If car buyers dwindle, Ford is trying to find what’s next

The peer-to-peer rental experiment — which has the Bay Area in a prominent role — 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.

U.S. auto sales are running at a rate that could hit 17 million new cars this year, a 14-year high.

[...] car-sharing and taxi services like Lyft, Uber and Zipcar have exploded in cities where traffic and parking prices have soared; even kids are hailing a ride.

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 them 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.

Owners get more money to pay off loans, and renters take a test drive that could persuade them to buy a Ford, if they ever buy a car at all.

For another experimental program, the automaker has designed a “dynamic social shuttle” built around an Uber-like app that could pick up and drop off up to 15 riders in a Ford “premium mini-bus.”

[...] 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).

Public policy experts say borrowing, renting and sharing cars makes a lot more sense anyway.