If you own a car but don’t use it much, growing numbers of startups are itching to help you rent it out. One of the latest ventures is Getaround, which aims to set itself apart with a recipe involving Facebook, smart phones, and green cars. Read More »
Cleantech
Over the course of 2010, a rich ecosystem of services, startups and innovations began to take shape around the idea of sharing cars and bikes. Here’s seven steps taken this year toward shared transportation: Read More »
RelayRides, which aims to help people rent out their personal vehicles, launched today and said it raised its first round of investment from Google Ventures and August Capital. It’s part of a trend in which companies are using the web to help people share “stuff.” Read More »
BMW Group is breaking into car sharing with a new pilot project in Munich that will let customers rent any current BMW model by the hour. It fits into much larger trends of innovation around providing mobility as a service — and growing competition for Zipcar. Read More »
Zipcar, a decade old startup with the country’s largest car sharing network, has filed with regulators this morning to raise up to $75 million in an initial public offering. Read More »
With Zipcar busy gobbling up car sharing competitors, a new generation of startups offering a peer-to-peer or distributed model of car sharing is taking shape. Here’s a snapshot of the next-gen car sharing landscape, comparing Spride Share, WhipCar and RelayRides. Read More »
Four years after setting up a car sharing service in London, England, Zipcar announced today that it has acquired the UK’s largest car sharing provider, Streetcar. Now Zipcar faces some questions about how to bridge technology gaps between different models. Read More »
These 10 bike sharing programs offer a glimpse of how a growing number of cities and unconventional transit players are putting wi-fi, solar power and smartphones to work in the service of mobility on demand. Read More »
Zipcar bills its car-sharing service as a money saver. At the tail end of a recession, has Zipcar — which has said it aims to “cross over to profitability” in 2010, and eventually go public — seen users flock to its service? Read More »
Today, just ahead of releasing its 2010 earnings forecast, Daimler announced it will open its Austin, Texas car sharing network to all city residents next month. Dubbed car2go, it demonstrates a service that could play into a larger Mobility on Demand system. Read More »
AAA’s latest study on vehicle ownership costs reads like a case for fuel sippers, if not for deserting personal cars altogether in favor of alternatives like car-share networks, which often cover fuel, maintenance and insurance costs, and larger “mobility on demand” systems. Read More »
The iPad could change the way vehicle networks operate and how consumers interact with organizations that offer alternatives to personal vehicle ownership. But a few hurdles stand between the device and a meaningful impact on vehicles’ software, entertainment, information and IT systems. Read More »
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