Car sharing: what is, how it works and which are the advantages

The car sharing is a short time car rental service, designed to facilitate the movements inside the big cities. Car sharing is, infact, a vehicle shared between a large number of people, that could easily book it trhough an app, from his own smartphone.

The idea about a shared car came from the 1948, when the first car sharing agency born, in Zurigo, in Switzerland, but the experience wasn’t so long. Others tried to do it in the ‘70s, in France, Holland, Germany and Swiss. Today the car sharing services are very common in the big cities, especially in the USA, in Germany, in the UK,  in Australia and in all the nord of Europe.

Car sharing in Italy

It is in the 2001 that the car sharing arrived in Italy, precisely at Milan, thanks to the environmental organization of Legambiente. Even in Milan, in 2006 opens the first private agency of this service, the Car Sharing Italia srl. In the next years we started to see around other organizations and agencies of services that pointed on the shared vehicles. Today there are many Italian cities that join the iniziative, like Rome, Milan, Bologna, Brescia, Florence, Genova, Savona, Padova, Palermo, Parma, Torino, Naples e Rimini, and some of them are increasing the service at their own provinces. At the moment the marketplace of the shared mobility, not only in Italy, but in all the world, is dominated by Car2Go, which have more than one million of users. Car2Go works with many models of Smart and right now it has, only in Italy, something like 200 shared vehicles that go around in the main cities of the country, using many facilities, like dedicated parkings. Car2Go though, has now found a valid competitor, Enjoy, the car shared service by the colossus of Eni, which use car fiat 500 and, at least in Italy, passed Car2Go for numbers of users and vehicles.

How the car sharing works

If we want to use the service we need firstly to register ourselves to the wanted agency, which we will choose keeping attention to the one more common in our area. At the moment of the registration they will give us a card, or, especially in the case we choose Enjoy, they will ask us to download an app. With the card, or the app, we can now rent a car, which we can find in the dedicated parkings. Getting the card, or the smartphone, closer to the chip in the front of the car, the doors will open and the rent will start. The prices depend on the car’s model and on the rent’s time (hours, day or more than one day). When we will finish with it, we can easily leave the vehicle in one of the designed parks.

The advantages of the car sharing for us

The car sharing service is very useful for the users that live in the big cities, where the usage of the own vehicles is less, because of the more usage of the public ones. Having his own vehicle, even if we don’t use it so much, has high costs, insurance, taxes, car box, etc, costs easily breakable thanks to the car sharing service. The service is so convenient for who rarely use the car, but even for the families that, usually, have two or more cars, which can, instead, decrease the numbers of vehicles, adding the car sharing service, when they need.  The service can be used even during a holiday, or to do short distances, when there aren’t public vehicles. Therefore, we don’t have any more to think about the controller traffic zones or to find the parking.

The advantages of the car sharing for all

The thing that, though, affect the soul of the environmentalists and not are the advantages that the service give to the whole community. The drastic decrease of the number of vehicles in the big cities, not only reduce the traffic and the difficulty to find a park, but huge is especially the low carbon footprint. All the cars are new, that means that they have less emissions and consumers, without calculate that almost all the agencies of car sharing choosed the electric energy, instead of the obsolete liquid fuel.  Therefore the rules about it said that the cars have to be disused after a precise number of kilometers, allow so to always have the last models.

This post is also available in: Italiano