More Germans choose car sharing over ownership

BERLIN－The number of people using car-sharing services increased by 16.6 percent, reaching a total of 2.46 million during 2018, the German car sharing association announced on Wednesday.

Location-based car-sharing services, in which a vehicle is picked up from and returned to the same location, also showed an "above-average" increase in vehicles by 12.5 percent. It is now available at 740 locations throughout Germany.

According to the BCS, this type of sharing could be the "backbone" of expansion in car-sharing services in Germany. Seventy to 80 percent of customers of these services no longer own a vehicle.

"Cities and municipalities should promote this option, in particular by setting up car-sharing stations throughout the country in public areas," said Gunnar Nehrke, chairman of the BCS.

The strong growth of these car-sharing services would be beneficial, as several scientific studies in 2018 have shown that this type of sharing had a "particularly high traffic-relieving effect", according to the BCS.

For free-floating car-sharing services on the other hand, cars do not have to be returned to a specific location.

Customers can locate available cars using their smartphones.

Such services were available in seven large German cities and a "few surrounding municipalities of these cities".

Here, customer growth had slowed down "slightly" to 14.9 percent in 2018. The share of electric vehicles in car-sharing services was "50 times higher than in the national car fleet", said Nehrke.

However, electric vehicles are still too expensive and there is no "promotional concept" for setting up charging equipment at car-sharing stations. Car sharing would be "good and right", Ferdinand Dudenhoefer, traffic scientist at the university of Duisburg-Essen, told the German press agency. "But the figures show that it is still a very long way to the top and that the significance is still very limited today." Two German luxury car makers, BMW and Daimler, are planning to merge their car-sharing services DriveNow and car2go.

The intention of the two was to create one of the world's "leading providers" of car-sharing services, according to Daimler. Germany's largest car manufacturer Volkswagen is expected to start its new electric car-sharing service "We Share" in the second quarter of 2019.