San Diego’s Car2Go Service Being Nixed At End Of Year
Those in San Diego (California) who use Daimler’s Car2Go carsharing service are out of luck — the company is ending service in the city at the end of 2016.
Reports are that service demand has been too low to warrant maintaining a presence in the city. I guess that carsharing demand itself is too low? Considering the number of carsharing services now operating in San Diego, though, this seems unlikely. There’s a fair chance that the limited demand has been because of the reliance on the Car2go Smart Fortwo vehicles — which are probably better suited to travel within very compact cities than in San Diego.
Those of you in San Diego interested in continuing to make use of the service while it lasts, or of giving it a try before it disappears, only have until the end of the day on December 31, 2016, to do so.
Interestingly, this news follows a transition made earlier this year (around March) in San Diego from all-electric Smart Fortwo vehicles to gas ones. So, it sounds like maybe the company initially thought that the limited range of the all-electric cars was the limiting factor, and decided to close things up when that speculation didn’t bear fruit?
Notably, there are around 255 vehicles in use through the service in the populous Californian city.
In the public statement revealing the upcoming end of service, it was stated that “unfortunately we have not seen enough adoption of our unique one-way carsharing service here to continue operations at this point. …We truly hope that as more people around the world like you adopt carsharing and embrace all its economic and environmental benefits, we might one day resume our service here.”
As it stands, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that the Car2Go service will be curtailed to any real degree in the other American cities where it operates.
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