Car Insurance Car

So bravo to Mobility for coming up with this program: May your 6 month membership rates zoom up and your insurance claims stay low!  (And thanks to Carsharingblog.de for the tip on this program)

I first heard about the concept of mobility on demand from Dan Sturges several years ago, but it's been promoted by other people and groups, as well — MIT Media Labs, to name one.  Typically, a "mobility on demand" system would consist of a network of lightweight 1-2 passenger vehicles, typically electric, usually operating between (recharging) stations.  The concept, as Dan likes to explain it, is that the MOD system is your "near car" and a more classic carsharing or car rental could serve as your "far car", if a train or bus option wasn't available.

Arguably, we already have several mobility on demand systems operating already: public bicycle sharing is also mobility on demand, as is one-way carsharing, like car2go or Autolib' in Paris.


The i-Road is a "lean machine" as one website put it.


Toyota isn't the only OEM working on mobility on demand.  General Motors has shown a similar sized vehicle, the EN-V, and there have been news reports of a possible demonstration project using this vehicle in China.

We will be watching these mobility on demand systems with interest.

Where have I been?  I must have been asleep at the keyboard when Daimler Innovations launched car2share in Hamburg at the end of January!


At first glance Car2share seems like more or less traditional round trip, fixed parking location, hourly carsharing, but with a bit of Daimler twist.  They've structured their offering with 3 components:

• Private — direct link to P2P car rental provider AutoNetzer.de
• Living — Daimler vehicles at a high end residential development
• Working — Daimler vehicles for corporate customers at an office park in Hamburg-Harburg

The Living car2share places new Daimler vehicles at a new upscale development the Marina at Castle Island (Marina auf der Schloss Insel) and a corporate car2share ("working") at a high tech business park in Hamburg called Channel Hamburg.


The Daimler vehicles included in the service are interesting: the Mercedes B-class sedan (gasoline), a Smart Electric Drive or Mercedes "Vito" E-Cell transporter van (similar to a Sprinter in the US), the latter two EVs recharged by renewable energy.

Rates for car2share vehicle usage is slightly higher but competitve than other German carshares operating in Hamburg:
  Smart Electric Drive € 2.20 per hour + €0.21 per kilometer; daily rate 35€
  Mercedes B-class  € 2.52 + €0.25 per kilometer; daily rate 35€
  Mercedes Transporter E-Cell € 3.92 + €0.29 per kilometer; daily rate 39€
  Monthly membership residential: €19 per month

Businesses pay a monthly membership based on the number of employees signed up:
  Small (up to 10 employees) 39 €
  Medium (up to 25) 69 €
  Large (up to 50) 119 €

Included is gasoline (or electric recharge) and insurance, with a € 500 deductible.

March has been a busy month in the world of carsharing executives, although perhaps not quite as bad as it was for Julius Ceasar:

Zipcar Shake Up — CEO Scott Griffith unexpectedly announced his resignation, immediately after the Avis deal was completed.  He handed the reins over to the COO Mark Norman.  Scott joined Zipcar in 2003, replacing co-founder Robin Chase.

Mark Norman and Scott Griffith in earlier times.

"We’ve built an incredible company; we’ve taken a big idea and turned it into a larger than life brand at the leading edge of an expanding global category; we’ve developed a technology platform that has become the industry standard; we’ve inspired the development of collaborative consumption; and we’ve sparked a major behavior shift in the areas of urban and campus mobility."

Full letter here.

My sense is that Scott had the complicated, and perhaps thankless job, of trying to reconcile conflicting needs major investors, apparently interested in getting their investment, getting the company to a marginally profitable place, and trying to grow the business at the same time.

Although the blogosphere was breathless with early commentators talking about Avis could ruin Zipcar, there's certainly been no evidence to date.  Perhaps the first fruit of the merger has been the announcement of Zipcar at airport locations (!) at all three major airports in in New York City - located in the Avis parking areas, not surprisingly.  The initial batch of vehicles appear to be pretty standard sedans, with no BMWs or lifestyle vehicles (yet).  And they are round-trip cars (must be returned to the airport) and not one-way vehicles, as Hertz On Demand offers between the airports and Manhattan locations.

Whipcar founders Vinay Gupta (left) and Tom Wright

Mysterious Demise of Whipcar — Talk about cryptic, Whipcar announced on Monday, March 12 it was shutting down.  The only explanation they've offered, so far is this:

"However, while so many of you saw the future, we have discovered there are still barriers to widespread adoption of peer-to-peer car rental in the UK. As a small team with limited resources, we have taken a good long look at these scaling challenges. And, after much thought, we have made the extremely difficult decision to close WhipCar. We would like to thank our wonderful community members, our colleagues and our investors for their incredible support over the past three exciting years."

One wonders exactly what the "barriers to widespread adoption" they have in mind?


Some Thoughts — One certainly gets the sense that P2P carsharing may be struggling a bit these days, at least in the North America and the UK.  But I wonder if any new business could meet the heady expectations we all had for P2P in the early days — expanding into the suburbs, putting traditional carsharing companies out of business within a few years, etc.  

Some P2P companies have struggled to find an affordable in-car technology solution that could scale with their hoped for growth, while others have opted out of car technology game altogether and chosen to occupy the P2P car rental niche, instead.

And marketing P2P carsharing is only slightly different than marketing traditional carsharing.  The P2P companies have proved that people will list their cars for rent by others and that only $100-$200 per month income is sufficient reward.   The challenge for all carsharing continues to be getting drivers/renters past the perceived convenience of car ownership continues to be a huge hurdle in a country with  cheap gasoline, low taxes on cars and abundant parking in most places.

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED WITH ADDITIONAL CITIES.

At last someone has put together a video showing the movements of car2go vehicles in a city.   It's fascinating and revealing about how people use one-way/on-demand carsharing systems.

What it shows to me is that one-way carsharing has almost nothing to do with traditional round-trip carsharing (okay maybe a little overlap) but is serving a completely different type of trip.  Arguably, living up to the slogan that Daimler used early on - "personal public transportation".

Take a look:



The other thing I find interesting is about the video is about the distribution of "demand" for the vehicles.  There's are constantly changing areas of the city that have no vehicles for a period of time, sometimes hours, and then a vehicle will show up and get used.   What are people in those neighborhoods doing when there are no vehicles available - are they walking long distances? cycling? riding the bus? taking their own car (if they have one)? foregoing the trip altogether?  It's a situation I've experience using car2go in Portland, so it's probably a bit of "all of the above"

This display only shows the starting and ending points of a trip, not the route, so there's no way to know how far the trips were, but it's a good guess that when you're paying by the minute most people will take pretty direct routes to their destination.

And if you can't get enough here's another day using an enhanced display that suggests the beneficial area served by each vehicle:


Since the initial posting, there are several additional visualizations: Toronto (which uses stations rather than floating parking), Calgary and Seattle.

Thanks to QVIRI for putting this video together and VanCity Buzz for bring these to my attention.  Videos like this of public bike system usage have been around for years, and car2go has always made it's API open, so it's great to finally have this look at one-way carsharing at last.