What a bummer, these car share services were incredibly useful in Seattle. I've been a huge fan throughout the evolution of car sharing here.
Car2Go launched in Seattle in 2012. The model was innovative (one-way trips! park almost anywhere for free!). But they had poor reliability. I think the cars were connected via some German cell plan with internationally roaming on T-mobile, and the failure rate (unable to access the car, "phantom" car not really at location) was 5-10%, which is pretty bad.
Car2Go was also very unresponsive to customer needs. They refused to create an airport drop point (such a great and obvious use case!) and seemed unconcerned by their poor reliability.
Enter ReachNow. The competition was exactly what Car2Go needed. ReachNow added an airport drop point quickly, then Car2Go finally added their own airport drop.
ReachNow was plagued by long transaction times (e.g. 2 minutes of wait time from unlock to engine start – this is a LONG time when someone is waiting for your street parking spot). They finally fixed their startup times on many of the vehicles.
Then Lime entered with LimePod, which was the low-price option but with fewer cars. In total, there were well over 1K cars between all the services, and availability was great.
When ReachNow consumed Car2Go, I was worried things were going to go downhill due to lack of competition. Then they shut down ReachNow and started a confusing rebrand, then Lime left, and now Car2Go / Share Now is leaving.
I wish they would have first tried charging enough to make it a viable business. I wonder how much higher the prices would need to be.
It was over when they dumped those crappy smart cars. Those cars were the worst but they were perfect for the service. Easy to park and easy to find. And driving them was like driving a go cart. You either had full gas or no gas.
I think what did them in was Uber and lyft. The cost for either is only slightly more and you don’t have to worry about parking or unlocking the car.
Car2Go launched in Seattle in 2012. The model was innovative (one-way trips! park almost anywhere for free!). But they had poor reliability. I think the cars were connected via some German cell plan with internationally roaming on T-mobile, and the failure rate (unable to access the car, "phantom" car not really at location) was 5-10%, which is pretty bad.
Car2Go was also very unresponsive to customer needs. They refused to create an airport drop point (such a great and obvious use case!) and seemed unconcerned by their poor reliability.
Enter ReachNow. The competition was exactly what Car2Go needed. ReachNow added an airport drop point quickly, then Car2Go finally added their own airport drop.
ReachNow was plagued by long transaction times (e.g. 2 minutes of wait time from unlock to engine start – this is a LONG time when someone is waiting for your street parking spot). They finally fixed their startup times on many of the vehicles.
Then Lime entered with LimePod, which was the low-price option but with fewer cars. In total, there were well over 1K cars between all the services, and availability was great.
When ReachNow consumed Car2Go, I was worried things were going to go downhill due to lack of competition. Then they shut down ReachNow and started a confusing rebrand, then Lime left, and now Car2Go / Share Now is leaving.
I wish they would have first tried charging enough to make it a viable business. I wonder how much higher the prices would need to be.