Peer-to-Peer Car Sharing and Rideshare
A car borrowed through a peer-to-peer car sharing platform is almost never usable for rideshare. The cover attached to those bookings is built for someone borrowing a car privately, and carrying paying passengers is commercial use, which sits outside it. Your own comprehensive policy does not help either, because it insures your car and not one you borrowed. If you need a vehicle to drive rideshare, a rental or rent-to-own arrangement written for rideshare is the channel that works.
The strongest evidence for how hard this is to insure is what happened to the biggest platform in the market.
Uber closed its own car sharing platform
Uber bought Car Next Door, Australia's largest peer-to-peer car sharing service, in January 2022 for a reported $105 million. It became Uber Carshare in December 2022. It shut down globally on 12 September 2024, less than three years after the purchase.
The reasons Uber gave are the point of this article: rising costs from insurance, thefts and vehicle repairs. Uber moved to partnering with scaled rental companies instead.
Read that as a driver. A company with Uber's balance sheet, Uber's data and a direct commercial interest in putting more cars on its own rideshare platform could not make the numbers work on insuring privately owned cars driven by other people. That is the risk an individual insurer is pricing when you ask them to cover a shared car for commercial passenger work, and it is why the answer is usually no.
If you want to borrow a car to drive rideshare
Two separate gates, and you need both open.
The insurance gate. The platform's protection plan covers the booking it was written for, which is private use. Carrying paying passengers is a different risk class, and cover written for private borrowing will not extend to it. Do not assume, and do not rely on a support chat. Get it in writing.
The platform terms gate. Even where cover could be arranged, the platform's own terms govern what the car may be used for. Check the current terms rather than an article, including this one, because they change.
If both gates are shut, the honest answer is that this is not the route. What works instead is a rideshare rental or rent-to-own arrangement, where the vehicle is supplied for exactly this purpose and insured for it. Those cost more per week than borrowing a neighbour's car, and the rent or buy calculator will tell you what that does to your week.
If you want to rent your own car out
This is the other half of the query, and the answer is more encouraging, with two things people get wrong.
Your insurer has to know. Renting your car to strangers is not private use, and a policy that does not contemplate it can decline a claim or be cancelled. This is the same trap as driving rideshare on a personal policy, and it bites the same way.
The ATO treats it as income. Money from peer-to-peer car sharing is assessable and goes in your return. The upside is that the related expenses are deductible in proportion to the sharing use: platform fees, insurance, servicing, depreciation. If you also drive rideshare in the same car, you are now apportioning one vehicle across private use, rideshare and sharing, which is exactly the situation a logbook exists for. The 12-week logbook guide covers how to keep that defensible.
What is actually left in Australia
The market changed shape when Uber Carshare closed, and the survivors are not all the same thing.
Fleet-based car sharing, of which GoGet is the largest with over 3,000 vehicles, is not peer-to-peer at all. The company owns and maintains the cars. There is no owner to negotiate with, and the terms are the company's.
Genuine peer-to-peer platforms still operate, including Turo and DriveMyCar, the latter concentrated in inner Sydney and Melbourne. Terms, cover and vetting differ between them, and differ from what Uber Carshare offered, so anything you remember from before September 2024 needs rechecking.
The short version
Borrowing a shared car to drive Uber is the wrong shape, and the market's own history says so louder than any article can. Renting your own car out is a real income stream, as long as you tell your insurer and declare it.
Either way, price it per hour before you commit. Work out what the car actually costs you across every use in the real earnings calculator, and if you are choosing between owning, renting and sharing, do it before the contract rather than after.