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“Learning by driving”: car2go offers an ever increasing number of people the opportunity to experien


car2go allows an ever increasing number of people to experience electromobility. In 2016, at the locations where the market leader for free-floating car sharing offered electrically driven cars, the number of users almost doubled. Currently, around 270,000 car2go users in Amsterdam, Stuttgart and Madrid rent the over 1,300 smart fortwo electric drive on average more than 10,000 times per day. Following the “learning by driving” principle, car2go therefore plays a decisive role in the breakthrough of electromobility in the private customer sector and simultaneously also helps reduce air pollution in the cities.

“Electromobility will only assert itself when we can convince and inspire the customers to use the electrically driven cars”, says Olivier Reppert, CEO of the car2go Group. For this reason, car2go has been making electromobility “driveable” for about five years now: In Amsterdam and Stuttgart, since their starts in 2012, only smart fortwo electric drive vehicles are used in the fleets. This is also the case in Madrid since its launch in 2015. In the Dutch capital, around 40,000 users currently share the 350 environmentally friendly electrically driven smart vehicles. In Stuttgart, the 90,000 users are able to flexibly rent the 500 electric cars in the Home Area. In the Spanish capital, the youngest location with an electrically driven fleet, around 140,000 users also currently share the 500 smart fortwo electric drive vehicles.

“The flexible, fully electric car sharing concept from car2go plays a decisive role in the breakthrough of electromobility for private customers”, explains Thomas Beermann, CEO of car2go Europe GmbH: “The more than 10,000 rentals per day at the car2go electric fleet locations correspond to more than 10,000 ‘test drives’ per day with an electrically driven vehicle – and thus, the total 275,000 car2go users at the electric fleet locations are potential electric vehicle owners of the future.”

If car sharing fleets are purely electrically operated, the already positive effects of car sharing on the air quality and traffic congestion in city centers increase many times over. This is then reflected in the measures required in cities with car2go electric fleets, which then also benefit flexible, fully electric car sharing: When the city of Madrid applied a driving ban in the inner city due to air pollution for the first time in history at the end of December 2016, the car2go electrically driven vehicles were explicitly excluded from the ban. Hence, car2go users were still able to remain flexibly mobile within the Madrid inner city, which subsequently resulted in higher usage figures. In Stuttgart, the city requests that people switch to alternative mobility options when weather conditions cause atmospheric pollution. During these so-called particulate matter alarm periods, car2go vehicles can even be rented at the reduced price of 19 instead of 29 cents per minute. Accordingly, the usage figures for the environmentally friendly electrically driven car2go vehicles increase on the days when there is a particulate matter alarm.

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