Zipcar and Flexcar, the two biggest US car-sharing companies, are to merge, they announced today. The merger caught my attention because, as I noted below, I don’t own a car and so occasionally use Zipcars to get around, collect shopping etc.

Zipcar lets you book cars online at between $10 and $16 an hour in New York. For that price, you get the petrol and insurance thrown in, which makes it cheap enough. When you get to the local parking garage, where the cars are kept, you use a smart card to unlock the one you have booked.

A few facts from the conference call today:

The two services, both of which were founded in 1999, focus on cities where people do not feel the need to own their own cars, and on college towns full of young people who occasionally want to drive.

Zipcar reckons that one of its cars in effect replaces 25 privately-owned cars on the road because a single Zipcar is widely shared.

It uses computers to work out exactly where to park its cars in relation to its customers users by plotting their home addresses against its existing locations. I have noticed that Zipcar keeps placing one or two cars in parking garages near my house. I wondered why.

There was an strange story in the New York Times yesterday that seemed, within the po-faced confines of New York Times news style, to be mocking Bob Nardelli, the new chief executive of Chrysler.

Mr Nardelli’s offence was to compare the experience of driving a car to that of being in a favourite room, where one finds gratification and tranquility away from the hubbub of public transport.

The piece, by the Times’ motor industry correspondent, suggested that Mr Nardelli was having trouble putting behind him his previous job as chief executive of Home Depot and was still focused on home improvement rather than becoming a "car guy" – Detroit’s moniker for an industry insider.

I have two points to make in response.

The first is that I think Mr Nardelli is right about the appeal of cars to ordinary folk. I do not own a car and so commute daily by public transport. But I remember when I did own one, in London, feeling the pleasure of being insulated from the outside world as I drove around.

The second is that Mr Nardelli’s attempts not to think like a "car guy" are to his credit. It was, after all, the "car guys" who brought Detroit to its current, desperate, state. The motor industry has always struck me as far too insular and inwardly-obsessed.

If Mr Nardelli is trying to break out of this mind-set, no matter in how awkward a manner, he deserves a slap on the back rather than ridicule.