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Hopefully one day you will be able to drop a Zipcar in another garage. That would be awesome!
by fesja 14y ago
Hopefully one day you will be able to drop a Zipcar in another garage. That would be awesome!
- kokey 14y agoThat would be nice, but it would only really become practical with self driving vehicles, or maybe with enough scale.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoOnce we get to self driving vehicles, they'll probably be evolve into more like an affordable taxi service.
- jaggederest 14y agohttps://www.car2go.com https://www.car2go.com Better let them know it's not possible to avoid returning cars to their place of rental yet...
- sksksk 14y agoCar2go does do one way, but it's not always the best solution: It's more expensive, the cars are all smart cars, and you have to leave the car within a home location.
- philwelch 14y agoCar2go just seems like a drive-it-yourself taxi to me. If you have any need for that sort of thing it could even be a complementary service to Zipcar, but I would never use it as a replacement.
- vanhiker 14y agoDrive yourself taxi is pretty accurate. In Vancouver it's closer in cost to a bus ride for a couple people going a few km.
- michaelt 14y agoLondon has a bicycle sharing scheme where you can rent a bike at one station and drop it off at another. A side effect of this is in the mornings, when most traffic is from stations towards the city centre, there are no bikes at stations; and in the evenings, when most traffic is from the city centre towards the stations, there are no free return spots near stations. To compensate for this, lorryloads of vans shuttle back and forth in the opposite direction to the commuters. Obviously, zipcar would follow a different demand pattern to a bike hire scheme, but there's still a risk there'd be large scale patterns in demand - for example in the holiday season all the zipcars might get driven to the airport. That isn't an insurmountable problem, of course. Presumably Avis deal with this every day. But presumably they don't plan to turn Zipcar into Avis.
- jre 14y agoMaybe you could give a bonus (price reduction, points) to customers that drops a car in an empty station.
- mikeash 14y agoAnd conversely, penalize trips to extremely popular stations. It ought to be doable purely through economics, although perhaps not without pissing off customers excessively.
- tedunangst 14y agoYou just described airline ticket prices.
- mikeash 14y agoThere are some differences. For example, an airline needs to hire a pilot to fly the plane regardless. For the return trip on a route that's popular in only one direction, if nobody wants to take the plane for a very low price, the airline will fly it empty. For Zipcar, it could conceivably be worthwhile to actually pay customers to drive cars from a popular destination to a popular origin, to avoid having to pay their own workers to do it. But the overall idea is no doubt the same.
- prostoalex 14y agoAirport garages, specifically, would be huge.
- allertonm 14y agoDaimler's "Car2go" service (available here in Vancouver and some other cities) allows you to leave the car anywhere in their core service area. http://car2govancouver.com/ http://car2govancouver.com/