> The decision to close North America was made based on two extremely complicated realities. The first being the volatile state of the global mobility landscape, and the second being the rising infrastructure complexities facing North American transportation today - such as a rapidly evolving competitive mobility landscape, the lack of necessary infrastructure to support new technology (including electric vehicle car share) and rising operating costs.
This is difficult to parse. It looks like they're saying:
1. operating costs were too high
2. we don't know what is in store for lyft/uber, scooters, etc
3. there aren't places to park and charge the cars
Car2go was also running into the wild-westness of America. Like this story about 75 car2go cars being stolen in a single day in Chicago. [1] I imagine things like NYC bumper-to-bumper damage adds up as well. Comparatively it's very calm in other markets like Germany and Denmark.
I wonder how this is not big news/political issue over there.
I've recently saw a documentary on Seattle and all those addicts in the streets. Now reading this just fit the picture. How could this come so far? This sounds like some 3rd world dystopia stuff. Is there some national effort to fix those conditions? I mean this is the USA. You can't take this as normal.
.. but it is "normal"? It's been like that for years. America just doesn't fix "local" problems, even if they're on a huge scale. That's how Puerto Rico managed to be without electricity for three months. This is what you get when you have a party that believes government is inherently bad: you get a failed state.
You say this as if a government with the capacity would save the day? The government already has the capacity to solve problems but this is the best that it can achieve. This is it. It's not being held back because it only had a trillion dollar budget to work with.
It chooses not to. It chose to waste the trillion dollars in Iraq; it chooses not to rationally investigate its options and invest in those most likely to have good outcomes.
As to why it chooses to do that, it looks like the crime in Chicago isn't an issue that affects marginal voters. Or that crime is endemic all the way up in Illinois; four of the last eight governors have been jailed for corruption, and that appears to be a cross-party problem.
Help my ignorance here, but why is the first response seem to go federally? Corruption seems to be a huge issue for Chicago, and the city is mostly run by one side for a while so why can’t they get anything done?
Hardly the first response, since it's been a mess for years, but it follows naturally from your second sentence: it's clear that the problem has festered for a long time and the local system is incapable of fixing it. If the corruption can't be attacked from the inside, perhaps outsiders will be able to break it?
It took Federal prosecution to get Al Capone, after all.
Don't be fooled by SV having all the shiniest, coolest companies. Overall US infrastructure is tending very close to what all those scifi dystopias show us: just absolute chaos[0] for all but the richest people, who get their own privatized infrastructure and are thus isolated from these problems.
[0]: exaggerating for effect, but it's hard to describe it otherwise when comparing to any other developed nation.
Many - if not most - of the residents of inner city slum areas were raised by single mothers who had them very young without the means to support them. They turned to drugs and gangs. They never graduated high school. In short, they never had a chance.
There is not much the government can do to fix this. One of the few things government could do to help - increased police presence and general law enforcement - has been rejected by inner city politicians. Police often find themselves at odds with the political leadership of major American cities. It's a shame, but that's politics.
Ultimately it's a cultural issue that the people themselves need to figure out. If they stopped having kids so young and women weren't forced to raise their children alone, things could improve.
> Ultimately it's a cultural issue that the people themselves need to figure out. If they stopped having kids so young and women weren't forced to raise their children alone, things could improve.
I’m still amazed when the privileged few sit on HN and espouse views like this. There’s an obvious answer and it’s probably the only reason you’re here - education. You’ve likely had access to decent or great education throughout your life. Your government could easily change its priorities and fund education, healthcare and social programs to correct these problems, but they don’t. Also, when you say it’s a ‘cultural’ issue, your suggesting it’s inherent to the people it affects, and given that they are largely black and ethnic people, it has a whiff of racism.
The government already funds education in inner cities. It has nothing to do with education funding. It has to do with personal priorities. What social programs do you propose?
Also has nothing to do with race. There are different cultural issues that afflict every community across America and the world.
Victim blaming a failure of society as "cultural" is disgusting. How do you expect people to solve structural issues themselves? Even more without any kind of support if they take a wrong path in their lives?
It sounds like there is no empathy in your speech, as in if someone took a wrong turn then they deserve to suffer for not having lived a perfect life with perfect choices.
A decent society would look at these problems and fix them in multiple levels: better education and support for teens to not get pregnant, opportunities for those with kids so young to be able to change their lives so they don't perpetuate a cycle of misery.
This is a failure of American society, its values and your comment just make it clear what is wrong in the public mind and discourse about these issues, these people are also people, unfortunately growing up in much worse conditions than you probably have and this, in the US, will completely impact the rest of their lives.
So please, think about the bigger picture here, use some empathy and stop perpetuating this idiotic "individual responsibility" discourse.
"Many - if not most - of the residents of inner city slum areas were raised by single mothers who had them very young without the means to support them. They turned to drugs and gangs. They never graduated high school. In short, they never had a chance.
There is not much the government can do to fix this. "
Here are some things the government could do to help fix this.
