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> The decision to close North America was made based on two extremely complicated realities. The first being the volatile state of the global mobility landscape

> The decision to close North America was made based on two extremely complicated realities. The first being the volatile state of the global mobility landscape, and the second being the rising infrastructure complexities facing North American transportation today - such as a rapidly evolving competitive mobility landscape, the lack of necessary infrastructure to support new technology (including electric vehicle car share) and rising operating costs. This is difficult to parse. It looks like they're saying: 1. operating costs were too high 2. we don't know what is in store for lyft/uber, scooters, etc 3. there aren't places to park and charge the cars

reaperducer 7y ago
It's certainly written very carefully to avoid saying anything. My interpretation is much simpler: "We can't compete, so we're leaving."
- chiefalchemist 7y ago
  Right. Because immediately after they said this. My read is, they expanded too fast. The fear of them being too late drove them to be too soon. > "Moving forward, SHARE NOW will focus on the remaining 18 European cities. We, along with our shareholders, believe these markets show the clearest potential for profitable growth and mobility innovation."
- maxerickson 7y ago
  This previous article mentions a bunch of services stopping: https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/car2go-latest-short-term-car-rental-service-pull-out-major-us-cities https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/car2go-latest-short... "It's not worth trying to run this business" can be the same thing as "we can't compete", but it isn't necessarily the same thing.
- microtherion 7y ago
  Or maybe… "we prefer not to compete against competitors burning VC money".
  - mypalmike 7y ago
    Probably a minor detail in the grand scheme of things, but I would imagine they also had trouble competing for engineering talent. For instance, ReachNow was owned by BMW, a privately held company. The salaries they were offering devs were very low, and they offered no equity compensation (which would have been illiquid even if they had).
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  Can't compete with who? Car2go was the last such service with cars available in my neighborhood. I had once been an iGo user, but canceled my membership after realizing that 80% of the time I'd either rather take the bus, rather find something else to do, or rather pay (often less money and certainly less time) for delivery services, whichever is more appropriate for the situation in question. I guess you could frame it as, "Can't compete with the fact that Americans who don't own cars do so because they either prefer other transportation options, don't have much money, or don't have a driver's license."
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I do know people who use short-term rentals. But between subsidized Uber/Lyft and traditional rentals, it's definitely a fairly niche use case. (e.g. run out and do a bunch of errands for a few hours) I remember when Zipcar was a new economy darling with the CEO a common speaker and panelist at certain types of events. That pretty much ended when Uber got big.
mumblemumble 7y ago
I'm slightly curious how much of this is some unexpected cost that they could't come to terms with as they expanded across NA. Across the street from my house, it's fine to park in the evenings, and a tow zone during the day. People would leave Car2go cars parked there all the time, and, with it being so uncertain when the next person would get the car, those puppies were like manna from heaven for the city impound lot's balance sheet. Someone on my block tried putting their car up Getaround, too, but that ended right quick. In many of the cities I've lived in, street parking is also odd/even in the winter in the denser parts of town where Car2go makes sense. Parking is less brutal further out parts of town, but I imagine actually finding and getting yourself to a car starts feeling like more hassle than it's worth. Seems like it could easily escalate into a choice between no customers at all, and customers who tend to produce negative revenue.
- llampx 7y ago
  Parking is even more of a hassle in their core market, dense urban Europe. I live in Berlin and have been hit with an unforeseen parking fine due to the hard-to-read parking signs. I think it has more to do with the fact that most people in America own cars and only rent if they need a car long term.
  - microtherion 7y ago
    Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite a bit). Recently, I tried to return a car only to see the parking space being taken up by an unauthorized car (all the more aggravating as my car was electric and should have been recharged overnight). I was advised to find a legal parking space where I could leave the car for 12 hours or so — which turned out to be a significant hassle. I was essentially unable to find a spot and ended up parking in my own driveway.
    - dmoy 7y ago
      > Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite Zipcar in the US does this for awhile now. It's ok, but means you can't do point to point as easily. So if you drive somewhere, do something for hours, you have to hold the reservation the whole time and then drive back when you're done. It's useful for many things, but the pricing doesn't work for everything.
mdorazio 7y ago
