The Online Autocar Rents Traffic When eBay, now the world’s biggest auction website, went online in 1995, many expected it t

admin2014-06-13  36

问题                     The Online Autocar Rents Traffic
    When eBay, now the world’s biggest auction website, went online in 1995, many expected it to fail. Why would anyone buy used items from perfect strangers? Two new services WhipCar, which was launched in London on April 21st, and RelayRides, which will start up in Boston, Massachusetts, early this summer will face similar skepticism. Both aim to get car-owners to rent their vehicles to strangers when not using them themselves.
    At heart, both offerings are online exchanges. Car-owners and drivers register, contact one another through the site and agree to a rental contract. To ensure that both parties are trustworthy, WhipCar asks, among other things, for details of both the rented car’s registration and the renter’s license, and checks them against official data. It also provides insurance for the duration of the rental and a replacement car if there is an accident. In addition to these measures, RelayRides only accepts cars that have gone through a safety check and installs a device that allows them to be unlocked with a special card. This way, owners and renters do not have to meet, as they do with WhipCar.
    Both firms allow owners to set the price, taking a 15% cut. Even with the insurance premium and other fees added in, the firms expect the rental price to be lower than using a conventional car-rental firm or an urban car-sharing club. WhipCar provides suggestions for the prices different cars might fetch in various neighborhoods. Shortly after the site went live an Audi A4 in central London cost £ 10 ($ 15) an hour or £ 41 a day.
    Will the idea take off? The main hurdle will be car-owners’ reluctance to share so personal a possession and the requirement to keep it clean. The firms must also overcome a problem all exchanges face: attracting enough members to make the service useful.
    Yet cars are expensive, underused assets. On average, a British car is driven for less than an hour a day but costs about £ 5, 500 a year to own—a sum many would love to reduce in these straitened times. Drivers, for their part, are ever more willing to share a car. By 2016 some 4. 4 million Americans will he members of a car-sharing club, nearly ten times as many as today, projects Frost & Sullivan, a consultancy. On April 21st two big clubs, Britain’s Streetcar and America’s Zipcar, announced that they would loin forces. Pooling assets, it seems, is all the rage.
Compared with WhipCar, RelayRides______.

选项 A、lets owners to decide renters
B、is stricter with cars’ security
C、offers lower rental prices
D、provides more services

答案B

解析 语义分析题。根据题干关键词Compare,WhipCar,RelayRides定位到原文第二段和第三段。第二段倒数第二句提到:In addition to these measures,RelayRides only accepts cars that have gone through a safety check and installs a device that allows them to be unlocked with a special card.除了这些措施外,RelayRides只认可那些已通过安全检查的汽车,并且给这些租借汽车安装了一个用专用卡才能开启的装置。由此可知,RelayRides对汽车的安全要求比较严格,故选[B]项。[A]项“让车主决定租赁者”,文中未提;[C]项“价位更低”,文中未对比两公司的价位高低,但两公司的价位比传统的租赁公司价位低;[D]项“提供的服务更多”,文中未提。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/cgO4777K
0

最新回复(0)