1. Stop locking up black men at a rate higher then white men and higher than any other country locks up its citizens.
2. Provide free or subsidized daycare and pre-k like most rich modern countries do.
3. Build trust with minority communities by listening to them and supporting them, not using policies like stop and frisk which alienates them.
4. Provide free/subsidized health and family planning services instead of doing tings like trying to defund planned parenthood.
5. Stop being so fucking racist.
>Many - if not most - of the residents of inner city slum areas were raised by single mothers who had them very young without the means to support them. They turned to drugs and gangs. They never graduated high school. In short, they never had a chance.
Do you have some actual peer reviewed studies on poverty that argue this or is your view into this issue based entirely on David Brooks columns?
Reagan began the process of "deinstitutionalization" which involved shutting down mental institutions and throwing their wards on the street. In theory, they were supposed to be sent to homes and provided publicly funded caregivers to help them be more independent or whatever. But they never actually bothered to hire the caregivers and, in fact, cut the budgets for all public health and mental health services dramatically.
Consequently, you've got a bunch of people with undiagnosed (or diagnosed) mental illnesses running around untreated. There is no public health system so they can't afford the treatment or medications even if they know they need them. There are no facilities in place to protect those who might be a danger to themselves or others. And even the homeless shelters are so full up with addicts and, sometimes violent or dangerous, headcases that otherwise healthy or stable homeless people are scared to go there, putting them at risk since they're actively avoiding the places that might have resources and support to help them get on their feet.
But people earning more than $250k a year pay like, 2% less in taxes so I guess it evens out or something.
People, including drug addicts and mentally ill (which largely comprise the homeless population), have a fundamental right to living on the streets in squalor.
1. We don't know what mobility technologies to invest in (electric cars, scooters, electric bikes, who knows what else)
2. Increased hassle building out in US cities in general (you can look at comments around Google Fiber as well).
3. Lack of any investment from civic actors on developing support for bikes / scooters / electric / etc.
Basically, there are a lot of imaginable futures for urban mobility and there are no real signals in the US market about where things are going to end up. Uber / Lyft / the scooter folks / Tesla are all pushing their things but there's no real direction or leader and as a result cities are largely staying out (even failing to build obvious projects like bike infrastructure and public transit to urban cores).
I'm slightly curious how much of this is some unexpected cost that they could't come to terms with as they expanded across NA.
Across the street from my house, it's fine to park in the evenings, and a tow zone during the day. People would leave Car2go cars parked there all the time, and, with it being so uncertain when the next person would get the car, those puppies were like manna from heaven for the city impound lot's balance sheet. Someone on my block tried putting their car up Getaround, too, but that ended right quick.
In many of the cities I've lived in, street parking is also odd/even in the winter in the denser parts of town where Car2go makes sense. Parking is less brutal further out parts of town, but I imagine actually finding and getting yourself to a car starts feeling like more hassle than it's worth. Seems like it could easily escalate into a choice between no customers at all, and customers who tend to produce negative revenue.
Parking is even more of a hassle in their core market, dense urban Europe. I live in Berlin and have been hit with an unforeseen parking fine due to the hard-to-read parking signs.
I think it has more to do with the fact that most people in America own cars and only rent if they need a car long term.
Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite a bit).
Recently, I tried to return a car only to see the parking space being taken up by an unauthorized car (all the more aggravating as my car was electric and should have been recharged overnight). I was advised to find a legal parking space where I could leave the car for 12 hours or so — which turned out to be a significant hassle. I was essentially unable to find a spot and ended up parking in my own driveway.
> Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite
Zipcar in the US does this for awhile now. It's ok, but means you can't do point to point as easily. So if you drive somewhere, do something for hours, you have to hold the reservation the whole time and then drive back when you're done.
It's useful for many things, but the pricing doesn't work for everything.
I think they'd need quite high density before releasing your reservation makes sense - after all, how are you going to get home if someone else has taken the car?
But you never get a situation in Germany where parking is allowed Mo-Wed-Fr during the day but not on Tue-Thu-Sat from 8am till 12am, which was driving me crazy in the US.
Reading between the lines, it seems like they're probably unable to compete with the VC-subsidized prices of the big mobility providers in the US (uber/lyft/lime/bird, etc.). The "infrastructure" comment is a bit weird since they mention mobility competitors again.
Some cities have provided dedicated parking spaces on blocks for Car2Go/Zipcar type services, but the issue is that not every city is doing this in every neighborhood, there are not necessarily enough being created even in places where they exist, and finding out where one can legally park otherwise at any hour of the day is extremely complicated.
I agree. But this is a natural disadvantage in comparison to both rideshare services (no one has to worry about parking) and shared mobility (leave your bike/scooter wherever). US cities often don't want to provide the spaces because it means less revenue, more work, and disincentive to use the public transit they fund.
Free parking is now a significant policy hill to die on for a loud, politically vocal portion of the population, even in places like NYC where they are a minority. Any giveaway of free parking, whether it be for dedicated carsharing spots, a bike corral, a bus lane, to free up spots by making people pay for usage, or to reduce double parking by delivery vehicles, is equivalent in these peoples’ eyes as personally driving a bulldozer to eminent domain their living room, despite the fact that the street is a notionally public realm. And at the scale of local elections with such low turnout that margins are measured in the hundreds of voters, pissing these people off is something you do at your own peril.
