Car-sharing service quitting North America
A car-sharing service owned by Daimler and BMW is being pulled out of North America at the end of February.
The decision to can Share Now has been blamed on the “volatile state of the global mobility landscape” and rising infrastructure costs.
On the same date – citing “low adoption rates” – it will also cease operating in Florence, London and Brussels. Instead, the focus will switch to remaining European cities where it operates and where it thinks the service remains viable. In North America, Share Now, which was formerly known as Car2go, operated in Montreal, New York, Seattle, Washington DC and Vancouver.
“This decision was made based on two realities,” says a spokesman for Share Now. “The first is the volatile state of the global mobility landscape. The second is the rising infrastructure complexities facing North American transportation and associated costs needed to sustain operations here.”
The Daimler AG and BMW Group joint entity had remained hopeful it would be able to come to a solution over the past few months, but ultimately it wasn’t in a position “to commit to the level of investment necessary” to make the North American market successful “in the near and long term”.
An email sent to London customers of DriveNow – the UK name for Share Now – echoes a similar sentiment with the company saying “the decision was not made lightly”. It adds the number of clients there and demand was below expectations and lower than other cities.
The email states: “We started in London in December 2014 with the vision to change urban mobility, and offer a flexible and attractive mobility solution that is in combination with public transport and is an alternative to the private car.
“Although more Londoners integrated our service in their daily behaviours, we had to face the reality we could not convince enough to do so. To make our car-sharing service successful in a city strongly depends on market circumstances.
“The number of customers in London and their demand for our service was below our expectations and lower than in other Share Now cities. Furthermore, we had to face local factors, such as the high costs of operation and the different circumstances boroughs.”