Reading between the lines, it seems like they're probably unable to compete with the VC-subsidized prices of the big mobility providers in the US (uber/lyft/lime/bird, etc.). The "infrastructure" comment is a bit weird since they mention mobility competitors again.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  Some cities have provided dedicated parking spaces on blocks for Car2Go/Zipcar type services, but the issue is that not every city is doing this in every neighborhood, there are not necessarily enough being created even in places where they exist, and finding out where one can legally park otherwise at any hour of the day is extremely complicated.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    I agree. But this is a natural disadvantage in comparison to both rideshare services (no one has to worry about parking) and shared mobility (leave your bike/scooter wherever). US cities often don't want to provide the spaces because it means less revenue, more work, and disincentive to use the public transit they fund.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      I wouldn’t even say that. Free parking is now a significant policy hill to die on for a loud, politically vocal portion of the population, even in places like NYC where they are a minority. Any giveaway of free parking, whether it be for dedicated carsharing spots, a bike corral, a bus lane, to free up spots by making people pay for usage, or to reduce double parking by delivery vehicles, is equivalent in these peoples’ eyes as personally driving a bulldozer to eminent domain their living room, despite the fact that the street is a notionally public realm. And at the scale of local elections with such low turnout that margins are measured in the hundreds of voters, pissing these people off is something you do at your own peril. Some jurisdictions, as it is, do not spend nearly enough money on street maintenance and upkeep, and changing parking is a fear that other issues will pop up and be ignored. And in some cities, streets are actually not managed by the city but by the state, and good luck getting a state DOT to do anything even a hairline outside of the box.
aeturnum 7y ago
I think I'd read this more like: 1. We don't know what mobility technologies to invest in (electric cars, scooters, electric bikes, who knows what else) 2. Increased hassle building out in US cities in general (you can look at comments around Google Fiber as well). 3. Lack of any investment from civic actors on developing support for bikes / scooters / electric / etc. Basically, there are a lot of imaginable futures for urban mobility and there are no real signals in the US market about where things are going to end up. Uber / Lyft / the scooter folks / Tesla are all pushing their things but there's no real direction or leader and as a result cities are largely staying out (even failing to build obvious projects like bike infrastructure and public transit to urban cores).
Strom 7y ago
Car2go was also running into the wild-westness of America. Like this story about 75 car2go cars being stolen in a single day in Chicago. [1] I imagine things like NYC bumper-to-bumper damage adds up as well. Comparatively it's very calm in other markets like Germany and Denmark. -- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434719
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
  That's hilarious.
  - banger180 7y ago
    and sad...
  - corporate_shi11 7y ago
    A culture of theft and violence is rampant in inner cities like Chicago, unfortunately.
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      I wonder how this is not big news/political issue over there. I've recently saw a documentary on Seattle and all those addicts in the streets. Now reading this just fit the picture. How could this come so far? This sounds like some 3rd world dystopia stuff. Is there some national effort to fix those conditions? I mean this is the USA. You can't take this as normal.
      - corporate_shi11 7y ago
        Many - if not most - of the residents of inner city slum areas were raised by single mothers who had them very young without the means to support them. They turned to drugs and gangs. They never graduated high school. In short, they never had a chance. There is not much the government can do to fix this. One of the few things government could do to help - increased police presence and general law enforcement - has been rejected by inner city politicians. Police often find themselves at odds with the political leadership of major American cities. It's a shame, but that's politics. Ultimately it's a cultural issue that the people themselves need to figure out. If they stopped having kids so young and women weren't forced to raise their children alone, things could improve.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I was an early Car2Go user in Austin, the first city in the US where Car2Go was available, and I loved it. I'd use it for a couple trips a month. In the last few years of its existence I used it maybe once (if at all, honestly I don't really remember). It simply got killed by Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft are just generally much more convenient, and I don't remember the cost being that different.
- coryking 7y ago
  Bingo. Once Uber and lyft caught on it was only useful when there was surge pricing.
  - jkaplowitz 7y ago
    Here in Montreal the local competitor Communauto is doing great, but with both Zipcar and car2go usage models in the same subscription, and cheaper than any car-based alternative including both of those as well as taxis and Uber. "Local" is a bit misleading - they're indeed based here, but they also serve Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, and over in Europe, Paris. (Service details vary by location outside the province of Quebec.)
  - Bombthecat 7y ago
    Yeah, but uber is running at a loss... Sooner or later they will increase the cost. But I doubt that they will come back....
danek 7y ago
I wonder if their pricing change earlier this year had anything to do with it. They made the pricing model very antagonistic (eg the 1 hour package doesn't roll over, so driving for 2 hours on it costs way more than driving one hour, ending the rental, than immediately starting another 1 hour package!) Before that I used the service a lot, I’d just hop in a car and go do stuff, changing my plans on the go, and know I’d get the best deal. After I had to plan things very precisely and hope for no randomness (heavy traffic, no parking, friend taking too long to come outside) and often it was less hassle and as expensive to take an Uber. I used to use them maybe once a week, then after all that I dropped to once every few months. But that’s just me..