Some jurisdictions, as it is, do not spend nearly enough money on street maintenance and upkeep, and changing parking is a fear that other issues will pop up and be ignored.
And in some cities, streets are actually not managed by the city but by the state, and good luck getting a state DOT to do anything even a hairline outside of the box.
> Some jurisdictions, as it is, do not spend nearly enough money on street maintenance and upkeep
There's an interesting tension there. I imagine that paving and maintaining streets wide enough to allow for free street parking is a massive drain on the city's street budgets. And, considering that, in my city, an annual on-street parking permit costs about the same as 1 week of off-street parking on the private market, it's probably being provided at a massive discount just on the basis of land value alone.
Combine the two, and it would seem that you've got what amounts to an absolutely massive taxpayer-supported hand-out. Which I could swear is exactly the kind of thing that Americans are supposed to hate the most.
Paving them costs money, and maintenance does, but that implies that proper maintenance is being done.
Most cities are far behind on maintenance on many of their roads. Modifying the free parking might also result in people asking to fix the other things wrong with the road, and before you know it you're Seattle spending $12M per mile to reconstruct the road from curb to curb. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/12-...
Can't compete with who? Car2go was the last such service with cars available in my neighborhood.
I had once been an iGo user, but canceled my membership after realizing that 80% of the time I'd either rather take the bus, rather find something else to do, or rather pay (often less money and certainly less time) for delivery services, whichever is more appropriate for the situation in question.
I guess you could frame it as, "Can't compete with the fact that Americans who don't own cars do so because they either prefer other transportation options, don't have much money, or don't have a driver's license."
I do know people who use short-term rentals. But between subsidized Uber/Lyft and traditional rentals, it's definitely a fairly niche use case. (e.g. run out and do a bunch of errands for a few hours)
I remember when Zipcar was a new economy darling with the CEO a common speaker and panelist at certain types of events. That pretty much ended when Uber got big.
My read is, they expanded too fast. The fear of them being too late drove them to be too soon.
> "Moving forward, SHARE NOW will focus on the remaining 18 European cities. We, along with our shareholders, believe these markets show the clearest potential for profitable growth and mobility innovation."
Probably a minor detail in the grand scheme of things, but I would imagine they also had trouble competing for engineering talent. For instance, ReachNow was owned by BMW, a privately held company. The salaries they were offering devs were very low, and they offered no equity compensation (which would have been illiquid even if they had).
I was an early Car2Go user in Austin, the first city in the US where Car2Go was available, and I loved it. I'd use it for a couple trips a month.
In the last few years of its existence I used it maybe once (if at all, honestly I don't really remember). It simply got killed by Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft are just generally much more convenient, and I don't remember the cost being that different.
Here in Montreal the local competitor Communauto is doing great, but with both Zipcar and car2go usage models in the same subscription, and cheaper than any car-based alternative including both of those as well as taxis and Uber.
"Local" is a bit misleading - they're indeed based here, but they also serve Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, and over in Europe, Paris. (Service details vary by location outside the province of Quebec.)
I wonder if their pricing change earlier this year had anything to do with it.
They made the pricing model very antagonistic (eg the 1 hour package doesn't roll over, so driving for 2 hours on it costs way more than driving one hour, ending the rental, than immediately starting another 1 hour package!)
Before that I used the service a lot, I’d just hop in a car and go do stuff, changing my plans on the go, and know I’d get the best deal. After I had to plan things very precisely and hope for no randomness (heavy traffic, no parking, friend taking too long to come outside) and often it was less hassle and as expensive to take an Uber.
I used to use them maybe once a week, then after all that I dropped to once every few months.
But that’s just me..
Ouch. Regular car share user here, sometimes multiple times per day. The sheer number of cars that Car2Go/"Share Now" had (approx 700 here in Vancouver, I think) usually made it my first choice, with Evo a close second.
Did not see this coming. Is it possible this is another rebranding/acquisition exercise (like the Car2Go->ShareNow transition), or is the fleet gone for good?
Surprisingly close to their departure from Calgary, Austin, Chicago, Denver & Portland.. one wonders why they didn't just do it all at once. I wonder where all the used cars go.. literally disappeared overnight (no small feat), surely enough surplus to upset secondhand prices.
I am very disappointed about their departure, especially after all of the nonsense promises related to their merger with BMW's ReachNow. I asked their Twitter account re. used cars and they gave me conflicting information: one said that the Mercedes are leased from the parent company and sent back while the other (more recently) said that I should check local auction houses since that's where they dispose of them.
I suspect one answer may be for the Smart Fortwo and the other for the more recent Mercedes sedans. The Smart cars likely don't have much residual value.
The first answer last year said that the Smarts are sold locally and that the Mercedes are sent back to the parent company. My recent question, asked when they were leaving Austin, was specifically about the Mercedes and they stated that they sold those locally.
Car2Go/ShareNow had a unit in a shared office space across the hall from ours (in Vancouver.) They moved out at the beginning of December, sold all their office furniture to other tenants in the building rather than taking it with them somewhere else. Seems pretty permanent to me.
