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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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
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).
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.
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-...
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).
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.
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?
.. 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.
Because of the "racism" hysteria that has swept the West, any reputable person who creates a public stir over the rate of crime in any majority non-White area will be accused of racism.
Unfortunately, you can't fix the problem either if you can't even publicly acknowledge the problem. And so they develop these extraordinary methods of side-stepping the problem in order to avoid publicising any politically inconvenient truths, no matter how obvious. One particularly laughable one included paying these young men not to commit crimes.
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.
People, including drug addicts and mentally ill (which largely comprise the homeless population), have a fundamental right to living on the streets in squalor.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
210 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadAlso, 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)
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.
Even BMW Canada has some smaller base engines available than BMW USA. (Reduced stroke volume on the n52).
It's also why a lot of people buy pickup trucks that they never haul or tow anything with, over SUVs - the latter aren't 'cool'.
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.)
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.
I’m with you on pickups though, gotta have a Duallie V8 just in case you install a 5th wheel one day.
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).
Perhaps I was at the wrong coast?
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.
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.
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).
* The app is terrible, and devotes too much UI space to spamming ads for other products while user is trying to give Lime money.
* They kept responding to low utilization by raising prices to the point where it's not notably cheaper than taking a cab.
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.
--
[0] https://www.bluela.com/
[1] not dockless, unpredictable availability (both cars and charging spots), limited range, dirty cars/chargers, frequent breakages, poor UX (both app and car), convoluted rental process, payment issues, uncaring customer service, etc.
[2] 20¢/min (≃$12/hr) with a $60/yr membership (also has a low-income tier at 15¢/min)
Edit: also ending in: London, Brussels and Florence
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?
Also Evo has even less of an incentive now to fix their broken Android app.
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 wonder how easy it'd be to reverse their API and make a mobile app less terrible than you describe. :P
https://blog.car2go.com/2019/09/27/important-update-car2go-n...
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.
> 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.
I was really hoping this model was going to see wider adoption and private car ownership would begin its ride into the sunset.
[1] obviously not killer enough.
> Good riddance.
Like they deserve to have to stop their service in NA?
> soapbox shaped small cars
Smart cars.
I still don't agree with the good riddance. That's not what it means.
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 ?
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.
Don't have to walk to wherever car is parked
Don't have to drive
Don't have to park car
Don't have to walk from parking spot to actual destination
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
"We can't compete, so we're leaving."
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."
https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/car2go-latest-short...
"It's not worth trying to run this business" can be the same thing as "we can't compete", but it isn't necessarily the same thing.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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).
--
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434719
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.
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.
Also has nothing to do with race. There are different cultural issues that afflict every community across America and the world.
There are things that can be done, but there's no solidarity and a legacy of racism.
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.
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?
.. 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.
How come other countries look so much better being on pretty much the same level of society and culture?
Who else can fix an issue on this scale? Or does it mean society needs to come to terms with it and accept it like some force of nature?
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.
It took Federal prosecution to get Al Capone, after all.
Unfortunately, you can't fix the problem either if you can't even publicly acknowledge the problem. And so they develop these extraordinary methods of side-stepping the problem in order to avoid publicising any politically inconvenient truths, no matter how obvious. One particularly laughable one included paying these young men not to commit crimes.
[0]: exaggerating for effect, but it's hard to describe it otherwise when comparing to any other developed nation.
People, including drug addicts and mentally ill (which largely comprise the homeless population), have a fundamental right to living on the streets in squalor.
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.
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.
"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.)
But I doubt that they will come back....
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..
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/transportation/twenty-one-ch...
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.
[1] https://modo.coop/
If one of these reasons goes away it might become much less attractive to them.
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.
https://www.drive-now.com/gb/en/now/important-update