> The decision to close North America was made based on two extremely complicated realities. The first being the volatile state of the global mobility landscape, and the second being the rising infrastructure complexities facing North American transportation today - such as a rapidly evolving competitive mobility landscape, the lack of necessary infrastructure to support new technology (including electric vehicle car share) and rising operating costs.
This is difficult to parse. It looks like they're saying:
1. operating costs were too high
2. we don't know what is in store for lyft/uber, scooters, etc
3. there aren't places to park and charge the cars
Car2go was also running into the wild-westness of America. Like this story about 75 car2go cars being stolen in a single day in Chicago. [1] I imagine things like NYC bumper-to-bumper damage adds up as well. Comparatively it's very calm in other markets like Germany and Denmark.
1. We don't know what mobility technologies to invest in (electric cars, scooters, electric bikes, who knows what else)
2. Increased hassle building out in US cities in general (you can look at comments around Google Fiber as well).
3. Lack of any investment from civic actors on developing support for bikes / scooters / electric / etc.
Basically, there are a lot of imaginable futures for urban mobility and there are no real signals in the US market about where things are going to end up. Uber / Lyft / the scooter folks / Tesla are all pushing their things but there's no real direction or leader and as a result cities are largely staying out (even failing to build obvious projects like bike infrastructure and public transit to urban cores).
I'm slightly curious how much of this is some unexpected cost that they could't come to terms with as they expanded across NA.
Across the street from my house, it's fine to park in the evenings, and a tow zone during the day. People would leave Car2go cars parked there all the time, and, with it being so uncertain when the next person would get the car, those puppies were like manna from heaven for the city impound lot's balance sheet. Someone on my block tried putting their car up Getaround, too, but that ended right quick.
In many of the cities I've lived in, street parking is also odd/even in the winter in the denser parts of town where Car2go makes sense. Parking is less brutal further out parts of town, but I imagine actually finding and getting yourself to a car starts feeling like more hassle than it's worth. Seems like it could easily escalate into a choice between no customers at all, and customers who tend to produce negative revenue.
Reading between the lines, it seems like they're probably unable to compete with the VC-subsidized prices of the big mobility providers in the US (uber/lyft/lime/bird, etc.). The "infrastructure" comment is a bit weird since they mention mobility competitors again.
I was an early Car2Go user in Austin, the first city in the US where Car2Go was available, and I loved it. I'd use it for a couple trips a month.
In the last few years of its existence I used it maybe once (if at all, honestly I don't really remember). It simply got killed by Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft are just generally much more convenient, and I don't remember the cost being that different.
I wonder if their pricing change earlier this year had anything to do with it.
They made the pricing model very antagonistic (eg the 1 hour package doesn't roll over, so driving for 2 hours on it costs way more than driving one hour, ending the rental, than immediately starting another 1 hour package!)
Before that I used the service a lot, I’d just hop in a car and go do stuff, changing my plans on the go, and know I’d get the best deal. After I had to plan things very precisely and hope for no randomness (heavy traffic, no parking, friend taking too long to come outside) and often it was less hassle and as expensive to take an Uber.
I used to use them maybe once a week, then after all that I dropped to once every few months.
But that’s just me..
Ouch. Regular car share user here, sometimes multiple times per day. The sheer number of cars that Car2Go/"Share Now" had (approx 700 here in Vancouver, I think) usually made it my first choice, with Evo a close second.
Did not see this coming. Is it possible this is another rebranding/acquisition exercise (like the Car2Go->ShareNow transition), or is the fleet gone for good?
Surprisingly close to their departure from Calgary, Austin, Chicago, Denver & Portland.. one wonders why they didn't just do it all at once. I wonder where all the used cars go.. literally disappeared overnight (no small feat), surely enough surplus to upset secondhand prices.
Car2Go/ShareNow had a unit in a shared office space across the hall from ours (in Vancouver.) They moved out at the beginning of December, sold all their office furniture to other tenants in the building rather than taking it with them somewhere else. Seems pretty permanent to me.
