This is a story of Uber running a local Aussie startup to the ground. Founded in 2012, Aussie startup Car Next Door offered peer-to-peer car sharing through it’s own unique app for nearly a decade. Unlike most competition, Car Next Door stood out as a pure community platform, where the car owners and borrowers are the general public (not simply a fleet of cars owned by the provider).The business is now called Uber Car Share.

In 2022, Uber bought the business for an undisclosed sum. This was the beginning of an incredibly badly executed rebrand and ‘relaunch’ – where we may see the business completely run to the ground by poor management. Unfortunately it also means hundreds of Aussie car owners who have been renting their cars out through the app will lose their income stream.

It began with a reskin of the app and and website. All fundamentals of ‘test first, go live after’ went out the window. Most owners reportedly experienced zero bookings for over a month while the mobile app (an essential part of using the service) costantly crashed and glitched. And shockingly, they had managed to break most functionality of the platform in the process of a simple reskin.

Uber Car Share had also reportedly skimmed the support resources for the business, leaving a skeleton staff (based offshore of course!) to handle the chaos that ensued. Even with many owners beginning to pull their cars off the platform, and loyal borrowers ditching the app altogether, Uber is seemingly not resourcing the business any differently, with many claims that they may just be running it to the ground (since the business is technically a competitor to the Uber taxi platform).

News of the disaster has travelled fast and the American version of Car Next Door, “Turo”, has aggressiely entered the Aussie market in the lead up to Christmas. They have reportedly identified the trainwreck in progress and is aggressively marketing across the country to capture Uber Car Share’s market.

Competitive strategy or pure inability?