Coppola Comment

Did you know that most cars do nothing for 23 hours a day? Yes, they are totally idle. Sleeping safely in their owner's garage, or on his drive, or at her place of work, or in the station car park. Shocking, isn't it? What a terrible waste of assets. We should ensure that all these cars are DRIVEN. All the time. But there is a reason why all these cars are idle. Their owners are busy doing something else. Many people who drive to work, or to the station, do jobs that they love, that they have the skills to do, and that earn them a good living. Should these people give up their jobs and embark on new careers ferrying people around for money, just so their cars don't stay idle for large parts of the day? Really? No-one in their right mind would give up a job that was sufficiently well-paid for a quality car to be affordable, in order to drive for Uber (or any other "car sharing" business, for that matter). The remuneration just isn't that good....

Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion on the "Sharing Economy" at the Battle of Ideas. Benita Matovska, who describes herself as "chief sharer" of the comparison website Compare & Share , enthused about how the Sharing Economy would build communities, transform capitalism and restore the planet. "It's all about trust," she said. No it isn't. It's all about money. Here's what Matovska herself says on the Compare & Share website. I was trying to book a family holiday in Morocco - when we travel as a family we're quite adventurous, we like to share, meet real people and have those amazing money can't buy experiences.... I'm sure everybody would like to have experiences money can't buy. But actually she wasn't after a "money can't buy" experience. She was after an expensive experience at a cheap price: I spent hours searching through site after site and not finding the unique holiday exp...