In Toronto they got in a spat with the city over street parking and pulled out about a year ago. Really unfortunate as it was a great service, and seemed successful in terms of adoption. There's a new one in its place called Commune Auto, but lacks the visibility, as those little Car2Go smart cars with their branding really stood out.
At least in Calgary, Uber was 2-3x the price of Car2Go. You could get halfway across town in 15 minutes, and pay ~$7 for the trip if you got one of the smart cars. It was great. Last time I checked Uber, it was $18 for the same trip.
So I figured I'd try Evo again after choosing to ignore them basically because their app is terrible, and I managed to count three issues in my first few minutes: It either takes way too long to populate the map with cars, or it just doesn't until your account is verified, or both. The pullout menu currently says "v[object Object]" at the bottom right (and I'm pretty sure it did this a year ago as well). And I can make it consistently crash by opening the map settings panel and pressing the OK button.
None of this stops me from renting a car (except maybe the map), but I don't think they understand that their mobile app is literally the first thing people look at when they hear about Evo, and if it's bad, many of them won't use it. Especially in Vancouver. Have you seen how many front-end developers there are in this city? A decent mobile app is worth a year's marketing budget for a service like this.
On some level, I'm excited for them because it's nice that the local company has this opportunity to win hearts and minds, but they definitely need to figure some stuff out.
I gotta say, this is really unfortunate. I’m in Vancouver too and I’ve been using Evo/Car2Go since I got here. I am really gonna miss the little Smart cars.
Evo now doesn’t face major competition, which I worry about. I like their service, but it definitely seems like they’ll jack up the price.
Very early adopter here (and little later even snapped a developer job there). Very sad to see, but if you were an insider I think it was clear for at least 5 years now, that this business was not going to last.
The sharing economy to me, looks more like a sustainability-simulation of its business models, driven by yield-seeking funds and millenial-pockets which, freed of the burden to buy property, are open to add hefty premiums to their every day expenditures (e.g. "checkout that new roastery run by that reknown barista").
Yet these businesses failiures become eminent once you realize that they aren't even viable in cities with less than 2M people.
Daimler/BMW is just facing up to this reality. If car2go were VC funded, we would see more money being thrown at this bottomless pit.
With car rental the true business model often is not in renting out the cars, but second market when selling the cars after a year. The rental earnings have to cover loss of value. The profits come from selling efficiently.
The deal with Daimler and BMW doing this is also to attract future generations of buyers. It is said that users of "car sharing" are younger folks (not necessarily my observation, but what do I know) ND the hope is that when they become older, get married, get children and need their own car at fixed in the premium brands. No idea if that equations works out, though.
Turo doesn't own the underlying asset that they're renting out, and is just a marketplace for others to bear the capital costs of buying a car, and most of the operational costs of keeping it running.
Their model is quite different than car2go's, which involved buying cars, keeping them safe and running, etc.
The only way for something to be profitable as online business, aside from e-commerce, is being a "platform". Ephemeral, little assets, just man-in-the-middle. Operating costs are basically determined by server centers and employees...
Anything real like cars on the road seemingly goes belly-up within a few years unless VCs throw money at it for no reason other than hype.
Do you want somebody renting your personal car? I mean, rental cars have the saying “drive it like a rental for a reason”. Your car will get totaled or somebody will smoke weed in it or leave a bag of uncapped needles. People will return it miles away from the drop point or not even return it at all. They won’t fill the tank, leaving you to drive to the gas station and fill it. They’ll rent it and than swap your working battery for their broken batter. Take the tires off and swap them with their shitty bald ones.
The only people who make money (like real money and not pretend “profit” that doesn’t account for everything I listed) are people who buy cars specifically to rent out on Turo. They don’t get attached to any of the cars because those things will get fucked.
> The only people who make money (like real money and not pretend “profit” that doesn’t account for everything I listed) are people who buy cars specifically to rent out on Turo. They don’t get attached to any of the cars because those things will get fucked.
Which is exactly what rental companies do. If Those private individuals can be any cheaper than Hertz & co with their huge discounts, it's just VC money being thrown at it, not a sustainable business model.
Turo includes insurance for the rental period, so I don't see where there'd be significant additional insurance costs.
Honestly, the handful of hosts I've worked with are basically operating their own rental businesses and simply preferred Turo's deal vs. franchising with one of the big names.
I dunno, this all feels like edge cases and not the kind of thing the average person would do. Or if a Turo member did this, they would get away with it once, and then be banned from the platform.
These all sound like ridiculous scenarios out of a bad cop show. Do you have any evidence that this has happened to any Turo hosts?
If this was the norm, these services would not exist.
I don't understand your point. Feel free to elaborate!
If you mean the Roastery example: it is just one example of "premiums" urban millennials add to their expenditures. Short-Renting a car or ubering around isn't cheap in the long term either.
But while I'm at it: Whenever my first-world-native colleagues discuss things like, whether coffee should be made in an Aeropress or a Hario Syphon, for hours, it usually takes a glimpse towards my second- or third-world born colleagues faces to find confirmation, that this is just first-world nonsense.
