Day: December 4, 2014

Filed under: Etc., Earnings/Financials, India

ZipCar is a great tool if you’re the city dwelling, car-ownership-averse sort. It’s even somewhat affordable, with prices from $6 a month and driving rates from $8 to $10 an hour. A ZipCar-like Indian company called Zoomcar India Pvt. is taking that affordability to the extreme, offering rentals of the Mahindra e2o, a small city-minded EV for just 73 cents an hour.

Now, obviously there’s a currency thing at play here. With one US dollar translating to about 61 Indian rupees, and a cursory search for India’s daily minimum wage yielding between $2.18 to $3.40, it’s fairly clear that while the deal is is ludicrously affordable to Americans, there are still many Indians who will be priced out.

According to Bloomberg, there are three ZipCar-like companies operating in India, offering cars like the Ford Figo, Tata Nano and Volkswagen Polo for prices ranging from 70 to 99 rupees ($1.13 to $1.60). Fancy something bigger and one company will even let you snag a Mercedes-Benz E-Class for $19 an hour.

The growing rental industry, Bloomberg reports, is due in large part to India’s youth joining the workforce while eschewing cars.

"Buying a car is a total waste of money," Shrinidhi Hande, a 31-year-old business analyst from Chennai told Bloomberg. "Using services such as Myles or Zoomcar, I get to drive the latest models without having to pay monthly installments, insurance or maintenance."

Quick! Someone cue up the story about how millennials are the same everywhere.

India’s ZipCar equivalent will rent you a car for 73 cents an hour originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 28 Nov 2014 15:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Etc.

Gas prices traditionally take a dive come winter, as demand cools faster than the daily temperature and producers switch to the cheaper "winter blend" of gas. That, however, doesn’t account for the precipitous fall in prices, with 2014’s nationwide average $3.69 high point, to last week’s average of just $2.79. In fact, prices are expected to dive even further in the coming weeks.

According to Bloomberg, fuel prices in parts of the US could be set to plunge even further than they already have, hitting numbers that haven’t been seen since the global economy began it’s slow trudge out of the Great Recession, back in 2009. That could mean gas going for $2 a gallon. In fact, some fueling stations in the south and Midwest are already shilling dino juice for just $2.20 a gallon.

"We could see the cheapest one percent of stations get within a few pennies of $1.99 over the next two weeks," Patrick DeHaan, an analyst at GasBuddy, told Bloomberg. "We’ll see at least one station in the nation at $2 by Christmas. And that’s not really a prediction at all. That’s more like a certainty."

Why the big plunge? Well, the usual suspects – winter fuel and falling demand – are being accompanied by OPEC’s curious decision to maintain its production pace of 30 million barrels per day.

"Given that OPEC has decided not to cut production and, for all intents and purposes, are entering into a market share war with the rest of the world, $2 a gallon could be in the cards," Andy Lipow, the president of Lipow Oil Associates, told Bloomberg.

Provided OPEC continues fighting for market share and ignoring the laws of supply and demand, things should continue being easy going for American consumers at the pump.

Experts predicting sub-$2/gallon gas for parts of US soon originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 01 Dec 2014 17:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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