Car2Go’s one-way carsharing service is coming to Portland
All of a sudden, Portlanders’ options for carsharing are exploding.
Getaround, the peer-to-peer service that helps you lend your own car to neighbors, launched here yesterday. Zipcar, the longtime market leader and successor to our homegrown Car Sharing Portland startup, offers more vehicles than ever – and yesterday it announced a big investment in personal carsharing, too, promising some possible healthy competition in that field.
And now Car2Go, a one-way carsharing service that lets you borrow a car for 35 cents a minute (up to $13 an hour) and doesn’t require you to return it to the original location, is hiring a Portland location manager, fleet coordinator, customer service coordinator and marketing coordinator. The jobs were posted on the company’s website last month.
Car2Go is an experiment by Daimler, with more than 30,000 members so far in its North American locations: Austin, Washington DC, San Diego and Vancouver BC. It’s a revolutionary model because it eliminates two of the biggest inconveniences in traditional carsharing: returning to home base and (even more importantly) paying for time in the parking lot of your destination.
It’s basically bikesharing with a motor vehicle. And like bikesharing, it’s ideal for local urban trips that can be combined, in a pinch, with public transit.
Daimler already has a major presence in Portland with its North American truck engineering headquarters on Swan Island.
Portland carsharing expert Dave Brook has covered Car2Go regularly on his industry blog. The firm is clearly interested in staying ahead of the curve of innovation in the auto industry, whose executives are now talking constantly about "car usership" eclipsing "car ownership." They’re eager to experiment with the new model.
Looks as if low-car Portlanders will be the beneficiaries.
Update: Car2Go spokeswoman Katie Stafford says she’ll get back to us "in a couple days." "We have not made any official announcements yet," Stafford said. "I’ll make sure to let you know as soon as we’re ready."
(Creative Commons Car2Go photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid.)
Posted by Michael at 8:42 am February 23rd, 2012. Like what you see? Get future posts by email.
