The cost of running a new small/medium hatch is ~£5000 pa (£100 pw). Lease is ~£250 pm (£3k pa), insurance (say) £500, servicing + tyres + tax £500, fuel ~£1000.

S/h may be ~£3-4k pa - lease costs offset by depreciation and higher repair costs.

Taxi or occasional car share for longer journeys for city dwellers may make a lot of sense. It also gets rid of the hassle factor associated with car ownership.

Maintenance, cleaning, servicing, repairs, vehicle tracking, insurance etc are all completely soluble. Credit and driving record checks before you join the club. Although different to the "rent a scooter" schemes the principles for the rest already exist.

As with any other service there are likely to be peaks in demand which need to be managed. The obvious solution is time flexible pricing - if you desperately need to travel at 08.00 or 17.00 you will pay a premium. Flex your demand and the price will fall.

Ultimately there will be a price attached to personal car ownership - it is a personal choice. But creating barriers where none really exist is there is pointless.

Good points Andy. However as regards time of use there is a lot that can be done. If all the cars in a pool are managed Uber-style then differential pricing can be applied to help smooth out some of the peaks. As it stands I suggest the school run, commuting, shopping are largely separate peaks and troughs. Big Brother monitoring could weed out the anti-social element who leave cars dirty or uncharged. Customers with good records could get favourable rates.

Being retired my use is flexible on most occasions. If they priced like Uber or airlines I could time much of my use to low rate slots. You can even see pricing models where they might want cars repositioning and make costs very cheap indeed. A bit like flying standby.
Not as flexible as having my own car but the cost per mile could be very attractive.

Maybe we could have have an army of electric scooters to takes to/from the station, etc, rather like Boris bikes? :-)

I suspect my less than enthusiastic experience (including of pool cars) and views stem from it not really working for my own industry (as was) - Building Services consulting engineers, where we often had to go out on a site visit (meeting, surveying, inspection) at very short notice and for long periods/distances, which meant we would go directly home afterwards, which would not be conducive to car sharing/pooling schemes.

Besides, we never had enough car parking spaces to house them and our own cars (which often we never had either!). I think what would be helpful is firms that respect and look after their staff generally and encourage living locally (where possible) to reduce the need for car or long train-ride commuting, which would reduce the number of car parking spaces needed, 'car allowances' and perhaps migh make car pooling/renting by day more cost-effective.

It was annoying that often I and another colleague were going to the same meeting but had to use our own cars because we didn't live anywhere near eachother to car-share.

I think making home ownership and the cost-to-move home cheaper and easier would be very helpful, which is more governmental level stuff. Unfortunately demand (increasing population) being so high means there's little they can do without (pardon the pun) mortgaging the country up to the hilt to try and keep up. Until workforce mobility improves, traffic will still be bad at rush hour times.

I think some people.careers/companies have seen over the past 2 years that some jobs/firms can operate well with some/all home/remote working, but many cannot, whether for logisitical, monetary or management/morale or training reasons.

Hopefully it will shake things out so that when (not if) 'normality' resumes, many people and firms/organisations will have a much better handle on how they and their staff can work optimally for the benefit of all.

Only ~ 17% of the UK live in rural areas, the rest are urban. This includes 20m (36%) in major conurbations, and 26m (47% living in urban cities and towns.

The logistics associated with where we live has evolved as a result of cheap and easy personal transport - family, friends, jobs, schooling, retail parks, etc. Having let the genie out the bottle (so to speak) it is going to be neither quick nor easy to get it back in.

Rural folk need transport almost daily for shopping, schools, job etc and are very unlikely to see car share/hire schemes as workable. Public transport in these areas is unlikely for the foreseeable future to be economically feasible.

Those in larger towns and cities could live their allotted 3 score and 10 without ever owning a car. and may willingly organise their lives to use a car only occasionally. Younger folk are typically more receptive to new ideas and many don't even take a driving test as they don't carry the "baggage" that many older folk do.

Car share schemes will not suit everyone or those whose job still requires travel flexibility, but it will appeal to an increasingly large number. There are clear environmental and personal economic benefits.

I don't expect it to become mandatory - but policies (emissions zones, parking permits, taxation, etc) will almost certainly favour car share over personal ownership.

Good points. I think that giving everyone options and not pricing those out of one or t'other because of personal circumstance is the best way forward.

Policy-makers should not (as they often done in the past) heavily penalise one group of people who cannot either afford or physically cannot change to whatever 'green' X or Y being proposed.

They could start by making it far easier in planning rules to get new build homes (including flats) fitted with PV panels on the roof to help provide some electricity to the grid to offset the extra taken by EVs.

That and giving new housing developments the necessary cabling ready to go and sufficient space to install secure/robust rapid EV chargers in allocated spaces (especially for terraced houses and flats), to take advantage of better/cheaper tech as it eventually comes in over the next few decades.

After a spell of PV panels being installed on homes about 8-10 years ago, they appear to have for some reason fallen out of favour and I rarely see them on new builds, except a few high-end properties. Oddly enough I do see some EV chargers being installed on new build houses, but no PV panels.

Strangely also PV panels are rarely stipulated/installed on new build offices or industrial/retail buildings, most of which would be ripe for them for the same reasons as above, but would earn the owners far more due to the high building footprint, hopefully offsetting those overly high rates charges based on property footprint rather than usable area. Similar charging point issues could be avoided if planning ahead were better as above.

I suppose the fundamental question is the historical decline in self-sufficiency. Very few people are equipped to survive cut off from the outside world these days. In my youth my mother would go to the local shopping street every day or two on her bike, which limited the amount she could carry. When this became difficult some traders delivered to the house, and we had weekly visits from a greengrocer (horse and cart) and the Corona pop-man. There were never any trips by car to a supermarket.

Weekly shops by public transport would be impossible, given the quantity of stuff to be carried. So ingrained habits might need some adaptation.