Building the Airbnb of Car Rental for Pakistan: Lessons from HireACar Millions of cars sit parked 22 hours a day while millions of people can't get one when they need it. That gap is a marketplace. When we started building HireACar , a car rental marketplace for Pakistan , the way Airbnb is a marketplace for accommodation, the most common reaction we heard was: "People here will never hand their car keys to a stranger." They were half right. People won't hand their keys to a stranger . But they will hand them to a verified renter whose identity has been checked, whose booking is documented, and whose payment cleared before pickup. The problem was never trust as a concept; it was that nobody had built the infrastructure for it. The market hiding in plain sight Pakistan's car rental market has run on the same model for decades: small fleet operators, phone-call bookings, cash payments, and almost always a driver included, because the driver was the trust mechanis...