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Zipcar and Flexcar Driven Together Zipcar (AP) Network News X PROFILE View More Activity TOOLBOX Resize Print E-mail Reprints   By Thomas Heath Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, October 31, 2007 Flexcar and Zipcar, two companies seeking to change American habits by renting cars by the hour, plan to merge in a deal that would reshape the nascent car-sharing industry. [an error occurred while processing this directive] After years of losses for both companies, Flexcar, based in Seattle and controlled by America Online founder Steve Case, said it will merge with the larger Zipcar, based near Boston, in hopes of achieving profitability within the year. "We just wanted to rapidly expand in new markets and rapidly expand the fleets," said Case, whose Revolution LLC bought Flexcar in 2005. "They're both in turbo-growth mode. We think the companies combined will be on a path to profitability in the next year or so, and with rapid and significant expansion will be ready" for an initial public offering of stock. The two companies, the nation's largest car-sharing firms, are owned by private investors. They did not disclose the merger's financial terms. Both companies were founded in 1999 with the intent of serving environmentally minded city dwellers and university students who could be weaned from the expense and other complications of automobile ownership. Zipcar, for instance, rents cars for $7.75 to $15 per hour on top of an annual fee. Together, the two companies helped popularize an industry that now includes more than two dozen competitors. "It's a niche that wasn't exploited by the larger traditional car-rental companies," said Chris Brown, managing editor of Auto Rental News. "I don't think it will ever eat into a huge percentage of the $20 billion U.S. car-rental market. It's kind of like this little cult of users that are all in it together in this cool new system." Even so, sensing profit or as a defensive measure, car-rental giants like Hert

MIT Smart Cities: City Car Published February 12, 2008 Energy Policy , Transportation 2 Comments Tags: Automotive X Prize, Electric Car When I think of car sharing in the U.S., I think of Flexcar and Zipcar [they have merged -- new name is Zipcar]. Together I think they had around 5,000 vehicles at merger time in 2007. But so far carsharing has no measurable impact on urban traffic or CO2 load. Some of the consumer resistance may be price. That's where the MIT City Car looks promising - this is exactly what I want for the urban short-trips that involved carrying stuff back to the transport station. I could imagine the Buenos Aires CBD traffic density being cut in half or more by a hundred thousand of these way-cool cars, with a "luggage cart" stand every couple of blocks. And a little car that can move in any direction on its four independent wheel-robots would be very appealing - though possibly deadly amidst speeding BA taxis… UPDATE 080212: Some clarifications are required, prompted by comments to this post from carsharing pioneer Dave Brook - whose blog is a recommended source on the industry. I'll just briefly enumerate these points: 1. Carsharing cannot make a major impact on urban traffic/CO2 load unless the concept wins large scale adoption by consumers who elect to substitute public transport + carsharing for their current single-passenger-per-vehicle preferences. 2. Not being privy to any objective studies of consumer preferences, I'm speculating that at least two factors will gate acceptance: convenience and price. On convenience the City Car concept might contribute if deployed with sufficient spatial frequency to e.g. make Ms. shopper happy running her errands within a convenient carsharing radius around a transport station. My speculation is that density is probably not coarser than a 2 block grid. 3. Price - The City Car could make high frequency deployment more economic by introducing several operating cost efficiencies

Zipcar and fair prices for public spaces By Mike DeBonis Zipcar is about to have some competition. (Flickr user Andrew Currie/CC BY 2.0 ) For years now, Zipcar had the local car-sharing industry pretty much to itself, turning it from a curiosity into a crucial service relied on by a significant and rising number of city residents not interested in owning cars of their own. But as the appeal and profitability of car-sharing grows, the more appealing it has become to potential Zipcar competitors - it merged with its only previous D.C. competitor, Flexcar, in 2007 - and the more unfair it seems for the city to treat Zipcar as a monopoly. So earlier this year, the city announced it would hold an auction for use of the more than 80 on-street parking spaces currently reserved for use by Zipcar. The benefits were twofold: The car-sharing market would open up, and the District would get paid a market rate for use of its public space. But Zipcar is ticked. Where it once had 86 spaces for its use, it now, after the auction, says it will have only about a dozen on-street spaces. That's prompted John Williams, a Seattle public relations consultant working with Zipcar, to get in touch with local reporters to take issue with the way the city transportation department handled things. (TBD's John Hendel covered the issue Friday.) Williams says that Zipcar has no problem with competition, but it is upset with the auction process, which essentially handed individual spots to the highest bidder (which, of course, is the way auctions tend to work). Zipcar would have preferred a "more strategic approach" in which its experience in the business and its existing large customer base were taken into account. And, Williams is not shy to point out, the auction could very well mean higher costs for its users. Good points in there. Zipcar turned car-sharing into a viable business in this town, and right now, everyone who wants a shared car wants a Zipcar - arguments both f