reaperducer 7y ago

It's certainly written very carefully to avoid saying anything. My interpretation is much simpler: "We can't compete, so we're leaving."

chiefalchemist 7y ago
Right. Because immediately after they said this. My read is, they expanded too fast. The fear of them being too late drove them to be too soon. > "Moving forward, SHARE NOW will focus on the remaining 18 European cities. We, along with our shareholders, believe these markets show the clearest potential for profitable growth and mobility innovation."
maxerickson 7y ago
This previous article mentions a bunch of services stopping: https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/car2go-latest-short-term-car-rental-service-pull-out-major-us-cities https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/car2go-latest-short... "It's not worth trying to run this business" can be the same thing as "we can't compete", but it isn't necessarily the same thing.
microtherion 7y ago
Or maybe… "we prefer not to compete against competitors burning VC money".
- mypalmike 7y ago
  Probably a minor detail in the grand scheme of things, but I would imagine they also had trouble competing for engineering talent. For instance, ReachNow was owned by BMW, a privately held company. The salaries they were offering devs were very low, and they offered no equity compensation (which would have been illiquid even if they had).
mumblemumble 7y ago
Can't compete with who? Car2go was the last such service with cars available in my neighborhood. I had once been an iGo user, but canceled my membership after realizing that 80% of the time I'd either rather take the bus, rather find something else to do, or rather pay (often less money and certainly less time) for delivery services, whichever is more appropriate for the situation in question. I guess you could frame it as, "Can't compete with the fact that Americans who don't own cars do so because they either prefer other transportation options, don't have much money, or don't have a driver's license."
- ghaff 7y ago
  I do know people who use short-term rentals. But between subsidized Uber/Lyft and traditional rentals, it's definitely a fairly niche use case. (e.g. run out and do a bunch of errands for a few hours) I remember when Zipcar was a new economy darling with the CEO a common speaker and panelist at certain types of events. That pretty much ended when Uber got big.

mumblemumble 7y ago

I'm slightly curious how much of this is some unexpected cost that they could't come to terms with as they expanded across NA. Across the street from my house, it's fine to park in the evenings, and a tow zone during the day. People would leave Car2go cars parked there all the time, and, with it being so uncertain when the next person would get the car, those puppies were like manna from heaven for the city impound lot's balance sheet. Someone on my block tried putting their car up Getaround, too, but that ended right quick. In many of the cities I've lived in, street parking is also odd/even in the winter in the denser parts of town where Car2go makes sense. Parking is less brutal further out parts of town, but I imagine actually finding and getting yourself to a car starts feeling like more hassle than it's worth. Seems like it could easily escalate into a choice between no customers at all, and customers who tend to produce negative revenue.

llampx 7y ago
Parking is even more of a hassle in their core market, dense urban Europe. I live in Berlin and have been hit with an unforeseen parking fine due to the hard-to-read parking signs. I think it has more to do with the fact that most people in America own cars and only rent if they need a car long term.
- microtherion 7y ago
  Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite a bit). Recently, I tried to return a car only to see the parking space being taken up by an unauthorized car (all the more aggravating as my car was electric and should have been recharged overnight). I was advised to find a legal parking space where I could leave the car for 12 hours or so — which turned out to be a significant hassle. I was essentially unable to find a spot and ended up parking in my own driveway.
  - dmoy 7y ago
    > Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite Zipcar in the US does this for awhile now. It's ok, but means you can't do point to point as easily. So if you drive somewhere, do something for hours, you have to hold the reservation the whole time and then drive back when you're done. It's useful for many things, but the pricing doesn't work for everything.

mdorazio 7y ago

Reading between the lines, it seems like they're probably unable to compete with the VC-subsidized prices of the big mobility providers in the US (uber/lyft/lime/bird, etc.). The "infrastructure" comment is a bit weird since they mention mobility competitors again.

