HiGear

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

~ the obituary ~

HiGear was peer-to-peer car rental for cars nobody rents out. The idea was that an expensive car sits unused most of the week, so its owner should be able to list it, and a stranger should be able to book it for a weekend at a rate the owner would never see from a parking space. It went live in the San Francisco Bay Area in July 2011 and added Los Angeles on 1 November. Rentals ran from a hundred and twenty-five to six hundred dollars a day with insurance charged on top, the typical booking was three days, and by the autumn there were more than two hundred cars listed and fifty more arriving every month.

It was not a small operation for its age. Over five thousand members, three hundred cars listed by the end, twenty-five thousand hours of car sharing booked by November, and a one and a third million dollar seed round announced in October 2011 with BV Capital and Battery Ventures in it, alongside 500 Startups and an early Zipcar investor. The founders had both built and sold companies before. The business they were in was essentially a trust-screening business wearing a marketplace costume.

~ the case file ~

~ the four cars ~

In December 2011 a criminal ring booked and kept four cars. They did it by defeating exactly the thing HiGear was selling. Every check HiGear ran came back clean, because every document in the application had been stolen from a real person who had earned that clean record. The founders put the total value of the four cars at around three hundred thousand dollars. TechCrunch reported four hundred thousand, and an Australian outlet rounded that up again to nearly half a million, so the number you remember depends on who you read.

New reservations stopped immediately after the incident. TechCrunch broke the closure on 1 January 2012 and published the founders' entire member email, which went out the next day, and the reasoning in it is unusually honest for a shutdown letter. Identity fraud cannot be eliminated on the internet, they wrote, naming Amazon and eBay as companies that lose millions to it every year, and when that ordinary fraud rate is multiplied by a seventy thousand dollar average loss it creates an untenable situation. The conclusion was that HiGear had to be shut down to stop organized crime using it again, and that this was what protecting the car owners required.

The premise of the whole company was a car expensive enough to be worth renting and cheap enough to risk. There was no local version of that premise. In Turkey the tax regime makes an imported car cost a multiple of its American price, so the seventy thousand dollar car in HiGear's listings is a car that represents somebody's entire net worth here. You park that in a garage and insure it against the neighborhood. You do not hand it to a stranger with a verified email address.

~ the site that never said a word ~

HiGear's homepage never carried a notice. The archive holds captures from 3, 4, 11, 16 and 22 January and from 5 February 2012. Every single one of them shows the normal site under its normal title, offering peer-to-peer car sharing for luxury and exotic rentals, describing a service that had stopped taking bookings in December. The farewell existed as an email and in a technology blog's transcription of it, and nowhere on the product itself.

On 27 February 2012 the assets went to Rent2Buy, and the domain started redirecting there the following day. The old /about/ pages were rewritten in place as Rent2Buy marketing and served off HiGear's own hostname, so for a while the dead brand's URLs were advertising the buyer. Both companies then began describing the previous two months as a pause in service rather than a closure, which is the kind of word that only becomes available after the fact.

~ what it pointed at on the way out ~

The shutdown letter recommended the competition by name, telling members that Getaround and RelayRides offered adequate safety procedures and protection. Both were still trading thirteen years later: RelayRides renamed itself Turo and went on to file for a public listing, and Getaround ran until its American operation closed in February 2025. The risk HiGear could not carry was still there for both of them. It just got underwritten and priced into the cost of a booking by companies big enough to average the losses across a fleet.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »