The Evening Standard mentioned www.drive-now.com and www.go-drive.com. The former operates in Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Waltham Forest boroughs and the latter currently only has cars in central London. Both are offering electric cars - the former BMW i3s and the latter Ford Focuses.
Go-drive offers free membership, which is good as there's no incentive to use the cars just to get money's worth, and it doesn't add to the cost of being in more than one car club / hire scheme to get the flexibility. Drive-now asks for a one off joining fee of £29 currently - no annual renewal.
Go-drive uses designated parking places for the cars, but you can return the car to any free one. It seems that the cars can only be hired 15 minutes in advance. This is pitched as no need to plan in advance, but if you want a car at a specific time it could be a bit annoying.
Drive-now does not have designated parking places and does allow you to pin a car down for up to 8 hours, though you have to pay for that. That's a downside of the park it anywhere operational model.
Each of the systems has its own app, but we can hope that some whizz-kid can come up with an app that works on all the cars in schemes that one is a member of. It seems likely that hirers will want a nearby car, rather than a specific club's car and a lot of the time they are not going to care what model of car it is.
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