Last month Ms Pinckney, 29, was one of the 1,000 people to join Streetcar, which has 150 Volkswagen Golfs.

Her first outing was to a supermarket to buy drinks for a party. “There’s no way I could have carried all those bottles on the bus or Tube and it’s too expensive to shop at the corner stores,” she said.

She has a Streetcar parking bay only 200 yards from her flat in Bayswater, Central London. If that car is being used, there is another parked ten minutes’ walk away near Edgware Road. “Finding a free car has not been a problem so far. It is very easy to check availability on the internet.”

She said that the main attraction of car club membership was being able to predict exactly how much her journeys would cost. There are no hidden extras. “When you own a car you are never sure when you might have to pay a big repair bill. But the club takes care of all that.”

Another advantage for those who drive into London’s congestion charging zone is that Streetcar automatically pays the fee and deducts it from the member’s account.

Ms Pinckney also plans to use the car to visit her parents in Wiltshire at weekends. However, the 48-hour fee is £99 and only the first 90 miles for that period are free. Each mile above that is 19p.

The 200-mile round trip would cost her £121, compared with £40 on the train.

But arriving on the doorstep in a new £13,000 Golf can be a more appealing prospect than catching the Tube to Waterloo, changing trains at Salisbury and queueing for a taxi.