Car Sharing

What would make electric cars perfect for you? Maybe it'd take a 300-mile range, or a sub-$15,000 price tag, or the ability to charge from empty in five minutes. But you could argue that current electric cars are already perfect--for car sharing schemes. City life Car sharing is becoming...

The most popular electric car in Paris is not what you think. It's not the Nissan Leaf, or the Mitsubishi i-MiEV (or its Citroen C-Zero or Peugeot i-On siblings). It's a silver three-door hatchback with four seats and a basic interior that Parisians drive for only a few minutes to a few hours, from...

In the developed world, we often think of ourselves as living in a classless society. But in fact, huge disparities still exist between the haves and the have-nots. Can car-sharing bridge the gap? Paris' city council seems to think so, and it's launched an electric car-sharing company to prove its...

We quite like the BMW ActiveE. It's a good-looking, comfortable, quick electric car, and its existence will help develop BMW's first true electric production car, the 2014 BMW i3. Now, thanks to BMW's car sharing service DriveNow, residents in San Francisco will also get to enjoy the ActiveE's...

Electric city cars are not a new concept, but in aiming vehicles at a city environment it can side-step many of the issues normally associated with EVs, such as short range and high pricing. Those issues are even less likely with the Hiriko electric car, which is designed to fill the "first and...

One way to drive greener is to use fewer cars more efficiently. The average car sits stationary for 23 hours a day; surely if it were used more, we would need fewer cars overall? That's the idea behind Relay Rides, a startup company that connects private parties who want to rent out their cars for...

Uber, a San Francisco-based startup company that provides on-demand private drivers to customers through its smartphone app, has had an especially bumpy ride since launching in Washington, D.C. in December 2011. But things are looking up now that the D.C. Council voted Tuesday to exempt Uber from...

Zipcar, it appears, has uncovered a niche that’s no longer ignorable by large rental car firms scrambling for market share and sales growth. Hourly car rentals have grown into an estimated $1.8 billion business in the U.S., which represents nearly six-percent of the $30.5 billion U.S. rental...

We're all familiar with daily car rental. Even hourly car rental is becoming a growing trend, with car-sharing services allowing you to pick up a car somewhere in a city and deposit it somewhere else, paying for the hours in between. In Europe, things are taken one step further, with rental by the...

Scion has revealed that as much as 60 percent of Scion iQ buyers are new to Toyota, fulfilling Scion's brief of drawing in younger buyers. The figure is important for Toyota, as the hardest part of selling cars is often attracting buyers to the brand. With the cheap, entry-level iQ model in the...

We're sure some electric car advocates wouldn't take kindly to the assertion that their pride and joy was "just like a gasoline car". After all, your average electric car is quieter, smoother, doesn't use fossil fuels, is full every time you come to it in the morning, and doesn't drip oil all over...

Owning a car isn't easy these days, particularly if you're a student. That's why firms like Wheelz Inc, a peer-to-peer car-sharing company aimed at college students, has caught the attention of Bill Ford Jr.'s Fontinalis Partners LLC, and car-sharing company Zipcar. Detroit News reports that the...

December seems to be the month when new electric-car makers manage to squeak their first deliveries in under the wire. Last year at this time, Nissan delivered its first Leaf electric car in San Francisco on December 12, with the first Chevrolet Volt following on December 18. This year, it's the...

The City of San Diego has become the first city in North America to offer an all-electric car sharing network, thanks to Car2Go. A fleet of more than 300 all-electric Smart ForTwo Electric Drives were present at the November 18 launch event. A subsiduary of Daimler North America Corporation, the...

Not so long ago, car-sharing was routinely dismissed by carmakers as a thing that silly San Franciscans might do, but real Americans wouldn't. But that view is changing, fast. In August, Ford said it would provide 1,000 cars to Zipcar over two years, largely as a way to get college-age drivers and...

City car-sharing schemes have become more popular in recent years as the cost of owning a car rockets, but until now they’ve focused on traditional gasoline-engined cars. Not any more. The City of San Diego has just become the first North American city to host a carsharing scheme made up...

BMW has acquired the car-leasing unit of Dutch bank ING. The move will give BMW the ability to launch their i Series electric cars with leasing aimed at both consumers and fleet customers.

With fuel prices going the way they are, and it getting harder and harder to find a parking spot in most congested cities these days, the increasing popularity of car-sharing schemes is hardly surprising. In fact, the industry is getting so popular that individuals and automakers alike are getting...

Car-sharing startup Zipcar went public on Thursday and saw its shares rise 56 percent in the latest example of a strong recovery for the initial public offering market. The shares started at $18 and closed at $28 today. In after-hours trading, the stock is up another 19 cents. ALSO SEE: More Zipcar...

Car-sharing service Zipcar has priced its initial public offering between $14 and $16 per share as it inches closer to finally going public on the NASDAQ stock market under the ticker “ZIP”, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Zipcar is looking to...