An Australian city could be one of the next in line to trial the innovative smart fortwo based 'car2go' car-sharing system.
Backed by Mercedes-Benz and smart's parent company, Daimler, the pay-as-you-go system recently moved from a pilot program to a fully fledged operation in the German city of Ulm. It will also be trialed in Austin, the capital of the US state of Texas, from September and an Australian presence is being actively investigated.
Loosely based on Paris's noted Velib city electric bicycle system, Daimler's idea for car2go was to make driving through clogged city arteries as cheap as talking on a mobile phone.
As the residents of Ulm have just discovered, after they register for the system, they can drive away in any car2go vehicle for just €0.19 cents a minute -- around $A0.35. The pricing covers all fuel, insurance and charges and, once the driver reaches his or her destination, they can just leave the car and walk away.
"The idea is that when you want a car, you just take it and when you've finished with the car, you just leave it," car2go project manager, Robert Henrich, said in Ulm yesterday.
"It's a completely free-flowing system and you never have to return the car to where you picked it up. If you want to cross the city, you just take a car, cross the city and then leave it."
The concept has moved from the pilot phase to a full-time business with 200 blue-and-white smarts for Ulm's 120,000 residents. Daimler will also supply another 200 car2go smart fortwos for Austin -- and it's looking to branch out into other countries as soon as it is practical.
"We have had interest from cities all over the world -- including several in Australia," Henrich admitted.
"We would probably think an Asian city should be next, because sometimes the thinking there for the consumer is more different to Ulm or Austin than it would be in Australia and we want to keep learning.
"But we have serious interest from some councils there and we are investigating all of them."
According to Mercedes-Benz Australia's David McCarthy, car2go is one of a list of alternative transport solutions the company would like to see trialed in Australia.
"car2go is a product of Daimler's Business Innovation department. Within that business unit there are people with experience and knowledge of the Australian market, so our biggest cities -- Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane -- are on the radar for car2go," McCarthy told the Carsales Network.
"What we learn from Ulm as a company will help make the local situation clearer. It could be that car2go comes Down Under via a third party operator.
"We have had strong interest from a number of specialist operators and they, like us, are looking closely at the results of how the initial car2go operation pans out," McCarthy said.
Ultimately, in Ulm, Austin and other cities, the system, which has no up-front joining fees, hopes to 'deliver' cars within a three-minute or 300-metre walk of every city driver. car2go also organises a fleet of cleaners to keep the cars pristine.
When users register for the scheme online or in one of the registration booths in the city, they are given a microchip to attach to their licenses. They 'show' these to a chip-reader inside the smart's windscreen, which unlocks the doors. Then they take the key from the glovebox, use the touch-screen pad to enter a PIN and rate the cleanliness of the car on a one-to-five scale (unashamedly lifted from eBay), before driving away.
In Ulm all the fortwos are fitted with satellite navigation. They're diesel micro-hybrid models which automatically switch off when the cars are stationary.
Locally smart would likely use petrol microhybrid fortwos. Future car2go systems could also use a fully electric smart -- as already trialed in London and Berlin.
Read more on the car2go system here
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