Carsharing in France: from laboratory to failure

🚗 Carsharing in France: from laboratory to failure 🚗

On July 31, 2018, Autolib ended its operations in Paris, after barely 8 years of service and leaving an estimated 210 million euro slate for Parisian taxpayers. A pioneer in new forms of mobility, Paris financed one of the first large-scale experiments in electric car-sharing. What has become of these services? 

Car-sharing was born in the wake of Airbnb, with the same principle: if you can rent out your second home, why not rent out other under-used properties? Its stated aim: to reduce the number of vehicles in the city by a factor of 5 or 10. Several types of car-sharing were soon to emerge: private car-sharing, launched in France by Ouicar and Drivy (since acquired by the Americans Turo and Getaround), and business-to-business car-sharing. This second category is further subdivided into "station-based" car-sharing, where the customer returns the vehicle to the place where he or she picked it up, and "open-loop" car-sharing (free-floating), where a customer can pick up and drop off the vehicle at different locations. The Autolib model was a hybrid between these 2 cases, with the customer able to pick up a vehicle at point A and leave it at point B, provided these were Autolib stations.   

The premise of the first model, between private individuals, quickly showed its limits: unlike an apartment, which can be booked well in advance and earn several hundred euros a day with only a moderate risk of damage, the profit/disadvantage ratio is far less favorable for a private car. The majority of vehicles rented today on the Turo and Getaround platforms are in fact used cars, made available on a self-service basis by semi-professional operators who sometimes own fleets of over 100 relatively old cars, from which they manage to extract every euro of residual value. In this way, they offer a low-cost alternative to traditional rental companies such as Avis or Europcar, who offer recent vehicles rented in their agencies. 

Professional car-sharing, on the other hand, relies on fleets of recent, generally well-maintained vehicles. The semi-open-loop model pioneered by Autolib gave way after its closure in France to the open-loop model of Zity (acquired by Renault) and ShareNow (acquired by Stellantis). While the latter offer more conventional vehicle models than Autolib's controversial Bluecars, and didn't cost the taxpayer a single euro, they did encounter the same constraints on the French market: 

1. Vandalism: The rate of damage to shared vehicles in France is among the highest in Europe. At any one time, half of the cars owned by the main operators could be out of service for repairs due to damage, often deliberate, caused by careless users. 

2. Competition from other mobility solutions: In Paris, carsharing services have to compete with faster, less expensive urban mobility solutions, such as public transport and micro-mobility.

3. The 100% electric challenge : while other European players have built their model on fleets of mainly combustion-powered vehicles, free-floating operators in France have been forced or have chosen to launch fleets made up of 100% electric city cars. The result? Not only less attractive to customers wishing to rent them for weekend journeys of several hundred kilometers, but also higher running costs for these vehicles, which have to be recharged more often and can be more expensive to repair than a combustion-powered equivalent. 

This situation contrasts with other European markets: while in Paris, no operator was able to exceed 100,000 registered users, the main open-loop operators, such as ShareNow and Miles in Germany, or Enjoy in Italy, have well over a million regular users. While profitability remains elusive for most of these players, they nonetheless enjoy high levels of satisfaction and frequency of use. 

Car-sharing has not totally failed in Paris, however. The station-based model, such as Virtuo or Toosla, where customers pick up and return the vehicle at the same location, continues to develop well. These services, in direct competition with short-term car-sharing operators, offer a viable alternative for citizens who only use a vehicle for occasional extra-urban journeys (weekends, vacations, business trips).

Although this type of carsharing is less flexible than those offered in Italy and German-speaking countries, with their comfortable, clean vehicles available on almost every street, it seems better suited to the constraints of the French market and the challenges of maintaining shared assets.

Conclusion

Carsharing remains a mobility solution with significant potential in major French cities, for citizens who are increasingly giving up owning their own vehicles. The challenges encountered also make it a large-scale innovation laboratory for players such as Otoqi, whether in imagining new modes of use or in the advanced use of data and artificial intelligence to limit the effects of incivilities and optimize costs. 

#Movingcarsdrivingchange #SustainableMobility #Selfsharing #UrbanInnovations #EcologicalTransportation #SmartCity