bobthepanda 7y ago
Some cities have provided dedicated parking spaces on blocks for Car2Go/Zipcar type services, but the issue is that not every city is doing this in every neighborhood, there are not necessarily enough being created even in places where they exist, and finding out where one can legally park otherwise at any hour of the day is extremely complicated.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  I agree. But this is a natural disadvantage in comparison to both rideshare services (no one has to worry about parking) and shared mobility (leave your bike/scooter wherever). US cities often don't want to provide the spaces because it means less revenue, more work, and disincentive to use the public transit they fund.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    I wouldn’t even say that. Free parking is now a significant policy hill to die on for a loud, politically vocal portion of the population, even in places like NYC where they are a minority. Any giveaway of free parking, whether it be for dedicated carsharing spots, a bike corral, a bus lane, to free up spots by making people pay for usage, or to reduce double parking by delivery vehicles, is equivalent in these peoples’ eyes as personally driving a bulldozer to eminent domain their living room, despite the fact that the street is a notionally public realm. And at the scale of local elections with such low turnout that margins are measured in the hundreds of voters, pissing these people off is something you do at your own peril. Some jurisdictions, as it is, do not spend nearly enough money on street maintenance and upkeep, and changing parking is a fear that other issues will pop up and be ignored. And in some cities, streets are actually not managed by the city but by the state, and good luck getting a state DOT to do anything even a hairline outside of the box.

aeturnum 7y ago

I think I'd read this more like: 1. We don't know what mobility technologies to invest in (electric cars, scooters, electric bikes, who knows what else) 2. Increased hassle building out in US cities in general (you can look at comments around Google Fiber as well). 3. Lack of any investment from civic actors on developing support for bikes / scooters / electric / etc. Basically, there are a lot of imaginable futures for urban mobility and there are no real signals in the US market about where things are going to end up. Uber / Lyft / the scooter folks / Tesla are all pushing their things but there's no real direction or leader and as a result cities are largely staying out (even failing to build obvious projects like bike infrastructure and public transit to urban cores).

Strom 7y ago

Car2go was also running into the wild-westness of America. Like this story about 75 car2go cars being stolen in a single day in Chicago. [1] I imagine things like NYC bumper-to-bumper damage adds up as well. Comparatively it's very calm in other markets like Germany and Denmark. -- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434719

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
That's hilarious.
- banger180 7y ago
  and sad...
- corporate_shi11 7y ago
  A culture of theft and violence is rampant in inner cities like Chicago, unfortunately.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    I wonder how this is not big news/political issue over there. I've recently saw a documentary on Seattle and all those addicts in the streets. Now reading this just fit the picture. How could this come so far? This sounds like some 3rd world dystopia stuff. Is there some national effort to fix those conditions? I mean this is the USA. You can't take this as normal.
    - corporate_shi11 7y ago
      Many - if not most - of the residents of inner city slum areas were raised by single mothers who had them very young without the means to support them. They turned to drugs and gangs. They never graduated high school. In short, they never had a chance. There is not much the government can do to fix this. One of the few things government could do to help - increased police presence and general law enforcement - has been rejected by inner city politicians. Police often find themselves at odds with the political leadership of major American cities. It's a shame, but that's politics. Ultimately it's a cultural issue that the people themselves need to figure out. If they stopped having kids so young and women weren't forced to raise their children alone, things could improve.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I was an early Car2Go user in Austin, the first city in the US where Car2Go was available, and I loved it. I'd use it for a couple trips a month. In the last few years of its existence I used it maybe once (if at all, honestly I don't really remember). It simply got killed by Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft are just generally much more convenient, and I don't remember the cost being that different.

coryking 7y ago
Bingo. Once Uber and lyft caught on it was only useful when there was surge pricing.
- jkaplowitz 7y ago
  Here in Montreal the local competitor Communauto is doing great, but with both Zipcar and car2go usage models in the same subscription, and cheaper than any car-based alternative including both of those as well as taxis and Uber. "Local" is a bit misleading - they're indeed based here, but they also serve Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, and over in Europe, Paris. (Service details vary by location outside the province of Quebec.)
- Bombthecat 7y ago
  Yeah, but uber is running at a loss... Sooner or later they will increase the cost. But I doubt that they will come back....

danek 7y ago

I wonder if their pricing change earlier this year had anything to do with it. They made the pricing model very antagonistic (eg the 1 hour package doesn't roll over, so driving for 2 hours on it costs way more than driving one hour, ending the rental, than immediately starting another 1 hour package!) Before that I used the service a lot, I’d just hop in a car and go do stuff, changing my plans on the go, and know I’d get the best deal. After I had to plan things very precisely and hope for no randomness (heavy traffic, no parking, friend taking too long to come outside) and often it was less hassle and as expensive to take an Uber. I used to use them maybe once a week, then after all that I dropped to once every few months. But that’s just me..