This sounds great. I would compare it more to airbnb - using someone's stuff that would otherwise go unused. So actually extracting lost value. Uber might one day become that (I hear the typical personal car goes unused something like 90% of the day), but when everything is self-driving.
I think the days of Airbnb being "rent out a spare room" are gone, whenever I look, most Airbnb properties tend to be used as dedicated short-term lets and has supplanted the old holiday letting market.
I've seen a mix. Some are definitely dedicated AirBnB rentals where it's obvious the owners are professional landlords; but we've stayed in ADUs where owners occupied the primary residences, cottages being rent out part-time, etc.
It's been an incredible model. We've already paid out $100's of thousands of revenue to small business owners in new "found" revenue. It's a totally new income stream and in many cases helps with rising rents and declining retail.
One difference is that using unused space is free (other than the transaction cost/effort). Whereas most of the cost associated with using a car is mileage rather than time based. So while there's some cost associated with a car sitting unused, there's even more cost associated with putting miles on it.
Rent is a fixed cost so if a shop is already paying $5k / month in rent, and they can turn an unused or repurposed closet into a $1k / month revenue stream, they are very happy. Not to mention all the new people (hopefully patrons) coming into their store!
The Uber bit makes little sense to me. If Uber takes my car at night, then I doubt I'll make much money, since not many people are out at night. And if it takes my car in the day, then I don't have immediate access to the car when I need it, which is the entire reason I use my car as opposed to a bus or a train.
I think for a certain class of workers, their car is used exactly once to get to work and once to get back. If that were the case I could see Uber usefully taken control of the car in between.
A better example would have been Waze Carpool or even older the practice of "slugging" which finds riders needing to go a similar way and saves toll or gas.