Presumably, a place with well paid software developers is usually crowded with a lot more software developers. So renting, not a problem. But buying: still not cheap. Add to this: you don’t buy if you don’t know how long you’re going to stay.
In my experience, growing up in the 80s, people went out FAR less than people do today. Food in general was seen in a very different light. Food was just a thing that you did a couple of times a day. There was very little cultural importance placed on it. At least for the people I knew (I did grow up spending a year or two in 9 different cities).
Big bummer, I loved this service when traveling in the PNW. I could be in Portland for a week and instead of needing to rent a car for the whole time, I had unfettered access on demand and only paid for what I needed. Being able to park it anywhere for free was a big bonus as well.
I was really hoping this model was going to see wider adoption and private car ownership would begin its ride into the sunset.
When I lived in Seattle I had ZipCar and Car2Go. I used Car2Go a lot more because you could leave the car anywhere (you didn't have to return it to the same spot) so you could do 1 way trips.
That was the 'killer feature'[1] really. They were great for unexpectedly needing a drive, or driving one way to somewhere you were going to drink (and cab/uber home) etc.
Too bad, this was really useful in Seattle to get to and from the airport.
They really struggled to keep the cars clean in my experience. Just about every ReachNow/Car2Go/ShareNow I got into reeked of smoke.
Was it actually cheaper than Ubering? I always felt that the price was very similar and Ubering removed the need to be the driver. Only ever used Car2Go when I actually needed the car space.
From the airport it's a lot cheaper: on an evening return from the airport (no traffic) it would be $20 for a 30 minute car2go trip to N Seattle vs. $40+ for a (non-shared) Lyft.
Plus no risk of getting speeding/parking tickets, and if you are in an accident no insurance hassle to worry about (I assume the car sharing services have some sort of excess if you get into an accident).
I’d been wondering when they would finally shut the doors in the US. I’d used the product quite a lot in Europe - worked especially well in Berlin. Was very difficult to use in the cities here in the US, and I found the UX to be consistently so bad I often gave up.
All the key folks are based in Berlin.
Seems very naive to think you can launch a mobile app based logistics business, dependent on UX fussy millennials, while managing a fleet of high maintenance automobiles, consistent and scaleable cloud infrastructure, that needs to grow geographically in cities across NA, AND fight and broker deals with municipalities along the way....
From San Francisco? Maybe.
From Berlin? Hardly.
With a European corporation supervising... Better off lighting the cash on fire.
In Denver it was a really excellent way to get around... until they ditched the easy to park and abundant smart cars for the much more limited numbers of Mercedes. Then the price creeped up to the point that it was price competitive just to take an Uber.
The move from the smart cars was understandable as they basically didn’t work in the snow but it did ruin the utility of the service the other 350 days a year.
What a bummer, these car share services were incredibly useful in Seattle. I've been a huge fan throughout the evolution of car sharing here.
Car2Go launched in Seattle in 2012. The model was innovative (one-way trips! park almost anywhere for free!). But they had poor reliability. I think the cars were connected via some German cell plan with internationally roaming on T-mobile, and the failure rate (unable to access the car, "phantom" car not really at location) was 5-10%, which is pretty bad.
Car2Go was also very unresponsive to customer needs. They refused to create an airport drop point (such a great and obvious use case!) and seemed unconcerned by their poor reliability.
Enter ReachNow. The competition was exactly what Car2Go needed. ReachNow added an airport drop point quickly, then Car2Go finally added their own airport drop.
ReachNow was plagued by long transaction times (e.g. 2 minutes of wait time from unlock to engine start – this is a LONG time when someone is waiting for your street parking spot). They finally fixed their startup times on many of the vehicles.
Then Lime entered with LimePod, which was the low-price option but with fewer cars. In total, there were well over 1K cars between all the services, and availability was great.
When ReachNow consumed Car2Go, I was worried things were going to go downhill due to lack of competition. Then they shut down ReachNow and started a confusing rebrand, then Lime left, and now Car2Go / Share Now is leaving.
I wish they would have first tried charging enough to make it a viable business. I wonder how much higher the prices would need to be.
It was over when they dumped those crappy smart cars. Those cars were the worst but they were perfect for the service. Easy to park and easy to find. And driving them was like driving a go cart. You either had full gas or no gas.
I think what did them in was Uber and lyft. The cost for either is only slightly more and you don’t have to worry about parking or unlocking the car.
I'm not sure it does. Lime had their LimePods car share program which used Fiat 500s and they shut down their program as well, although they wouldn't comment on the economics or the program (https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lime-shutters-limepod-raising-...).
In Seattle, over the past few years, we've had car2go, ReachNow, and Lime all attempt the on demand car sharing and all three have eventually shut their programs down. Only ZipCar has managed to stick around, but their pricing model is a bit different and requires a monthly subscription.