I gotta say, this is really unfortunate. I’m in Vancouver too and I’ve been using Evo/Car2Go since I got here. I am really gonna miss the little Smart cars.
Evo now doesn’t face major competition, which I worry about. I like their service, but it definitely seems like they’ll jack up the price.
Very early adopter here (and little later even snapped a developer job there). Very sad to see, but if you were an insider I think it was clear for at least 5 years now, that this business was not going to last.
The sharing economy to me, looks more like a sustainability-simulation of its business models, driven by yield-seeking funds and millenial-pockets which, freed of the burden to buy property, are open to add hefty premiums to their every day expenditures (e.g. "checkout that new roastery run by that reknown barista").
Yet these businesses failiures become eminent once you realize that they aren't even viable in cities with less than 2M people.
Daimler/BMW is just facing up to this reality. If car2go were VC funded, we would see more money being thrown at this bottomless pit.
With car rental the true business model often is not in renting out the cars, but second market when selling the cars after a year. The rental earnings have to cover loss of value. The profits come from selling efficiently.
The deal with Daimler and BMW doing this is also to attract future generations of buyers. It is said that users of "car sharing" are younger folks (not necessarily my observation, but what do I know) ND the hope is that when they become older, get married, get children and need their own car at fixed in the premium brands. No idea if that equations works out, though.
Big bummer, I loved this service when traveling in the PNW. I could be in Portland for a week and instead of needing to rent a car for the whole time, I had unfettered access on demand and only paid for what I needed. Being able to park it anywhere for free was a big bonus as well.
I was really hoping this model was going to see wider adoption and private car ownership would begin its ride into the sunset.
Too bad, this was really useful in Seattle to get to and from the airport.
They really struggled to keep the cars clean in my experience. Just about every ReachNow/Car2Go/ShareNow I got into reeked of smoke.
Was it actually cheaper than Ubering? I always felt that the price was very similar and Ubering removed the need to be the driver. Only ever used Car2Go when I actually needed the car space.
I’d been wondering when they would finally shut the doors in the US. I’d used the product quite a lot in Europe - worked especially well in Berlin. Was very difficult to use in the cities here in the US, and I found the UX to be consistently so bad I often gave up.
All the key folks are based in Berlin.
Seems very naive to think you can launch a mobile app based logistics business, dependent on UX fussy millennials, while managing a fleet of high maintenance automobiles, consistent and scaleable cloud infrastructure, that needs to grow geographically in cities across NA, AND fight and broker deals with municipalities along the way....
From San Francisco? Maybe.
From Berlin? Hardly.
With a European corporation supervising... Better off lighting the cash on fire.
In Denver it was a really excellent way to get around... until they ditched the easy to park and abundant smart cars for the much more limited numbers of Mercedes. Then the price creeped up to the point that it was price competitive just to take an Uber.
The move from the smart cars was understandable as they basically didn’t work in the snow but it did ruin the utility of the service the other 350 days a year.
What a bummer, these car share services were incredibly useful in Seattle. I've been a huge fan throughout the evolution of car sharing here.
Car2Go launched in Seattle in 2012. The model was innovative (one-way trips! park almost anywhere for free!). But they had poor reliability. I think the cars were connected via some German cell plan with internationally roaming on T-mobile, and the failure rate (unable to access the car, "phantom" car not really at location) was 5-10%, which is pretty bad.
Car2Go was also very unresponsive to customer needs. They refused to create an airport drop point (such a great and obvious use case!) and seemed unconcerned by their poor reliability.
Enter ReachNow. The competition was exactly what Car2Go needed. ReachNow added an airport drop point quickly, then Car2Go finally added their own airport drop.
ReachNow was plagued by long transaction times (e.g. 2 minutes of wait time from unlock to engine start – this is a LONG time when someone is waiting for your street parking spot). They finally fixed their startup times on many of the vehicles.
