Will Zipcar's hot IPO pave the way for car sharing startups?

Zipcar’s better-than-anticipated Nasdaq debut this week may be good news for the country’s biggest name in car sharing. It could also help jumpstart a small crew of startups offering a new twist on the traditional car sharing model.

Zipcar is among the first generation of collaborative consumption companies, which facilitate the lending and sharing, rather than the purchasing, of goods, as Lauren Anderson, innovation strategist and project manager at CC Lab, a consultancy that advises companies on launching and scaling collaborative consumption, told Sustainable Industries recently.

If Zipcar’s IPO represents that first wave of companies coming of age, it’s also paving the way for what Anderson says is the second generation of collaborative consumption ventures – ones that provide the technology to allow people to pool their own resources.

In San Francisco, that includes three young companies – Spride Share, Getaround and RelayRides – that allow car owners to rent their personal vehicles to other members. (Stay tuned for an in-depth look at the San Francisco’ fledgling peer-to-peer car sharing scene in the upcoming print issue of Sustainable Industries.)

These startups aren’t positioning themselves as going head-to-head with Zipcar. Rather, they say they can coexist with and augment Zipcar and other car sharing services.

“Our competitor is not Zipcar,” RelayRides founder Shelby Clark said. “It’s car ownership.”

These second generation car sharing startups say that not owning their own fleets gives them a flexibility that Zipcar lacks. Maintaining its own fleet means high fixed costs for the newly public company. While its model works well in urban cores and near college campuses, it doesn’t export well to less-dense areas.

The peer-to-peer startups, meanwhile, make their money by taking a percentage of each rental transaction and say their business models can work anywhere from downtown to the ‘burbs.

“One of the things that’s most exciting is that we can operate profitably in any area,” Clark said. 

Massachusetts-based Zipcar raised $174.3 million in its initial public offering on Thursday. Its stock debuted at $30 per share, a jump of almost 70 percent over its initial offering price.

Not bad for a company that’s still far from profitability. As Zipcar disclosed in its S-1 filing: “We have experienced net losses in each year since our inception ... We do not know if our business operations will become profitable or if we will continue to incur net losses in 2011 and beyond. We expect to incur significant future expenses as we develop and expand our business, which will make it harder for us to achieve and maintain future profitability.”