Based on that, my gut says that this no subscription, hop in, hop out car sharing just doesn't make money no matter what car is being used (although I'd be curious to see it tried again with fully electric cars).
price/cost is a real issue, even with electrics, if bluela[0] in LA is any indication (indianapolis has the similar blueIndy).
it's an all-electric car service rented by the minute, and developed by bolloré, a french conglomerate, in collaboration with ladot.
bluela is riddled with problems[1], and for many use cases, it's not cost-competitive[2]. it's basically only economical for 15-minute point-to-point trips directly from and to charging stations (which have limited coverage, all near downtown).
by my (very rough) estimation, such services become attractive when they're dockless and the cost gets to $3/hr for 3-5 hour rentals (the sweet spot for most errand-running and visitation trips). otherwise, you can often find rental car deals at ~$20/day.
I used it back when it was the Smart cars specifically because they were extremely easy to park anywhere, so the nicer cars were actually negative value for me even before considering the higher rates to use them.
They're owned by Daimer and BMW, so the cost of the cars isn't as big a factor.
Also, for long-running services, the initial costs aren't that important anyway if the cars are more durable. In Germany, almost all cabs used to be Mercedes. (I remember the whole cinema laughing in Collateral when the Jamie Foxx character presented his business outline for his luxury cab service)
Even without considering the higher cost to manufacture a Mercedes/BMW vs Smart/Mini, those "lesser" brands were often more convenient since they made it easier to find parking.
Quality is all great, but options, configurations, even engine choices vary.
In Europe they are much more a la carte - cloth seats, etc., available, making them the standard cars in many ways at any price point.
In the US and other "luxury" targeted markets, the country only offers certain premium configurations or bundles, such as how nearly all BMWNA cars have the "premium package", etc., significantly raising the MSRP to hit those premium luxury categories.
It’s really funny to watch N. Americans buy BMWs with substantially larger engines than Germans, even though N.A. speed limits will top out at ~100 or ~110km/h.
Even BMW Canada has some smaller base engines available than BMW USA. (Reduced stroke volume on the n52).
I get most of that, but it’s a bit more complicated:
BMW/truck makers could sell the smaller engine for proportionately less money, but they don’t because it would make the vehicle too available. Or just make up close enough numbers and most won’t care.
99% of bystanders won’t know the difference.
BMW doesn’t follow its numbering scheme for engines anyway (The 323 had a 2.5L engine.)
>It’s really funny to watch N. Americans buy BMWs with substantially larger engines than Germans, even though N.A. speed limits will top out at ~100 or ~110km/h.
That's not why Americans like big engines. American driving styles resemble drag racing: they like to take off from stop lights, even though their ultimate speed isn't as high as on German autobahns.
The actual driving style (distracted but polite to a fault and painstakingly low-key) I experienced in a week of driving as a European tourist tells yet another story:
Americans want big engines so that they get moderate acceleration at the semi-idle throttle levels that allow their automatic transmission to stay in the quiet low rev range. Never saw anything in terms of "taking off" that could not have been handled by an engine half the size at full throttle on manual in high gear/low rev (most economic way to drive a given ICE) or by an engine quarter the size driven at low gear, high rev (most economic way to reach a given performance level of you can size the engine to fit).
It's a little better nowadays in many western US states, 75-80mph limits are common on rural interstates.
We also have lots of roads with literally nothing and no one for, in some cases, hundreds of miles so it really makes no difference whether there's a speed limit or what it is.
I guess a BMW in California is a lot better after the first year, because it hasn't been through the shitty German weather...
Different factories have different failure rates, but Germany ain't even leading here (and believe me, there's no inherent "German engineering" factor separating someone working in Lower Bavaria than someone from South Carolina).
Apart from minor details like bumpers and first aid kits, the cars should be pretty much the same wherever you go. Would be pretty bad from a marketing perspective if the quality varies too much, never mind that with global logistics, minimizing differences is pretty much the core value.
Or in other words: The cars are overpriced rust all over the world.
As a person from Europe, in the hometown of DriveNow, which now they are killing to be absorbed by the former car2go, now Sharenow app, I really don't see them succeeding in Europe either. I used DriveNow a lot, mostly because of their packages and the better app and UX, but now that they merged, the prices are insane compared to SixtShare and the usability just seems very bad. It's a shame that before there was more competition (even now in Germany SixtShare seems like the better choice), but now that BMW and Mercedes joined forces, the new prices make the service useless.
I use ShareNow daily, because I enjoy it. They will not last in Europe, deep in the red. Operating costs far exceed what people would be willing to pay for a ride. Essentially you have to provide people with brand new cars all of the time, they have to be clean, filled up and evenly spread throughout the business area.
If you believe that Uber+Lyft survives by VC subsidies and drivers spending their wages on car TCO, making the driver essentially free to users, it makes sense that car-shares can't be price-competitive and turn a profit.
Used to use Car2Go all the time on holiday, recently had major problems re-activating my account after they became Share Now. Staff still answered the phone as "Drive now", it was a very confusing experience, which concluded with "wait 7 days for a human to review your account". Perhaps if they made sign up easier, they wouldn't be struggling!
Sad. I was a mega Car2Go fan/user here in Austin. Haven't owned a car in over a decade. Car2Go really made it so much easier for quick grocery trips/etc...
