Car sharing in Melbourne means finding a car parked near you through an app, unlocking it with your phone, and driving off without ever speaking to anyone. Fuel, insurance and maintenance are bundled into the price, so it works out cheaper than a hire car for short trips and errands, and it’s become a genuine alternative to owning a second car for a lot of inner-city households.
Who’s operating in Melbourne now
- GoGet: Melbourne’s largest network by a wide margin. Hourly rates start around $8.50, daily rates from about $69, with fuel, insurance, registration and maintenance all included and no booking fees.
- Flexicar: the other major fleet-based operator, now owned by Hertz. Hourly rates start from roughly $11 with unlimited kilometres included, which suits longer single trips better than GoGet’s per-km model.
- Popcar: a smaller fleet with a hybrid hourly-plus-distance model, hourly rates around $8.90 to $18.90 depending on the vehicle, or daily rates from about $79 to $119 with 100km included and $0.48/km after that.
RACV is worth a mention because plenty of people still assume it runs its own fleet, the way it did years ago under “RACV Car Share, powered by Thrifty”. It doesn’t anymore. RACV’s current role is as a Flexicar partner, so RACV members get discounted rates through Flexicar rather than a separate RACV-branded car share service.
One that’s gone
If you remember Car Next Door, or its later rebrand as Uber Carshare, that peer-to-peer service (borrowing someone else’s private car rather than a company fleet car) shut down completely in September 2024, citing “operational challenges”. Uber has since pointed people toward Uber Rent, a traditional rental-car booking option, rather than anything peer-to-peer. There’s currently no direct peer-to-peer replacement operating at scale in Melbourne, so GoGet, Flexicar and Popcar are your fleet-based options for now.
Picking between them
- For availability, GoGet’s larger fleet generally means a closer car, especially inner-city.
- For a longer trip out of town, Flexicar’s unlimited-kilometre hourly rate can beat GoGet’s per-km charges once you’re covering real distance.
- All three include fuel and insurance in the price, but check the damage excess and whether it’s reducible, since that’s where the real cost difference between operators tends to show up.
- Membership models vary (free casual plans versus paid monthly plans with lower per-hour rates), so if you’ll use it weekly rather than occasionally, run the numbers on a paid plan before committing.
If you only need a car for a single trip rather than by the hour, it’s worth comparing against a hire car or chauffeur, or one of our rideshare options, especially for airport runs where parking and return-trip logistics eat into the car share savings.