The peer-to-peer car rental space is jumping, and RelayRides, a San Francisco-based ride-sharing startup revealed on Tuesday that it has bought Wheelz.

RelayRides reportedly has plans to implement Wheelz's smartphone-based technology to find and unlock cars. And In acquiring Wheelz – which opened office a year and a half ago, RelayRides is scooping up all the company's goods including assets, IP, and the organization's 10 or so employees.

RelayRides is seeing phenomenal growth. The startup, which launched roughly five years ago, went national a year ago, and its been popping up all over the states. The service now has presence in more than 1,500 cities across the U.S. RelayRides has also seen both rental reservation hours and active listings increase more than 500 percent since unveiling its services.

But this is about cars, and cars go “vroom!” hence RelayRides wants to go faster. Wheelz is the ticket for RelayRides to accelerate, the company believes. Wheelz's proprietary DriveBox technology will enable RelayRides renters to unlock the vehicles and get access to them without having to meet owners to hand off keys. This opens a great deal of (car) doors.

Wheelz is also benefiting from the acquisition. In combining forces with RelayRides, it can bring its technology and user experience to more renters around the country.

The Chief Executive Officer of RelayRides, Andre Haddad suggests that Wheelz has been working on lower-cost hardware that would make DriveBox technology more widely available to RelayRides users. The goal here is to get people who are already crazy about listing on RelayRides to be even crazier about doing so.

Haddad, who was formerly an executive at eBay (News - Alert) and Shopping.com, compared RelayRides’ dependence on what he termed “super users” to his days at eBay, where about five percent of users made up about half of all revenues.

RelayRides will be able to use Wheelz's hardware to accommodate rentals from its own pool of “super users.” 

Wheelz Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Miller suggests that there could be an added opportunity in having car owners pay for their own equipment. In the future, he expects more OEMs to provide access through OnStar-like integrations. As we drive toward that future, the Wheelz hardware should make car sharing more accessible to users who don’t have cars produced by GM or similar manufacturers.