Rei Vardi is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eon, a car rental company that is “building a mobility platform.” Rei explains the genesis of his business and what can now be seen as an exciting, disruptive business model: He was a college student in Boston. When his father planned to turn in the family Tesla, Rei was determined to keep it and pledged to make the payments. To do so, he rented the car to family and friends, and recalls some really bad arrangements, including a bank robbery. But his experiences sparked a novel concept… enabling EV car owners a new means of income. Since most cars sit idle 95% of the time, why not rent them out?

The discussion then focuses on how he de-risked the concept. Instead of an owner — “an amateur in the car rental space” — taking on the challenges of rentals to strangers, why not have a platform to manage a network and to remove the risk and hassle for car owners? For renters, why not create a new car rental model that makes renting easy, really easy? Forget rental locations and lines and consumer frustration.

Eon boasts that its network now is the easiest way to rent a car. The company only rents privately-owned electric vehicles, primarily Teslas, Rivians, and Lucids. There are no keys involved at all. More and more, its business partners — the car owners — are developing fleets of EVs for program participation that they post on the company’s website. Then renters get instructions on how to access the vehicles and use their phones to unlock and turn on the cars. Renters can even pre-warm or pre-cool the cars. They get explicit instructions on where and how to charge the vehicles too.

Owners put their cars on the platform and specify the terms they want… like car pick-up and drop-off location, the daily price, etc. Eon screens renters to assure a positive experience for the owners, and similarly stipulates a set of terms for owners… like vehicle cleanliness. Now, after eight years developing and scaling the model, Rei and his colleagues have over 3,000 cars in their network, with business activity in 50 cities across the nation. And the business model is popular, Rei notes that 45% of his renters are return renters. Check it out at Eonrides.com.