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
Identity verification
Validated payments
Location & tracking
What we hold to
Three commitments
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.
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.
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.
Jayrald P. Ancheta
Researcher
Christian J. Neri
Researcher
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.