The seventh episode of the ninth season of ABC’s “Shark Tank” premiered on October 29, 2017, to an audience of 3.18 million people according to Nielsen Media Research’s viewership ratings. The first of four pitches featured that week was for WaiveCar, a company providing advertising-subsidized rentals of electric cars. Though the reception among the sharks was very mixed, with a guest shark outright saying the WaiveCar founders were basically drawing up a blueprint for a company like Uber to use to steal their business, they still received two offers, going with one that was less traditional but asked for a lot less equity in line with their initial ask. After the episode was shot, WaiveCar got even more good news: A deal with Hyundai that gifted the start-up 150 cars for a year, with the requirement being that Hyundai was the sole vinyl wrap sponsor of the cars.
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Everything seemed like it was going great, and slowly, WaiveCar was expanding into new cities, including New York. However, after an attempted pivot to providing cars for ride-share drivers as WaiveWork, whatever WaiveCar had planned next got decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Any hopes of the originally planned level of growth were scuttled, but the company managed a graceful exit, finding a buyer who wanted to try its hand at a similar EV rental business…but that didn’t last very long, either. Let’s take a detailed look at how exactly the WaiveCar journey went down and what its founders have done since.
