Electrifying Carsharing

(Note to readers: this article has been significantly updated since the original posting.)


With the arrival of highway-capable battery electric vehicles (EVs), a number of carsharing companies are adding them to their fleets.  And it's happening all over the world.  Here are some of operations and concepts that caught my attention.


In the North America many of the operations are adding Nissan Leafs, since it was the first vehicle in wide availability but Mitsubishi iMievs are becoming available.  

• Hertz On Demand — New York City has been busy adding Nissan Leafs and other vehicles to their New York City operation.  Although not widely publicized they offer one-way trips between many of their parking locations.  Although they don't offer city-wide carsharing in other cities, they do offer EVs in San Francisco and Washington DC, as well as London.  Hertz has set out a goal of 1,000 EVs systemwide by the end of 2012.
• CommunAuto — Montreal & Quebec City; has had a long interest in EVs, starting with a proposed Branché project in 2003; possibly the first carsharing service to add battery EVs in North America; will add 50 Nissan Leafs in 2012.
• car2go — San Diego; opened for business on November 18 with Smart ED (electric drive) in one-way service over a large area of downtown (including the airport) and adjacent neighborhoods.
• Getaround — And then there's Getaround P2P carsharing using the Tesla Roadster as their signature vehicle for marketing; now they have 3 privately-owned Teslas enrolled - at $50 per hour ("gas and insurance included").  They've also undertaken to recruit EV owners through a marketing campaign with PlugShare.com
• City Carshare — Announced plans to power half it's fleet with renewable energy; they will do this using Renewable Energy Credits (REC) from 3 Degrees.
• I-Go — Chicago, with great fanfare (deservedly) announced not one but plans to add 11 solar powered charging stations for Mitsubishi iMievs they will adding to their fleet in 2012. Each station, from 350 Green. will cover 4 parking spaces and house 2 I-Go EVs and have room for charging two other EVs. Congratulations IGO!

(Arguably, the first EV carsharing was the Electrovaya Altcar service at the Baltimore Science Center starting in 2009, but it is defunct now.)

France — EVs from major manufacturers have been available in France continuously since the 1980s and France started the first EV carshare in 1999.

  
• Auto Bleue — Nice; the first EV carsharing in France; round-trip service model; a very well funded partnership with Veolia Transport, EDF (the French electric utility) and Transdev; launched in the spring of 2011 with 15 stations 61 vehicles; eventual goal is 70 stations and over 200 vehicles; telematics by Vulog.  "Nice" logos, too, as they say in Nice,)
•  Autolib — Paris; Group Bolloré started it's one-way EV carsharing last week month with the official launch of 250 "Blue Car" vehicles less than a year after signing the contract with the City of Paris.  Pricing is the same as somewhat similar car2go service with Smart EDs in Amsterdam (see below) - 0.29 € per minute.  (I will have a more complete report about Autolib soon.)
• Yelomobile — La Rochelle; rebranded successor to Liselec, the oldest EV carshare (started 1999) operated by the city; with an upgrade from Veolia Transport which integrates the brand (and the member card) with city's Yelo buses and public parking operations.
•  Cité Vu— Antibes (southern France); operated by telematics supplier VuLog allows round trip and one way service between 6 locations.
• Carbox — Toulouse; Carbox is a unique business to business carsharing service, primarily in Paris, but also provides fleet carsharing to Airbus in Toulouse, recently announced they would be adding 15 Citroen C-Zeros (Mitsubishi iMievs) to the 150 vehicles they currently provide the aircraft manufacturer.  

Spain seems to be suddenly very active in EV carsharing, with several demonstration projects:

• CochEle — Sevilla; This is by far the largest operation 6 stations and 16 Peugeot iON (Mitsubishi iMievs) vehicles; rates are 4.95 € per hour or 19.95 € day + 0.29 € per kilometer (I'm a little mystified why they charge so much for "fuel"?)  Cochele has announced a partnership with NH Hotels (major hotel chain in Spain) showing the MIT folding City Cars now being built in Spain (no details)
• E:sharing — Sagunto (just north of Valencia, on the Mediterranean); using Th!nk vehicles; currently with 2 stations
• SareCar - Ataun (northern Spain; tiny village of only 1,500 people); demonstration project with 2 Th!nk vehicles.

