Car2Go / Share Now

» see car2go.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

car2go was the kind of thing european commuters with a brief north-american stint actually used. it never reached turkey, and in the meantime i was driving my own car around ankara like everyone else here was. the closest car2go city to me was probably vienna or rome (close enough), neither of which i was visiting often enough to want a per-minute carshare account.

to be fair, the product itself was the cleanest version of the carshare idea anyone had built. daimler launched it as an internal pilot in ulm in october 2008, with a fleet of smart fortwo two-seaters. you registered once, got a card or an app key, and could pick up any car parked in the operating zone. you drove it where you wanted. you parked it on a legal street. no return-to-base requirement, no docking station, no hourly minimum. the per-minute meter ran until you logged out.

the smart fortwo was the iconic car2go vehicle. tiny, two-seater, easy to wedge into the gaps that no normal car would fit. by mid-decade the fleet had expanded to mercedes and bmw mini units after the 2018 merger with bmw's drivenow. the combined company took the share now name.

share now announced in late 2019 that all north american operations would end on 29 february 2020. that meant new york, seattle, denver, washington dc, montreal, vancouver. the company also pulled out of london, brussels, florence in europe. by 2022 stellantis bought the remaining european business and folded it into free2move. by april 2024 the share now brand was retired entirely.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the free-floating carshare model that car2go put in place was the most ambitious version of the "you do not need to own a car" pitch that the 2010s urban-planning press loved. zipcar had been doing fixed-base carshare since 2000, but you had to bring the car back where you got it. car2go let you abandon the car at the destination. for someone going to a meeting across town it was a one-way taxi without the driver.

in european cities with dense urban cores and short trip distances, the math worked. in seattle and denver and washington dc, the trip distances were longer and the parking-zone geometry was harder to manage. north american drivers were also more likely to already own a car, so the carshare was a backup rather than a daily option. by 2019 the company had concluded that the us market was not going to break even on the EV-fleet investment it would have required.

~ the day it died ~

the 29 february 2020 shutdown was meant to be a clean exit, with refund flows for any remaining account credits. as it turned out, the date landed three weeks before the covid lockdowns began rolling through north america, which meant that the carshare market in those cities collapsed anyway before any post-mortem could be written. the timing was the timing.

the european business kept running under share now branding for two more years. stellantis closed the acquisition in july 2022 through its free2move subsidiary. by april 2024 the integration into free2move was complete and the share now name was retired (or whatever it was called).

~ the long tail ~

the free-floating carshare model did not die with car2go. free2move still operates a similar fleet in european cities and started us re-entry in 2023 under the stellantis banner. the smart-car-as-carshare moment did die, though. the smart brand itself pivoted to china in 2020 and stopped selling fortwo two-seaters in europe by 2023. the tiny city car as a shared object is now a memory.

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