Friday, January 7, 2011 at 3:23PM | 3 Comments tagged Adam Butler | in Consumer Power, Sustainability, Transportation
Adam Butler | in Consumer Power, Sustainability, Transportation What Car Sharing Makes You Consider
Austin is a pilot city for Daimler AG's Car2Go car sharing program. They basically dropped a fleet of 200 Smart ForTwo cars on the city with a very smart reservation system powering the whole operation. I won't go into details, but you can with help from this great little article by Kate X Messer.
Having recently sold a vehicle, I saw this Smart invasion as an opportunity to become a one car family again. My biking to work works on most days, the commute is only five miles one way. But what of early morning meetings where you need to show up dressed in more than lycra? The Car2Go program held out the promise of closing this gap. The buses in Austin simply don't cut it. So this was my personal intermodal opportunity to seize. I signed up.
Now Car2Go isn't cheap to use. But you have to hold it up against the real monthly cost of owning a vehicle. which is more than you think when you consider - your payment, annual registration, inspection, insurance, gas, maintenance, and time spent overseeing maintenance. This says nothing of environmental costs which vary depending on what you drive or how you get around. So when you do some accounting, the cost per minute model that Car2Go uses is put in it's proper context.
And that's really what this method of transport forces us to do - consider. Consider where we are going, when and why. Consider each trip. Consider the costs. I love this side effect. The forced consciousness. Riding a bike is much easier by comparison. But we do have to reconsider the whole matrix of how we get around and we all know it. So what are we willing to do as individuals, companies, and municipalities to drive efficiency up and environmental costs down? How grand will our vision be? The ideas can come from anywhere, and they need to.
By Adam Butler
Friday, January 7, 2011 at 3:23PM | 3 Comments
Reader Comments (3)
With the energy of everyone reading this and the guys at FearLess ~ a gestalt is being created!
Beautiful!
Blessings
I think the origin of the car sharing idea is based here in Switzerland. The company "mobility" started in 1997. I live in Zurich and because of very little parking space and a good public transport system it's the perfect fit for me to use a mobility car in addition to public transport.
They have places near public transport such as train stations and also lots of places with just 1-2 cars in my direct neighborhood which is perfect.
I really like the idea. Hope it will be a success in the states as well.
BTW: Your comment label here is a bit misleading: the author email field is declared as "optional" while it is a mandatory field.
It's important to consider, as well, that as the premise of car sharing begins to take off and spring up in more and more places there will be drops in operating costs all around.
In time (and in the success of these projects) there will be fewer cars and even fewer gas guzzlers occupying the roads which -- again in due time -- would serve to decrease the demand for fuel and as supply goes up, fuel costs go down. Everybody wins.
With fewer cars occupying the streets, accidents will inevitably be fewer as well, and over time that will have to lead to better insurance rates. Everybody aside from the incredibly dangerous wins!
And assuming the widespread success of a project like car sharing is limited to just a few companies, their operating costs will decrease per unit due to their quantities they'll be dealing with. Just like Walmart can sell me my iPod for $30 less than somewhere else due to their bulk purchasing power, car sharing companies' growth will reduce their costs, and competition with one another will drive them down even further. Not to mention companies' cost reduction as a result of added efficiency through experience.
The cost of car sharing for the consumer in the future will be a fraction of the cost today, assuming the project takes off. (Keeping in mind 15/16 is still a fraction.) The million dollar question concerns helping the product to really take off. When the consumer considers that the price difference between car sharing and car owning is negligible it may become very difficult to justify trading in the independence associated with ownership in favor of what, for the early adopters, will be an equally negligible effect on traffic and the environment.
I think the way to help give these companies the push and publicity they need is for them to become associated with big businesses. To have the execs at major corporations driving around in car-share Smart Cars provides the opportunity to claim that their corporation is doing what it can, even at the highest levels, to reduce their carbon footprints and make a difference. They can even bill it as a small self-sacrifice, giving up their Bentley in favor of sharing a Smart Car with their community (the stigma of self-sacrifice will dissolve when the price of membership drops enough to justify car sharing from a financial standpoint above a social one). When a major corporation's company cars are handled by a car sharing company, and shared equally with anybody else in the community interested in the project, things begin to look up and momentum begins to build. Further, when Pepsi makes that commitment and improves their brand image as a result, how can Coca Cola not follow suit? The early adoption of car sharing by Wall Street that will add hundreds of cars to the projects just by their participation is what the movement needs to gain notoriety, legitimacy, momentum, and public interest and through that we can see reduced rates facilitating average Joe's justification for hopping on the band wagon.
Or they could just turn every car into Smart little billboard and subsidize through ads.