Then Lime entered with LimePod, which was the low-price option but with fewer cars. In total, there were well over 1K cars between all the services, and availability was great.
When ReachNow consumed Car2Go, I was worried things were going to go downhill due to lack of competition. Then they shut down ReachNow and started a confusing rebrand, then Lime left, and now Car2Go / Share Now is leaving.
I wish they would have first tried charging enough to make it a viable business. I wonder how much higher the prices would need to be.
I'm not sure it does. Lime had their LimePods car share program which used Fiat 500s and they shut down their program as well, although they wouldn't comment on the economics or the program (https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lime-shutters-limepod-raising-...).
In Seattle, over the past few years, we've had car2go, ReachNow, and Lime all attempt the on demand car sharing and all three have eventually shut their programs down. Only ZipCar has managed to stick around, but their pricing model is a bit different and requires a monthly subscription.
Based on that, my gut says that this no subscription, hop in, hop out car sharing just doesn't make money no matter what car is being used (although I'd be curious to see it tried again with fully electric cars).
I used it back when it was the Smart cars specifically because they were extremely easy to park anywhere, so the nicer cars were actually negative value for me even before considering the higher rates to use them.
They're owned by Daimer and BMW, so the cost of the cars isn't as big a factor.
Also, for long-running services, the initial costs aren't that important anyway if the cars are more durable. In Germany, almost all cabs used to be Mercedes. (I remember the whole cinema laughing in Collateral when the Jamie Foxx character presented his business outline for his luxury cab service)
As a person from Europe, in the hometown of DriveNow, which now they are killing to be absorbed by the former car2go, now Sharenow app, I really don't see them succeeding in Europe either. I used DriveNow a lot, mostly because of their packages and the better app and UX, but now that they merged, the prices are insane compared to SixtShare and the usability just seems very bad. It's a shame that before there was more competition (even now in Germany SixtShare seems like the better choice), but now that BMW and Mercedes joined forces, the new prices make the service useless.
I use ShareNow daily, because I enjoy it. They will not last in Europe, deep in the red. Operating costs far exceed what people would be willing to pay for a ride. Essentially you have to provide people with brand new cars all of the time, they have to be clean, filled up and evenly spread throughout the business area.
If you believe that Uber+Lyft survives by VC subsidies and drivers spending their wages on car TCO, making the driver essentially free to users, it makes sense that car-shares can't be price-competitive and turn a profit.
Used to use Car2Go all the time on holiday, recently had major problems re-activating my account after they became Share Now. Staff still answered the phone as "Drive now", it was a very confusing experience, which concluded with "wait 7 days for a human to review your account". Perhaps if they made sign up easier, they wouldn't be struggling!
Sad. I was a mega Car2Go fan/user here in Austin. Haven't owned a car in over a decade. Car2Go really made it so much easier for quick grocery trips/etc...
They had some incident earlier in the year where 100 Mercedes went missing in Chicago. I can't find the article that described it but apparently it was a wild night.
These worked pretty well in Austin. A few years ago my car had problems and I spent about six months commuting via bus and taking these guys the rest of the time. They had a deal with the city where downtown you could park them in any street spots for free, and they were all smart-cars so they didn't take up much space. Downtown, by a decently-central apartment complex, etc. there were almost always cars available in a reasonable walking distance.
Man, this is super frustrating. These were great in Seattle - last forever on ReachNow before they were folded in to Car2Go, then Car2Go into ShareNow...
Made living here much easier for when I just needed a quick vehicle rental.
A friend of mine worked for Car2Go during one of the freak snowfalls in Seattle.
That night, over a hundred C2G vehicles were left stranded and abandoned, all over the city. Many of them ended up in fenders, while the rest had to be manually retrieved, and re-parked by C2G agents.
The overtime, and the various surprise costs of single night probably wiped out months of profits in the city.