Elsewhere in Europe — 

• Move About — offers carsharing with Th!nk EVs in corporate fleet sharing service as well as public carsharing in Oslo, Norway (80 vehicles), Copenhagen, Denmark (launched this month); and Goteborg (Gothenberg) Sweden 5 vehicles in a science park.  Here's a nice video (in English) showing the service.
• GreenWheels — started adding their first Peugeot Ion to their fleet in Amsterdam in July with plans to add 25 EVs total, 7 more in that city, as well as additional vehicles in Utrecht and Rotterdam.
• car2go — Amsterdam; expects to have all 300 Smart Electric Drive models deployed by the end of the year; rates are slightly lower than car2go in other cities (0.29 € per minute; 12.90 € per hour and 39 € per day)

Japan was one of the earliest countries to offer EV carsharing, but took some time out until the current generation of EVs.  Several Japanese auto makers have announced EV carsharing —Nissan (partnering with Mitsububishi in Kyoto) and Toyota (at housing developments in Tokoyo and Nagoya using IQ EV vehicles).  These build on innovative demonstration projects in the 1990s at the manufacturer's corporate campuses -- a project on the Toyota campus using their earlier generation "Crayon" vehicle; and the Honda ICVS project (which currently sponsors the Intellishare program at UC Riverside and once had Honda EVs; as well as the DIRACC one-way carsharing program in Singapore; currently testing in EVs in various commuter projects.

Several independent development concepts have also been announced.  One called the "Green Cross-over Project" would locate EVs at convenience stores and equip them with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities.  Another would use home delivery storage lockers, which already have security features, to make carsharing vehicle keys available to members.


China, which has been very active in developing all sorts of electric mobility - e-bikes, a variety of cars, now a EV carsharing service has launched:

• EVNet — Hangzhou; arguably the first carsharing in China (and joins the largest public system in the world); has 15 vehicles at 4 rental locations near university and office park, both gas and Chery EV (surprisingly their signature Smart car is gasoline Smart not the Chinese knock-off electric Smart). Thanks to Lewis Chen of Invers for this tip and to the Team Red (my consulting firm) man in Shanghai, Dominik Villaret, for update that rates are between $3 - $5 per hour  They have good support from the city government.  Watch this short video.

The future of EV carsharing?

Given the high cost of battery-electric vehicles themselves, plus the cost of charging stations, carsharing and EVs seem like a logical relationship. I have recommended to cities I've worked with, that if they are obtaining EVs and charging stations for their city fleet they consider partnering with a local carshare to make these vehicles available to the general public, while still having access to them for city employee use.  Such application also better utilizes the charging stations.   Since carsharing offers a variety of vehicle types, members can select whether an EV is the right type of vehicle for the type of trip they're planning to make — replacing more trips with vehicles that are the cleanest operating.  The carsharing company should be able to keep an EV in use much more than most private individuals could.   

The installation of solar charging stations overcomes one of the major drawbacks to current battery EVs - instead of recharging from electricity generated from coal-fired power plants, these EVs would be truly renewable transportation.

In the long run some transportation experts believe there will be fleets of shared very light shared EVs, even smaller than Smart cars, in major cities.  These might look like the Renault Twizzy or other light vehicle designs not yet thought of.

Meanwhile in the present, one of the important operational questions all carsharing operators are asking themselves is how often members won't accurately judge the range of their trip and find themselves stranded a long way from home; and what will they do about it.  As of now, there aren't any AAA trucks with quick chargers cruising the streets.  Car2go has got an even more complex situation to manage.  They don't require that vehicles be returned to a charging station so really have to depend that members will look at the fuel level reported on the web or app to decide which vehicle to take.

Where is Zipcar on the on the question of EVs?  They have been cautious (or perhaps "strategic", depending on your point of view). Only 2 years ago Scott Griffith was quoted that Zipcar would "not be going electric anytime soon".  Earlier this year they did announce a partnership with Toyota to place a number of Prius Plug In Hybrids in several Zipcar cities, so they've arguably gone at least partially electric!  For them to implement battery EVs would require a not insignificant upgrade to their system to be able to manage vehicle battery state of charge so that members would get a vehicle with sufficient range to meet their needs.

As EV technology improves (particularly range and recharge times) and vehicle costs come down (or subsidies increase) my guess is Zipcar will be increasingly interested.

CommunAuto, one of the most skillful companies in building partnerships, explains their approach pretty well in these slides from their Nissan Leaf partnership launch event.

If you know of other interesting or exemplary EV carsharing services or concepts.  Please let me know and I'll add them to this post or create new ones.  Thanks.

