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About CarHub

Cars sit idle. People need rides. That is the whole problem.

CarHub is a marketplace that puts privately owned vehicles to work — safely, transparently, and with enough structure that neither side has to take the other on trust alone.

The problem

Most privately owned vehicles in the Philippines are used a fraction of the week. Meanwhile, renting a car through traditional agencies is expensive, inventory is thin outside the major cities, and informal peer-to-peer rentals happen over group chats with no verification, no contract, and no recourse when something goes wrong.

Both sides carry real risk. Owners hand over a major asset to someone whose identity they cannot confirm. Renters send deposits to strangers and hope the vehicle exists and is roadworthy. Neither has a record to point to when a dispute happens.

Our approach

CarHub formalises the transaction without making it slow. Identity is verified once with two government-issued IDs. Payments are authorised and validated before a reservation is held. Every trip is governed by a digital contract that records the vehicle's condition at both ends, and GPS-tracked for its duration.

On top of that base sits the matching work a plain listings page cannot do: narrowing thousands of combinations down to the vehicles that actually suit a trip, helping owners price against real local demand, and locating vehicles by distance rather than by city label.

How it holds together

What is actually running underneath

Two IDs

Identity verification

Renters submit two independently issued government IDs before their first booking, matched against the name on the account. Owners prove registration and ownership before a listing goes live. Documents are stored encrypted and never shared between users.
Authorise & capture

Validated payments

The rental total is authorised when a booking is requested, checked against the booking record, and captured only once the owner accepts. A reservation is never held against an unverified payment, and a declined request releases the authorisation in full.
GPS

Location & tracking

Listings carry coordinates so search can be run by radius from a dropped pin. During an active rental the vehicle reports its position to the owner; the feed is closed the moment the trip ends.

What we hold to

Three commitments

01

Verification is not optional

Two valid IDs from every renter, proof of ownership from every host. There is no fast lane around it, because the fast lane is where fraud lives.

02

Tracking has a boundary

Location data exists to protect a vehicle during a rental — nothing more. It is visible only to the owner, only while a trip is active, and it is disclosed up front.

03

Pricing should be explainable

The model suggests; the owner decides. Renters see the full breakdown of rate, service fee, and deposit before committing to anything.

The team

Built as undergraduate research

CarHub: A Web-Based Vehicle Rental Marketplace for Connecting Vehicle Owners and Renters — presented to the Department of Computer Science, College of Computing Studies, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

JP

Jayrald P. Ancheta

Researcher

CJ

Christian J. Neri

Researcher

HC

Hannah Claire P. Pontillas

Researcher

Joemarie Delgado

Thesis adviser

Questions about the project?

We are happy to talk through the research, the models, or the platform itself.