2013. The city and the airport said FlightCar was a rental car company that had arranged not to be treated like one. The counters inside SFO handed the airport ten percent of gross and worked out of designated pickup areas; the airport wanted the same ten percent plus a $20 charge on every rental, and wanted the pickups moved. The airport's spokesman described it as enforcing a consistent standard. Zaparde's public answer was that the company would carry on working on the business, and it did.

~ the day it died ~

On 14 July 2016 FlightCar closed all twelve airport locations at once and sold its technology platform to Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America, where it was folded into the group working on new mobility services. Employees learned about it the same week the customers did. Forbes reported that some of the ninety-plus staff would move across to Mercedes. A former employee later told Digital Trends that "some" worked out to two people.

The reviews had been drifting the wrong way for a year, and the lots were always the expensive half of the idea. The domain answers nothing now, on either scheme. The last page the Internet Archive caught is dated 28 May 2016, six weeks before the end, and it is still advertising free parking.

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