At Diamondthrills we’ve taken a high-value product that is traditionally owned and turned it into something borrowed.

So we keep an eye out for others who are doing similar things but with different products, and in a few cases we don’t just observe what they’re up to, we dive right in and get involved.

Which brings us to Zipcar.

My wife – Fiona – and I sold our car last weekend.

We live in central London and we use public transport for most of our daily comings & goings (and we do a lot of walking). We only used our car for occasional trips outside of London and for visits to see friends in odd places like France and Belgium.

We’ve got an 11-month old baby girl (Ella) who comes with lots of heavy, bulky accessories such as prams and travel-cots, but even so, we did the sums and we reckon that we can hire & borrow vehicles when we need them and still come out ahead compared to last year.

So, at Fiona’s suggestion, I’m going to document our switch to vehicular ‘rentalism’ over the coming months, and I’ll let you know (via this Blog) how we’re getting on, especially in terms of saving money.

Here’s the starting point: we worked out that owning a car last year cost us £7,101. Now most of that was depreciation (we owned our last car – a BMW 1 Series – for almost exactly a year, so we’ve got a very accurate read of the cost of depreciation), but other expenses included insurance, road tax, maintenance, petrol, London’s congestion charge, and parking.

Of course this year we’ll still have to spend money on some of those things, or substitutions such as taxis, but I’m very confident that we’ll spend a lot less than £7,000 on getting around in 2011.

We plan to use Zipcar, and I’ve also signed up to Whipcar (‘borrow the car next door’ – the peer-to-peer version of Zipcar). And I’m sure that we will do the more conventional hire car thing to escape from London for weekends and holidays.

So how was our first Zipcar experience?

It was excellent. Our little Zipcar – a VW Golf with the unlikely name of Gloshen - was waiting patiently for us in its allocated space just a few minutes’ walk from our flat.

It had a clever locking mechanism that was opened by my shiny new Zipcard (pictured —>>), and then I was away, rolling down Bermondsey Street and into the London traffic.

Gloshen helped me to ferry some stuff over to Fulham to put into storage, and then we took a trip to B&Q to get a couple of things for the flat.

I had the car for about 4 hours and it cost me £23.80 (there’s also an annual membership fee of £50). No need to worry about the cost of insurance or the Congestion Charge or even petrol - they’re all included!

It feels very liberating – so far – to be without wheels. We know that we can get a car when we need one, and we can get just what we need for particular occasions: a small hatchback to zip across town, a larger estate to take Ella and her voluminous luggage on holiday.

And there’s another plus to a life without wheels: we can rent out our unused parking space — yet another underused asset which has a value in an Internet-enabled marketplace.

So far so good with our experiment with vehicular rentalism. We’ve written recently about the idea that access is better than ownership, or collaborative consumption, or whatever you want to call it.

I reckon it’s the future. Well, a part of the future, anyway.

Watch this space…