They had some incident earlier in the year where 100 Mercedes went missing in Chicago. I can't find the article that described it but apparently it was a wild night.
That page actually explicitly says otherwise in the context of Uber/Lyft which I'm assuming OP refers to.
> In January 2015, the Associated Press Stylebook, the collective that sets many of the news industry's grammar and word use standards, officially adopted the term "ride-hailing" to describe the services offered by Lyft and Uber, claiming that "ridesharing" doesn't accurately describe the services since not all rides are shared, and "ride-sourcing" only is accurate when drivers provide rides for income. While the Associated Press recommended the use of "ride-hailing" as a term, it noted that, unlike taxis, ridesharing companies cannot pick up street hails. However, the Associated Press has also used the term ridesharing as well.
While "ride sharing" sounds nice, because, you know, sharing is good, that's not what Uber and co primarily do. They offer "pool" versions, sure, but the number from 2016 I found said those account for only 20% of all rides.
Sure, you could say I'm being pedantic but I do think "sharing" is a different concept and has a positive connotation that might be deliberately being used here.
There are "ride sharing" companies out there where people actually share a ride to the same or similar location.
These worked pretty well in Austin. A few years ago my car had problems and I spent about six months commuting via bus and taking these guys the rest of the time. They had a deal with the city where downtown you could park them in any street spots for free, and they were all smart-cars so they didn't take up much space. Downtown, by a decently-central apartment complex, etc. there were almost always cars available in a reasonable walking distance.
Man, this is super frustrating. These were great in Seattle - last forever on ReachNow before they were folded in to Car2Go, then Car2Go into ShareNow...
Made living here much easier for when I just needed a quick vehicle rental.
A friend of mine worked for Car2Go during one of the freak snowfalls in Seattle.
That night, over a hundred C2G vehicles were left stranded and abandoned, all over the city. Many of them ended up in fenders, while the rest had to be manually retrieved, and re-parked by C2G agents.
The overtime, and the various surprise costs of single night probably wiped out months of profits in the city.
They didn't charge the customers that did that? From what I remember, they were seemed pretty clear in agreements that you would be charged if you violated anything.
Such a shame - Car2Go was so useful here in NYC, great for short local hops or if you ever had the need to go further afield and didn't want to deal with the subway. Plus the Smart Cars were great for city driving.
Sure, all the cars smelt of weed and the seats were covered in dog hairs or french fries, but the convenience!
They haven't been using those in the US for a while, at least in Austin - they all got replaced by four-seater Mercedes Benz cars over the last couple of years.
Dunno why the downvoted. Smart cars are objectively bad cars. For a similar price you can get much better cars like the Honda Fit.
However, they did have their charm when you were getting charged per minute driving them. Handled like a go cart. Gas is either 100% or 0% and you just modulate the brakes.
Depends where you live I suppose. A Jazz (what it's called in the UK) starts at £15k, a Smart back before they went electric only in this market was well under £9k.
Sad to see this but to note out some recent things in the carsharing industry:
- Tiny EV carsharing companies like Bollorè are parterning with US cities like Los Angeles: https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061603873 , I'm guessing between the cheap small EV, city partnership, they're trying to optimize for nearer term profitability & business sustainability.
I'm not surprised. They killed off the BMW service across North America a few months ago, as well as the Mercedes/Smart service in a bunch of cities across North America. The writing was on the wall after that.
In Austin, the cost of Car2go was nearly 1:1 with Uber/Lyft for all of the short trips I would use them for (~5 mile trip). Given the hassle of finding parking, I ended up rarely using it.
This is sad. I had been a user of car2go and then ShareNow in Seattle and was quite happy with the service. I was basically renting a car for 24 hours once a month or so... I guess that's not the model they expected. Not a huge deal, I can easily replace them with traditional rental cars (Avis, etc) and Zipcar. Folks in the USA are too addicted to owning their own depreciating under utilized cars for now. Perhaps they will eventually become rational ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I used car sharing in Toronto a lot including Car2Go. A couple years ago Car2Go left Toronto. As they explained it - they failed to get the city's permit for free unlimited street parking. However, as I see it the real reason was that they couldn't compete with Uber:
When I need a car for 1 full day or more, I go to Avis/Budget/etc. They charge per day.
When I need a car for 2-5 hours I get a Zipcar. They charge per hour. Daily rates are somewhat high compared to Avis/etc.
Before Uber, when I needed a short ride (up to 30-60 minutes) I would typically take Car2Go. They charged by minute which made sense for short rides. However, per hour their rate was higher than Zipcar.
When Uber appeared, it became a more convenient choice for short rides. Just summon it, and get going. No need to go find a Car2Go on some side street. No need to deal with unlocking, locking, parking, refueling, etc.
Maybe, if Uber wasn't subsidized it could've been a less attractive option and Car2Go could have a chance to stay. But with the current Uber pricing, Car2Go simply has no business.
Used them here in MPLS until they pulled out. I was able to replace car ownership with their network of smart cars. Even as a heavy user in the winter, my spend was less than $300.00, never paid for parking, no insurance, no fuel. It was such a great idea. I would have paid more (it was like 0.35 per minute or $12 per hour).
