New York is cracking down on Airbnb peer-to-peer home rentals, New York City is doing its darnedest to snarl e-hail for taxicabs and now car-sharing service RelayRides is pulling out of the state amid scrutiny of its handling of insurance.

San Francisco-based RelayRides, which said earlier this week it was acquiring its California competitor Wheelz, is suspending peer-to-peer car rental service in New York effective immediately, though it will honor existing reservations, CEO Andre Haddad disclosed in a blog post today.

That comes after a cease-and-desist order from the New York Department of Financial Services today that charged that RelayRides’ million-dollar insurance policy could still leave users personally liable in the case of an accident.

Haddad said his company was in discussion with the department about how it could comply and resume service.

Wheelz had raised more than $15 million from investors including Zipcar, while RelayRides has raised more than $13 million from investors including General Motors Ventures.

However, RelayRides has a car-sharing user base that is “several times larger” than Wheelz’s membership, said RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad.

The appeal of the acquisition was Wheelz’s hardware technology, Haddad said, which integrates into participating owners’ cars to allow renters to access them from a smartphone app.

RelayRides had previously tried to integrate similar technology that was originally for fleet managers with cars that are constantly being borrowed, and it had the side effect of running car batteries down while not in use. Needless to say, RelayRides car owners didn’t like that much.

The Wheelz “DriveBox” doesn’t have that problem, Haddad said. Incorporating DriveBox into RelayRides will help regular participants avoid the hassle of in-person key exchanges, which are the current alternative.

Plus, Wheelz had built its own distinct user base, starting at college campuses and extending to California cities, which will be incorporated into RelayRides.

Haddad said 10 of the 20 Wheelz employees will join RelayRides in San Francisco, primarily those with hardware and mobile app experience. One of those departing will be Wheelz co-founder and CEO Jeff Miller.

Explaining the difference between the two companies, Haddad said, “Their expertise was very automotive, and they were not as much at ease with building online consumer products.”

One interesting aspect of RelayRides is that it has moved much more into daily and weekly rentals than hourly rentals. That means it perhaps competes more with mainstream car rental companies than the Zipcars of the world. Hourly rentals are now down to 10 percent of revenue.

Haddad, who would not quantify nearly any aspect of the deal or of his business with exact numbers, said that RelayRides’ revenue was up 500 percent year over year.

After moving the company to San Francisco from Boston and raising money from investors including Google Ventures and August Capital, Clark had been replaced as CEO in 2011 by Andre Haddad.

“It feels great to have enough faith in the management team to be able to step aside and focus on the next venture,” Clark told me today, saying he was taking time to travel and consider startup ideas around collaborative consumption and mobility.

Meanwhile, Haddad said in an emailed statement, “We wish him the best in his next endeavor and are happy that he will continue to provide his insight and passion as a member of our board and an advisor to the company.”

Other peer-to-peer car-sharing companies — which also happen to be based in San Francisco — include Getaround and Wheelz.

At least that’s the premise of FlightCar, which is launching today at San Francisco International Airport.

FlightCar is similar to other car-sharing services like RelayRides — for instance, it also has a $1 million insurance policy to cover damage, which seems pretty important when total strangers borrow your car.

However, there are some additional incentives for drivers who participate in this airport-specific shared economy:

• FlightCar will meet you at short-term parking at the airport with a valet driver when you depart and return.
• Parking is free for the full time you’re gone.
• You get paid if someone borrows your car.
• And your car gets washed every time.

FlightCar was founded last year by a trio of 18-year-olds — so, coincidentally, they’re below the minimum age to rent from Hertz and Avis and the rest.

The company is currently part of the Y Combinator startup program and has just raised $650,000 in seed investment from SV Angel and others. Co-founder Shri Ganeshram said FlightCar has set up operations at a warehouse near SFO and plans to expand to other airports once it has figured the first market out.

The rest, I’d venture to say, are lying about it! But then, I didn’t conduct an online survey of 4,000 people in the U.S.

Of respondents who said they use their smartphones while driving, 89 percent said it was for calls, 68 percent for navigation, 39 percent for SMS and 31 percent for using the Internet.

The McKinsey report — which was released at the Detroit Auto Show — did not get into the various voice, visual and touch interfaces people use to try to be safe while driving.

But it’s worth saying, because it’s always worth saying, that smartphones tend to distract us from other things we probably should be paying attention to when operating a motor vehicle.

McKinsey also found some interesting results around more sustainable transportation. For instance, 45 percent of young people — age 18 to 39 — said they expected to use car sharing more in the next 10 years.

It was way less weird than I expected.

The guy who gave me the ride was an incredibly friendly fellow named John Robertson, who was driving for a start-up called SideCar, which has built an alternative to taxis, with cars driven by regular people and hailed using smartphone apps. SideCar launches to the public today in the San Francisco Bay Area.

At a SideCar employee’s suggestion — I should admit that my Friday afternoon meeting had actually been at SideCar’s office — I sat in the front seat of Robertson’s car and chatted him up.

