Sharing Cars At Scale

By | February 27, 2008

I write about Zipcar periodically on this blog for the simple reason that I’m a passionate customer.

When Scott Griffith, the CEO, says “Forty percent of our customers either sell their car or halt a purchasing decision of a car,” he’s talking about me.

I sold our second car when I became a Flexcar (which merged with Zipcar last year) member a couple of years ago.

Zipcar has 180,000 members, so 72,000 people have given up a car in their life because of this service?! Wow. I’m sure this is barely on the radar in Detroit or at Avis, but Zipcar is only a $100M company today. Tomorrow it has plans to be a $1B company . . . a tomorrow in which gas is $4/gal.

In addition to letting me shed a car, Zipcar gives me everything I’m looking for:

It saves me money (gas and insurance are included), it’s convenient (cars are everywhere in Portland), it’s practical (rented a zippy Subaru one day to drop someone off at the airport and a Toyota truck another to move things to storage), it’s cool (high tech, high touch), it’s green (efficiently sharing carbon-producing vehicles reduces a city’s carbon footprint), and it’s politically conscious while also being economically smart.

Zipcar will try to get to scale in the next few years, and I’m betting that they will.