SHARE NOW, the car-sharing company that resulted from the merger between DriveNow and Car2go, has announced that the number of electric vehicles in its European fleet will be increased to more than 4,000 vehicles. The 26% increase will take place over the course of 2019.
Photos via SHARE NOW
The company currently has four fully electric fleets in Europe: Madrid (850), Amsterdam (350) and Stuttgart (500), and, as of January 2019, Paris (400). Its other European fleets are located in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Brussels, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, Milan, Rhineland, Vienna, and most recently Budapest.
With an added 800 Smart EQs, SHARE NOW wants a quarter of its European fleet to become electric by the end of the year. “The majority of the 800 additional electric vehicles in 2019 will be added to the fleets in Paris and Italy,” a spokesperson for SHARE NOW commented to CleanTechnica in an email. “In addition, we will see significantly more EV also in our fleet in Hamburg and the UK (already added 130 BMW i3 in London in February). Furthermore, we announced yesterday that we will launch SHARE NOW in Budapest on April 29th with a fleet of 240 BMW and MINI cars, including 40 electric BMW i3.”
Currently across Europe, SHARE NOW’s electric vehicles are rented approximately 12,000 times per day, and electric cars were driven almost 29 million kilometers by customers in 2018. This points to a strong interest and demand for car-sharing among the company’s membership.
We asked SHARE NOW how it has experienced the successes of electric vehicles in comparison with the rest of their fleet, and here’s what the company told us:
This clearly depends on how we measure success. Regarding the usage, we see basically no difference between electric vehicles and those with internal combustion engines. In our view, it is really remarkable for a rather new technology like EV, with also quite a different driving experience, that people adopted and learned using it so quickly and integrated it into their mobility mix.
In addition, following the “learning by driving” principle, SHARE NOW also plays a decisive role in the breakthrough of electric mobility in the private customer sector. For example, when we started our fully electric service in Madrid 2015, a vast majority of the people in Madrid had never driven an electric car before. Today, the largest electric SHARE NOW fleet with 850 cars operates in the spanish capital. Our 250.000 customers in Madrid, as well as the ones in our three other fully electric cities Amsterdam, Paris and Stuttgart, experience every day that it is possible to run a highly reliable and super convenient car sharing fleet only with electric cars.
Feedback is consistently positive: it works! Electric mobility is much more practical for everyday use than many people think. The range of electric cars is already sufficient for more than 99 percent of the reasons for vehicle usage in urban areas. Additionally, electric cars are fun to drive, satisfy the ecoconscience and are pleasantly quiet. Thus, an ever-increasing number of people have discovered in practice that an electric car is already a real alternative to one with a combustion engine. As we now from customer surveys, the majority of our customers today would even prefer to use an e-vehicle over a combustion engine car.
So, to answer the question: yes, the electric cars are more successful when we look at the additional value that they bring in terms of supporting the electric mobility of the future or in reducing noise and air pollution.
Personally, we can’t wait to give one of the new EVs a test spin.
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