Robertson told me he recently retired after 30 years as a project manager at UPS, and quickly got bored. He now generally drives five or six hours per morning with SideCar, and golfs in the afternoon.

Robertson said he lives in the East Bay, and has used the driving as a chance to get to know San Francisco better. He only makes $80 or so per session — which isn’t great, minus the cost of gas — but he doesn’t do it for the money, but rather because he believes in what SideCar is doing.

And Robertson meets all sorts of interesting people — during the beta period, lots of Twitter and Google employees, where word about SideCar apparently spread quickly through their SF offices.

SideCar is run by Sunil Paul, the serial entrepreneur and investor behind companies like Brightmail, who in recent years has been exploring cleantech and now the “cleanweb.” Paul first worked on getting California legislation changed to allow car sharing, and tested a start-up in that space called Spride, but then decided the more transformative and potentially lucrative opportunity was around sharing rides within an online community rather than borrowing people’s cars.

If you ask Paul, the idea for a ride-sharing start-up first occurred to him in 1999 — and he actually received a patent on some aspects of it in 2002.

After sitting on the idea for some 10 years, Paul recently invested and became CEO of a University of Michigan transportation research spinoff called Shepherd Intelligent Systems — now SideCar.

SideCar has been in testing since February, with more than 10,000 rides to date. In San Francisco, SideCar isn’t nearly as fast as Uber, but rides can be booked in “minutes to 10s of minutes,” as Paul described it.

As seems to happen with many timely ideas, there is a direct SideCar competitor that also just launched — it’s called Lyft, and is made by the start-up Zimride. I tried Lyft yesterday, and from a user’s perspective, it seems almost identical.

There’s one key difference between SideCar and the competition, at least according to Paul. After all the work he did with car sharing, he knows the regulations around collaborative consumption and transportation backward and forward, and SideCar’s payment system is apparently more strictly built to abide by existing laws.

The way it works is that SideCar automatically and dynamically computes a suggested payment that averages what other people have paid for the same kind of ride. This sidesteps the company and the driver setting a price for the ride, in order to avoid commercial vehicle restrictions. SideCar takes a 20 percent cut.

Users don’t have to pay for the ride, but if they don’t, drivers are unlikely to give them a good rating, and they’re less likely to be picked up the next time they request a ride. (Lyft has the same policy.)

Of hinging his company’s business model on an optional donation, Paul said, “The capitalist in me is scared silly of that idea, but the human being says you can trust people.”

Another nice feature of SideCar is an easy way for riders to share their ETA with a friend and send them a live online map of their progress in the car. This looks a lot like Glympse, and helps people reassure themselves that someone knows where they are while they’re in a stranger’s car.

Paul is being somewhat secretive, even as SideCar opens to the public, and won’t disclose how much funding he’s raised or how many employees he has. He did give me a long list of investors, which includes his own Spring Ventures, Huron River Ventures, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, First Step Fund, Jeff Clarke, Lisa Gansky, Robert Goldberg, Jared Kopf, Konstantin Othmer, Mark Pincus, Martin Roscheisen, Josh Silverman and Thomas Varghese.

Now he’s placing a second bet on the San Francisco company.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Coneybeer plunked down $10,250 on a 2001 BMW Z3 2.5i high-mileage roadster, with the sole purpose of trying to make money on RelayRides.

He told me the goal was to buy a car that was fun to drive, attractive to renters in Palo Alto — including Stanford students — and cost below $5,000. But his budget quickly increased to $10,000, Coneybeer explained in a blog post.

At that cost, he still believes he can make money:

Assuming a used car loan rate of 4.35%, no down payment, and a term of 4 years, the purchase works out to 48 monthly payments of $227 each. I haven’t added in insurance or maintenance yet, but I’m assuming that will roughly double the monthly cost. Given that the top cars on RelayRides can regularly make $600-$800 per month for their owners, this would equate to a free car!

Coneybeer thinks he’ll list the car for about $10 to $20 an hour, or $50 to $100 a day. Total return on the investment will depend on utilization, he admits. “We’re creating a new market, so utilization depends on awareness,” he said. He has some experiments in mind on the social media front, but so far isn’t sharing what those might be.

Everything was going according to plan — until, that is, yesterday, when the Beemer wouldn’t start.

It already needs a new battery.

Wheelz is basically a peer-to-peer version of Zipcar — one of a few such companies that have sprung up in the past couple years.

Wheelz CEO Jeff Miller

In a release, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith said P2P is likely to “expand the total addressable market for car sharing,” and that investors could expect Zipcar to explore offering its own “mobility services” in a similar vein.

P2P car sharing has itself become a minor turf war. General Motors funded a very similar service called RelayRides, and is helping expand its fleet through an integration with OnStar in-car communications systems. RelayRides has about $13 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures, August Capital and Shasta Ventures, while another competitor, Getaround, has about $5 million from Redpoint Ventures, General Catalyst, CrunchFund and others.

When I talked to Wheelz CEO Jeff Miller last fall, he said his company’s advantages were its strategy of focusing on the college market and its team’s experience at electric vehicle infrastructure company Better Place and Mercedes Benz.