Gamescom 2017 Erin Roberts interview: https://youtu.be/n-ToRKZkJdI?t=39m30s
Partially-cleaned-up Youtube Transcript (it's an audible mess of jumbled words):
DJKnight: "will there be a way in 3.0 for a player to rent a ship that they don't have access to so they can kind of give it a test run for it?"
Erin: "well you'll be able to buy it, they're using, you know, after you get in 3.0 yeah, that's the idea. It's basically, the idea is about something, kind of different things go bad, so that's, obviously, that's the hope. The whole idea is if you've obviously been good enough to support the game and obviously own a package, and some of that and you have the ship to fly, but also the idea is we're gonna be earning, as we go in we're gonna be earning money so you can buy items and ships, you can do stuff like that. And also I have to say no to 3.0 because actually, we actually think that's probably not be making 3.0 but 3.1. But the idea is everything else you can buy and you can do all that kind of stuff"
DJKnight: "So maybe not the first major update but further down the line"
DiscoLando: "i just want to reconfirm that is ship purchasing with alpha UEC, it's down the road, it's still in the pipeline"
There may have also been a media article or two on the topic, which CIG won't have corrected, so definitely worth looking out for.
Partially-cleaned-up Youtube Transcript (it's an audible mess of jumbled words):
DJKnight: "will there be a way in 3.0 for a player to rent a ship that they don't have access to so they can kind of give it a test run for it?"
Erin: "well you'll be able to buy it, they're using, you know, after you get in 3.0 yeah, that's the idea. It's basically, the idea is about something, kind of different things go bad, so that's, obviously, that's the hope. The whole idea is if you've obviously been good enough to support the game and obviously own a package, and some of that and you have the ship to fly, but also the idea is we're gonna be earning, as we go in we're gonna be earning money so you can buy items and ships, you can do stuff like that. And also I have to say no to 3.0 because actually, we actually think that's probably not be making 3.0 but 3.1. But the idea is everything else you can buy and you can do all that kind of stuff"
DJKnight: "So maybe not the first major update but further down the line"
DiscoLando: "i just want to reconfirm that is ship purchasing with alpha UEC, it's down the road, it's still in the pipeline"
There may have also been a media article or two on the topic, which CIG won't have corrected, so definitely worth looking out for.