I want to go further than across town maybe four times a year.
I recently saw a demo of something Verizon is trying to get part of, which is streamlining the rental process. Basically they want to be the infrastructure to support an improved car rental system.
Article: Verizon Auto Share Streamlines Asset Sharing with Self-Serve Car Rentals
The end result would be someone like Budget would have thousands of cars scattered across the city, and as a user you'd just get notified to where the closest one is, walk up, wave your mobile device at it and it'd unlock and be ready to drive. There's a lot of practical problems with this, ex:
Who is liable when you rent a car and dump it off in a bad neighborhood and it all of a sudden gets stolen?
How do they guarantee a vehicles are where they need to be?
How do they get privileges to store vehicles across the city? Even places like Walmart or the mall aren't going to want random vehicles parked indefinitely on their property while someone else profits from it.
The upside of this is pretty good though. Renting a car right now is a pain in the ass unless you do it often enough to get in their streamlined system and are stepping off a plane. Right now if I had to rent a car I'd have to first call an Uber to drive me to the rental center some half hour away. The process of renting always takes all damn day because they have to explode their profit margins trying to grind me down until I accept their bloated insurance rates.
If there were 3 cars parked within a kilometer of me that I could easily go and drive wherever I wanted at less cost than today's rental car, it'd be nice.