First Impression: Nissan Leaf - Good for Carsharing

I took a short test drive in a Nissan Leaf yesterday at SolarWorld offices near Portland and will share some impressions.  To give you a sense of it here's a short video on our test drive.  We got up to 40 mph. on this street.  (That's my wife driving and the Nissan handler talking.)  As you can hear, it's very quiet.

Nissan has done a very nice job on the exterior - it's a lot fresher looking than a Versa, and, for better or worse, not as distinctive as the Prius (perhaps to appeal to the Civic Hybrid mentality?)  Car designer and friend Jose Paris in his itMoves blog had a stronger reaction to the Leaf than I do.  (His blog is well-worth following for his thoughtful and progressive comments on lot's of things automotive.)

I was very impressed with how comfortable and familiar it seemed inside.  It has a similar interior feel to a Prius (which I own).  Although the Leaf is a lot smaller than our Prius it doesn't feel cramped (including the back seat (at least with 1 or 2 people in back).  I thought the performance was amazing - very peppy acceleration (the Nissan handler in the car with us said it would do 0-60 in 10 sec.)  With a quoted 90 mph top speed certainly seems like it would be a comfortable car for freeway driving.  However, the published 100 mile range would be at more moderate speeds!  There's a good amount of room behind the 60-40 split rear seats, which fold down.

Nissan does a good job of addressing the "range anxiety" question - using the nav system map to display circles from your current location showing you available range based on your current battery charge, as well as the map displaying the location of EV charging stations.  (They also claim they'll have roadside assistance providers to give you a boost or a tow if you run out of juice.)

Overall, Nissan has done a great job of putting enough technology on display to appeal to Prius owner and techy types) - a very similar dashboard layout, a navigation system, and even a backup camera.  If has full heater and air conditioning, radio (including optional XM button) etc.

The whole test drive experience was an up-scale production - including a mandatory warm up pitch to wow you with the technology, sell you on electric drive and compare the cost of fuel — electricity in our area is 10¢/kWh and Nissan claimed it would still be cheaper to operate than gas at $1.10/gal. (Presumably this will change somewhat when the equivalent of gas taxes are applied to the electricity for recharge; which will presumably will be facilitated since utilities are creating special low(er) tariff rates for off-peak recharging.) 

This summer I was also impressed (as a passenger) in an equally short (around a couple of blocks) trip in a Mitsubishi iMiev that Sharon Feigon of I-Go Carsharing had on loan.  Also very quiet and much cuter than a Leaf.  The model I rode in was a right hand drive prototype from Japan so it's hard to judge what the interior will be like when they're sold in the US.  The other prospective highway-rated EV out there is the Smart Electric Drive, likely to cost far more than either the Leaf or iMiev but presumably would offer at least some vestige of the Daimler panache.

At this stage, the primary thing that tempers my enthusiasm about EVs right now is that in most parts of the country EVs will make a the relatively low contribution to greenhouse gas reduction.  The problem is so much of our electricity comes from coal-fired electric generation (which we hope will change over time).

So does a Nissan Leaf make sense for carsharing?  Definitely - especially if someone else is paying for the charging stations.  Either the Leaf or iMiev would be an excellent specialty vehicle and should be a good marketing tool for the carsharing company.  Yes, there will be some management issues as customers get used to driving EVs, but they will quickly pass.  (I remember talking with a number of CarSharing Portland driving our Honda Insight (the original one, not the current one) who didn't understand the engine autostop feature and called on their cell phone when the engine stopped at a stop light!)

Given the government money flowing on both sides of the North American border to promote EVs, it's no surprise that a number of carshares will be adding EVs as soon as they're available.  I-Go will get some of the first production iMievs, City Carshare is getting a $2.4 million grant to add 12 Nissan Leafs, 12 Prius Plug In Hybrids and 5 Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEVs) along with 24 charging stations. Hertz Connect has announced they will be getting some of the Leafs in the Hertz allocation, as well.  CommunAuto in Montreal has announced they'll be adding 50 Leafs (Leaves?) to their fleet - with 18 stations already on the map.  (Since Hydro Quebec provides such a large part of Montreal's electricity, CommunAuto customers really will be doing their part to reduce GHGs for the planet.)  Hopefully car2go will get some Smart Electric Drives to round out the picture.

