October 31, 2007
Sharing cars in a country that is full of them
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.
