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  3. The Online Autocar Leasing Business When eBay, now the world’s biggest auction website, went online in 1995. many expected i

The Online Autocar Leasing Business When eBay, now the world’s biggest auction website, went online in 1995. many expected i

admin2013-07-08  75
问题                     The Online Autocar Leasing Business
    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 he 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.
The main barrier for the quick development of car-sharing is______.
选项 A、the high cost of rental and duration
B、the reliability of car-sharing firms
C、the reliability of car renters
D、the attitude of car-owners
答案B
解析 语义分析题。根据题干关键词barrier，car-sharing定位到原文第四段第二句：Themain hurdle will be carowners’reluctance to share so personal a possession and therequirement to keep it clean．其主要障碍是车主们不愿共用这种私人财产，且常常被要求保持汽车清洁。由此可知，车主的态度很关键，故选[D]项。[A]项“高额的租赁费和保险费”非主要障碍；[B]项“共享车公司的可信度”和[C]项“租车人的可信度”文中均未提。
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