Meanwhile there's Altcar the so-called carsharing scheme started in Baltimore last year by Canadian EV manunfacturer Electrovaya renting vehicles the Maryland Science Center (I say it's "so-called carsharing" because after over a year they've still got only 1 station - perhaps that will change?)  In Europe, what may be the under-reported carsharing news of last year, newly revived EV manufacturer Th!nk created an all-electric carshares in Copenhagen, Gothenberg and Oslo called Move About and the Oslo branch recently reported they had signed up their 1,000th member.  Last year Better Place (battery swap company) partnered with the Danish Railways to provide EV carsharing at sevveral stations (but otherwise continues to avow they're not interested in carsharing). And, of course, when it finally launches, the "grand Pere" of them all will be the Autolib service in Paris.

A New York Perspective on (Car)Sharing and some history, as well

Sunday's New York Times has a very nice article about carsharing, including a little history of yours truly, as well as Zipcar founder Robin Chase. I think the author Mark Levine has done a nice job telling the story, but then I'm biased since I'm quoted.

Something else the article talks about is the differing views of for-profit and nonprofit carsharing companies. Rick Hutchison of City Carshare is certainly right in saying that carsharing (in it's present form at least) is a low margin business. All companies have been struggling valiantly to increase profit margins since the day they started - for-profits to deliver returns to their investors and nonprofits to avoid rate increases (or maybe even lower rates if they got really big). The entry of car rental companies onto the field suggests they've also run the numbers and think it's not as low a margin business as it appears. My view is that there's room in most, if not all cities, for both for-profit and nonprofit carsharing. After all, less than 1-2% of people living in most neighborhoods served by carsharing are members, so it's not as if there isn't huge potential. In the short run, either one or the other company might give up or they differentiate themselves sufficiently to attract different customers.

I particularly liked this anecdote from Zipcar founder Robin Chase quoted from the article) because it gets to the heart of the dilemma about carsharing:

She and [business partner Antje] Danielson came up with a list of five potential names for the company, and Chase walked around Boston asking people on the street for their reactions. “Antje really wanted to do ‘Wheelshare,’ ” she says, “but that seemed too close to ‘Wheelchair.’ Then we tried ‘U.S. Carshare.’ That was how I learned that 40 percent of the people I talked to had an extremely negative reaction to the word ‘sharing.’ The word makes people nervous. They feel they’re being scolded or told to wait their turn. At that point I banned my staff from using the phrase ‘car sharing.’ Do we call hotels ‘bed sharing’? That’s way too intimate. Do we call bowling ‘shoe sharing’? Who would want to bowl?” Chase landed on the name Zipcar, accompanied by the slogan “Wheels When You Want Them.”



Since we're talking about history, here are some more screen shots from early Zip and Flex web sites (courtesy of WaybackMachine.org). As with Zipcar, Flexcar under founding CEO Neil Peterson, CEO of Flexcar, would avoided the "S" word.


Flexcar's first site hit cyberspace on May 10, 2000 and Zipcar's a few weeks later on June 21. Flexcar stuck with their "Shift Your Thinking" slogan until Revolution LLC came on the scene in 2006 and they decided that "sharing" wasn't a problem and declared themselves to be "the car-sharing company" as well as "the nation's first and best carsharing company".


Both Flex and Zip web sites underwent major upgrades in 2002, with Flexcar losing the orange in the X (apparently in a dispute with Cingular cell phone company which had a remarkably similar image at the time.


That same year Zip tried out another car logo...

...until they came up with their current Z version.

Here's City Carshare in the "old days", also back in 2002.

Sorry, no iconic green VW Beetle on their home page at the time. (Comically, Zipcar actually threatened City Carshare with legal action claiming that Zipcar had trademarked the green Beetle, even though CityCarshare started using them first.)

And to complete our little historical romp, although the original CarSharing Portland website isn't available, here's what the original brochure looked like (circa 1998):

Enough nostalgia. Onward.

A Day in the Life

TV producer Lisa Meak at the NBC-tv station in San Francisco produced an interesting story about a day in the life of a City Carshare vehicle.

"As someone in our newsroom said, this car has a more interesting life than most of us," Lisa Meak reports on the TV station's website.

"We ended up talking to three different people who snapped photos of what they did while driving the Prius. It took them on trips they wouldn't be able to take using public transportation, walking, or biking.
The photos you will see in the story were just a small sampling of where those drivers took the car and what the drivers did, from carting around out-of-town friends, to visiting a loved one, to shopping for groceries."

It's a nice reminder about one of the aspects that carsharing is all about. You can see the video, as well as still pictures at the LINK below.