Sharing their Rides
BERLIN — Germans, once a nation of ardent automobile enthusiasts, are not buying cars as much as they used to. Instead, they’re sharing them.
The country has become the world’s biggest user of one-way car sharing plans, where people can find a vehicle using their smartphone, drive it across town and leave it there without having to return it to a central base.
The powerful auto industry first ignored the trend, but is now jumping on board. Some companies are betting big on car sharing, not just for short trips within cities, but also for longer ones between them.
It follows a culture shift in the country that invented the automobile, where cars were once commonly described as the Germans’ “favorite child.” Excellent public transport, high fuel prices and a strong environmental movement mean that for many Germans the car has become an expendable accessory, or at worst an expensive liability.
New vehicle registrations fell below 3 million last year, continuing a two-decade decline. Meanwhile, the average age of buyers rose above 52 for the first time, compared with an average age of 46 in the mid-1990s.
“The young buyers are dying off,” said Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, who heads the University of Duisburg-Essen’s Center for Automotive Research.
As a result, the auto industry has embraced car sharing as a means of reaching a younger generation for whom the idea of owning a vehicle is as outdated as their parents’ record collection.
“I want to pay for things when I use them,” said Martin Blankenstein, a 35-year-old management consultant who uses several different car sharing companies.
For decades such services were station-based. Vehicles could only be picked up in certain places and had to be returned to the same location. But six years ago car sharing took a different turn, with the launch of the first one-way offers.
These flexible services have spread to major cities across Europe and North America thanks to the adoption of smartphones, and have really taken off in Germany, where more than half of all the journeys were booked last year.
Using a mobile app, customers can find a nearby car, book it at short notice, drive it across town and leave it there without having to return to the starting point.
Billing is by the minute. Twenty minutes of use will typically cost $5.50-$8.20 with fuel, insurance and parking included.
Advocates say the cost tends to be half of what a taxi would charge for the same journey.
Daimler just launched a new option for its Car2Go short-term rental service that allows customers to take one of its Mercedes-Benz B-class vehicles from Berlin to Hamburg, or vice versa, and leave it. Previously, Car2Go had only offered two-seater Smart cars.
