The heavy hitters of Europe's car industry have opted to embrace the car-sharing trend, calling it "the future" of cars, The New York Times reported.
Not letting car-sharing interrupt their business, automaker Daimler and rental company Europcar have teamed up to create Car2Go. BMW and Sixt collaborated to make DriveNow.
"Our core business in the '70s was selling cars; in the '80s, late '70s came the great innovation of leasing and financing," said Tony Douglas, head of marketing and sales at BMW's mobility unit. "Now you can pay per use of a car. It's like the music industry. You used to have to buy an album, now you can pay per play."
He and others in the auto industry believe the car-sharing trend will continue to rise as travel becomes "multi-modal," where people use smartphones to plan their trips with a combination of cars, bikes, public transportation and walking.
"We just think it's the future, as simple as that," said Robert Henrich, the chief executive of Daimler Mobility Services, which includes Car2Go. "Young customers cannot imagine a life without smartphones anymore, and we need to be part of the smartphone world."
About 2.3 million drivers worldwide belonged to a car-sharing service in 2012, according to Martyn Briggs, mobility expert at the consulting group Frost & Sullivan. The number is expected to increase to 26 million by 2020.
The growth in car-sharing has been fueled by urbanization; an attempt to reduce congestion and pollution and more available technologies, among other factors.
Even among car-sharing companies, there are varying degrees of flexibility. Zipcar, which has locations in North America and a few European countries, rents cars on a hourly basis and requires that the vehicles be returned to a designated parking spot at a certain time.
On the other hand, Car2Go and DriveNow rent out cars by the minute and leave them in any legal space when they're done. Customers can use a smartphone to locate the nearest car and a membership cars to get in.
"In every big city almost, you see these vehicles standing around, and you can jump in and take it," said Thorsten Wagner, a spokesman for the Automotive Institute for Management at the European Business School in Oestrich-Winkel, Germany.
The current leader in the car-sharing business, Car2Go has 9,500 cars and 500,000 customers in 25 cities in Europe and North America.
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