Such a shame - Car2Go was so useful here in NYC, great for short local hops or if you ever had the need to go further afield and didn't want to deal with the subway. Plus the Smart Cars were great for city driving.
Sure, all the cars smelt of weed and the seats were covered in dog hairs or french fries, but the convenience!
[+] [-] nostromo|6 years ago|reply
This is difficult to parse. It looks like they're saying:
1. operating costs were too high
2. we don't know what is in store for lyft/uber, scooters, etc
3. there aren't places to park and charge the cars
[+] [-] Strom|6 years ago|reply
--
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434719
[+] [-] aeturnum|6 years ago|reply
1. We don't know what mobility technologies to invest in (electric cars, scooters, electric bikes, who knows what else)
2. Increased hassle building out in US cities in general (you can look at comments around Google Fiber as well).
3. Lack of any investment from civic actors on developing support for bikes / scooters / electric / etc.
Basically, there are a lot of imaginable futures for urban mobility and there are no real signals in the US market about where things are going to end up. Uber / Lyft / the scooter folks / Tesla are all pushing their things but there's no real direction or leader and as a result cities are largely staying out (even failing to build obvious projects like bike infrastructure and public transit to urban cores).
[+] [-] mumblemumble|6 years ago|reply
Across the street from my house, it's fine to park in the evenings, and a tow zone during the day. People would leave Car2go cars parked there all the time, and, with it being so uncertain when the next person would get the car, those puppies were like manna from heaven for the city impound lot's balance sheet. Someone on my block tried putting their car up Getaround, too, but that ended right quick.
In many of the cities I've lived in, street parking is also odd/even in the winter in the denser parts of town where Car2go makes sense. Parking is less brutal further out parts of town, but I imagine actually finding and getting yourself to a car starts feeling like more hassle than it's worth. Seems like it could easily escalate into a choice between no customers at all, and customers who tend to produce negative revenue.
[+] [-] mdorazio|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
"We can't compete, so we're leaving."
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|6 years ago|reply
In the last few years of its existence I used it maybe once (if at all, honestly I don't really remember). It simply got killed by Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft are just generally much more convenient, and I don't remember the cost being that different.
[+] [-] danek|6 years ago|reply
Before that I used the service a lot, I’d just hop in a car and go do stuff, changing my plans on the go, and know I’d get the best deal. After I had to plan things very precisely and hope for no randomness (heavy traffic, no parking, friend taking too long to come outside) and often it was less hassle and as expensive to take an Uber. I used to use them maybe once a week, then after all that I dropped to once every few months. But that’s just me..
[+] [-] emptybits|6 years ago|reply
Did not see this coming. Is it possible this is another rebranding/acquisition exercise (like the Car2Go->ShareNow transition), or is the fleet gone for good?
[+] [-] gnabgib|6 years ago|reply
https://blog.car2go.com/2019/09/27/important-update-car2go-n...
[+] [-] derefr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamspoilt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobib|6 years ago|reply
Also Evo has even less of an incentive now to fix their broken Android app.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nneonneo|6 years ago|reply
Evo now doesn’t face major competition, which I worry about. I like their service, but it definitely seems like they’ll jack up the price.
[+] [-] woodpanel|6 years ago|reply
The sharing economy to me, looks more like a sustainability-simulation of its business models, driven by yield-seeking funds and millenial-pockets which, freed of the burden to buy property, are open to add hefty premiums to their every day expenditures (e.g. "checkout that new roastery run by that reknown barista").
Yet these businesses failiures become eminent once you realize that they aren't even viable in cities with less than 2M people.
Daimler/BMW is just facing up to this reality. If car2go were VC funded, we would see more money being thrown at this bottomless pit.
[+] [-] johannes1234321|6 years ago|reply
The deal with Daimler and BMW doing this is also to attract future generations of buyers. It is said that users of "car sharing" are younger folks (not necessarily my observation, but what do I know) ND the hope is that when they become older, get married, get children and need their own car at fixed in the premium brands. No idea if that equations works out, though.
