Rent an Electric Car? No Problem!
….if you live in either Vienna or Sylt, that is. (Or if you go to Paris.) The largest car rental agency in Europe, Europcar, has recently made a few EVs available in Vienna, and this week they announced 5 rentable electric Citroen C-Zeros in Germany’s largest North Sea island: Sylt.
Renting a C-Zero in Sylt isn’t prohibitively expensive; one to two days will cost the customer 49 euros/day ($64USD). Take the car for more than two days and the price goes down ($39 USD per day for 8 days, for example). Europcar also charges about 10 cents a mile (USD) to cover the cost of electricity but the car can be charged for no cost to the consumer at a charging station or brought back totally empty.
Rent Electric?
Vienna and Sylt aren’t Europcar’s first foray into electric mobility; the company has done some testing in Algaeu with the Luis4U and in Rhine-Ruhr with a Renault Fluence. Now, however, seems to be the right time to offer electric vehicles to the public, and the Citroen C-Zero seems to be the right car to do it with.
Roland Keppler, CEO of Europcar Autovermietung GmbH in Germany, spoke very enthusiastically about the future of electric cars to Oekonews.at:
“We like to think of ourselves as an innovative mobility service. That means we also have to push forward with new mobility solutions as they hit the market. By introducing the Citroen C-Zero, we’re clearly one of the first to move toward electric mobility in the car rental industry. We’re sending a clear signal here in terms of sustainability. Electric cars are the way of the future, and we want our customers to be able to experience them.”
Why Sylt?
As a tourist destination, Sylt has a diverse and changing population. It also already has a number of EV charging stations with parking spots attached, with more on the way. All the electricity available at those stations is guaranteed to be 100% emission-free from all renewable sources. While most stations are the standard type that take approximately 6 hours to charge the C-Zero, there is also one rapid-charging station that will put the battery at 80% in just 30 minutes.
Tim Ohler, project leader for electric mobility at Europcar, told Oekonews.at why Sylt made such an attractive choice:
“Sylt is a closed test market with a broad mix of people – that’s fantastic. It has a well-designed infrastructure, making it possible to travel comfortably on the island, and it’s also easy to charge the EVs. In addition, Sylt is a market for innovation. Europcar can offer an emission-free clean mobility solution here, introducing electric vehicles to tourists and residents.”
For anyone in the area or heading in that direction, the C-Zero is all electric, has zero emissions and is completely silent. It has removable lithium ion batteries powering a 47kW motor. It has a range of just over 90 miles and a top speed of 81mph. It seats four, and of course, has all the requisite safety equipment.
Would you rent an electric car to see how they work before buying one, or just because it’s something different? Let us know in the comments, below.
Source: Oekonews.at | Image: Citroen.
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