Consider that car sharing, when run by one of the car manufacturers like BMW, DB or VW might be a way to tune financials (overproduce and dump) and their fleet mileage numbers by producing more small cars.
If one of these reasons goes away it might become much less attractive to them.
A few years ago they took over a taxi service in Ireland called MyTaxi. It was originally Hailo. They rebranded it "Free Now" -- people are still years later angry at the change. All it brought was confusion to the brand.
Car shares are quite popular in Vancouver, probably because we only just got Uber/Lyft. Personally, I prefer to drive myself, so I haven't been missing ride sharing.
We do have a local car share company here that appears to be thriving. It's run by BCAA, which already provides roadside assistance so there is some synergy there. They used a car share platform provider called vulog.
They have recently disrupted traditional car rentals, in my opinion. They dropped a 200km limit per trip, so you can take them anywhere for $90 CDN per day, including fuel and insurance. It is as cheap or cheaper than a traditional car rental without all the hassle.
I used this a few times in Chicago. Always found it was easier to use mass transit to get around in town, and cheaper to use legacy renters for longer trips to see the family (100mi+ roundtrip). I assumed they would benefit grocery gap neighborhoods, but cars tended to cluster in places with high competition & logistical substitutes.
Is their service more commonly used inter-city in Europe? I always thought intra-city driving was more of a hassle than in the states.
I think it was Mercedes and/or VW which recently said their new e-car is not going to the US some time and Europe is first. This was surely driven by CO2 fleet averages which are going to cost billions of Euro in 2020. Small sharing cars will help to bring it down so deploy them where it matters financialy.
Parking in London is very bad but Florence is insane.
Really frustrating for Vancouverites since the service was enormously popular here, but probably suffered in other parts of NA due to competition from Uber/Lyft which likely contributed to this pullout.
Of course now Vancouver is finally getting a ride hailing service in Lyft, but that won't replace the different sort of service that Car2Go offered.
I feel like political opposition at the municipal level was also a factor. For example, San Francisco never gave any of the car-sharing services the ability to let renters park "anywhere" in the city.
I think this is mainly down to US cities (and Toronto because ??!) still seeing Car2Go as a revenue opportunity, rather than a way to reduce congestion and allow people to get occasional car mobility.
However, Car2Go was a luxury option. Far more expensive than CommuneAuto. Hard to see it as anything but a convenience for rich urban yuppies.
Good riddance. They had very bad customer service at least in Montreal. It was worse than Communauto. I was also skeptic about the safety of their soapbox shaped small cars & their safety during winter riding conditions.
I can definitely attest to the poor customer support - the wait times for car2go were unacceptable across the board. My credit cards on file expired twice during my time as a customer of the service and each time that put my account into negative balance which took literal weeks to resolve.
That said it wasn’t common that I needed to contact them so this frustration didn’t come up too often even as a $200+/month customer over the past six or so years.
For me in Montreal, it took a WEEK for my account to be verified! Nobody I could talk to could explain why, and for English I was transferred over to Toronto support, who were understandably confused at my address! And at the end, I got a $12/hr rental for a SmartCar that can't handle plowed roads, when a Honda Accord from Avis costs me $35 for the entire day. Service is useless, good riddance.
Was it difficult to get service in English? I remember now that I never got service in French. When I called, I would press the button for French and always get an anglophone speaker. But that's a problem I get with most companies.
I still don't agree with the good riddance. That's not what it means.
Probably car2go offices in Montreal had the infamous Québec customer service attitude.
Communauto is still surviving because they are backed by Québec govt paid for by the tax payers. Services such as Communauto and Teo Taxi should not be funded by tax payers. I mean take a look at Communauto website & app. Can't they do better ?
Honestly, after all the reshuffling and shenanigans around Reach, sharenow, etc, this seems pretty predictable. They never seemed to have a real strategy or goal beyond hoping to ride some PR wave.
Car2Go briefly deployed on my campus years ago. They'd frequently end up on their roof or in the lake after the bars close. Not sure why they pulled out!
I was an evangelist for this service until the day I drove around the block
to show it off to a friend, literally parked it in the exact same spot I found it, then got a parking ticket a whole month and a half later.
They purposefully waited till the discount period was over then charged me extra and when I demanded they delete all of my personal and payment data they wouldn't do it.
I threw my driveNow card in the trash the same day.
Fuck this company. Good riddance. Besides, the future for urban mobility is electric bikes not derivative electric car sharing.
I think a true car share coop model works better than a private business that doesn't have roots in the city they are operating in. The model in my city is expanding rapidly. basically you buy a share into the coop for $500 (you get this money back if you decide to leave) and then you get discounted fares for the vehicles.
I've been a CAN/Modo member for well over a decade. Having to return the car makes it drastically inferior to car2go/evo for most purposes. Definitely superior for doing a home depot run or helping someone move, though.
This is difficult to parse. It looks like they're saying:
1. operating costs were too high
2. we don't know what is in store for lyft/uber, scooters, etc
3. there aren't places to park and charge the cars