Ford takes novel path: It's promoting loaners

Ford last month sent letters to 14,000 of its American drivers with an unusual suggestion: For extra cash, they could rent their cars to fellow urbanites wanting a cheap ride.

America's second-biggest auto giant wouldn't directly sell any additional cars or trucks off the arrangement; it wouldn't even take a cut. But it would put Ford closer to the front of a movement in which cars are shared, ignored or Uber-ed - not bought.

The "peer-to-peer" rental experiment is only the latest weird move for America's auto powerhouse, maker of the F-150 and Model T. Last month, Ford launched a pay-as-you-go network of shareable, on-demand cars in London, called GoDrive.

And this week, the car giant introduced a new foldable, battery-powered "e-bike," the MoDe:Flex, with companion smartphone and Apple Watch apps that alert cyclists to weather, directions, and even upcoming potholes.

Call it a late-life identity crisis. Ford and other carmakers, the chief benefactors of America's auto addiction, are suddenly facing a future in which car buying is a thing of the past. That future, of course, could still be far off: U.S. auto sales are running at a rate that could hit 17 million new cars this year, a 14-year high.

But in the meantime, car-sharing and taxi services like Lyft, Uber, and Zipcar have exploded in cities where traffic and parking prices have soared.

Instead of depending on the business model that's kept them going all these years, rolling new cars and trucks off the lot, Ford is trying desperately to, in the words of chief executive Mark Fields, "challenge custom and question tradition" - even if that tradition helped it survive.

"We've been watching how mobility has changed in recent months and are very interested in learning how this would appeal," said David McClelland, a vice president of marketing at Ford Motor Credit, the automaker's lending arm. "It's really important for us to learn what our customers do, what they rent out, and, as a result, what our next steps will be."

The car-sharing program, running now through November, will cover cars, trucks, and SUVs in six of America's younger cities: Berkeley and Oakland, Calif.; San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Chicago; and Washington. The Ford-financed vehicles are rented to prescreened drivers through Getaround, an Airbnb for cars, for anywhere between $5 and $9 an hour.

Getaround takes a 40 percent cut, but Ford gets a few perks, too: The car owners get more money to pay off loans, and the renters take a test drive that could persuade them to buy a Ford, if they ever buy a car at all.

But Ford isn't just betting all on car rentals or smart bikes. On Tuesday, Ford announced its team in Palo Alto, Calif., focused on self-driving vehicles was moving from research to "advanced engineering." The carmaker also said it would install new driver-assist technologies (sometimes called "semi-driverless" upgrades, like highway auto-pilot and automatic brakes) across its fleet within five years.

And Ford executives cited a poll by researcher Penn Schoen Berland that found one-third of American millennials were interested in renting out their stuff in order to boost their income, with most ranking "rides in a car" as the second-best rentable behind books.