[+] [-] cbsmith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duhi88|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xavdidtheshadow|6 years ago|reply
I was really hoping this model was going to see wider adoption and private car ownership would begin its ride into the sunset.
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellow_postit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbkrule|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ea1k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lasky|6 years ago|reply
All the key folks are based in Berlin.
Seems very naive to think you can launch a mobile app based logistics business, dependent on UX fussy millennials, while managing a fleet of high maintenance automobiles, consistent and scaleable cloud infrastructure, that needs to grow geographically in cities across NA, AND fight and broker deals with municipalities along the way....
From San Francisco? Maybe. From Berlin? Hardly. With a European corporation supervising... Better off lighting the cash on fire.
[+] [-] enjo|6 years ago|reply
The move from the smart cars was understandable as they basically didn’t work in the snow but it did ruin the utility of the service the other 350 days a year.
[+] [-] reeddavid|6 years ago|reply
Car2Go launched in Seattle in 2012. The model was innovative (one-way trips! park almost anywhere for free!). But they had poor reliability. I think the cars were connected via some German cell plan with internationally roaming on T-mobile, and the failure rate (unable to access the car, "phantom" car not really at location) was 5-10%, which is pretty bad.
Car2Go was also very unresponsive to customer needs. They refused to create an airport drop point (such a great and obvious use case!) and seemed unconcerned by their poor reliability.
Enter ReachNow. The competition was exactly what Car2Go needed. ReachNow added an airport drop point quickly, then Car2Go finally added their own airport drop.
ReachNow was plagued by long transaction times (e.g. 2 minutes of wait time from unlock to engine start – this is a LONG time when someone is waiting for your street parking spot). They finally fixed their startup times on many of the vehicles.
Then Lime entered with LimePod, which was the low-price option but with fewer cars. In total, there were well over 1K cars between all the services, and availability was great.
When ReachNow consumed Car2Go, I was worried things were going to go downhill due to lack of competition. Then they shut down ReachNow and started a confusing rebrand, then Lime left, and now Car2Go / Share Now is leaving.
I wish they would have first tried charging enough to make it a viable business. I wonder how much higher the prices would need to be.
[+] [-] bowmessage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superfrank|6 years ago|reply
In Seattle, over the past few years, we've had car2go, ReachNow, and Lime all attempt the on demand car sharing and all three have eventually shut their programs down. Only ZipCar has managed to stick around, but their pricing model is a bit different and requires a monthly subscription.
Based on that, my gut says that this no subscription, hop in, hop out car sharing just doesn't make money no matter what car is being used (although I'd be curious to see it tried again with fully electric cars).
[+] [-] crooked-v|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhd|6 years ago|reply
Also, for long-running services, the initial costs aren't that important anyway if the cars are more durable. In Germany, almost all cabs used to be Mercedes. (I remember the whole cinema laughing in Collateral when the Jamie Foxx character presented his business outline for his luxury cab service)
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mns|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neuronic|6 years ago|reply
None of these are cheap to realize.
[+] [-] rusticpenn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukilot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pezmc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johannes1234321|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikon|6 years ago|reply
https://www.drive-now.com/gb/en/now/important-update
[+] [-] badwolf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/transportation/twenty-one-ch...
[+] [-] bthrn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobib|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brundolf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Klonoar|6 years ago|reply
Made living here much easier for when I just needed a quick vehicle rental.
[+] [-] vkou|6 years ago|reply
That night, over a hundred C2G vehicles were left stranded and abandoned, all over the city. Many of them ended up in fenders, while the rest had to be manually retrieved, and re-parked by C2G agents.
The overtime, and the various surprise costs of single night probably wiped out months of profits in the city.
[+] [-] ckorhonen|6 years ago|reply
Sure, all the cars smelt of weed and the seats were covered in dog hairs or french fries, but the convenience!
[+] [-] jonbaer|6 years ago|reply