BERLIN (AP) — Germans, once a nation of ardent automobile
enthusiasts, are not buying cars as much as they used to. Instead,
they’re sharing them.
The country has become the world’s biggest
user of one-way car sharing plans, where people can find a vehicle using
their smartphone, drive it across town and leave it there without
having to return it to a central base.
The powerful auto industry
first ignored the trend, but is now jumping on board. Some companies are
betting big on car sharing, not just for short trips within cities, but
also for longer ones between them.
It follows a culture shift in
the country that invented the automobile, where cars were once commonly
described as the Germans’ "favorite child." Excellent public transport,
high fuel prices and a strong environmental movement mean that for many
Germans the car has become an expendable accessory, or at worst an
expensive liability.
New vehicle registrations fell below 3
million last year, continuing a two-decade decline. Meanwhile, the
average age of buyers rose above 52 for the first time, compared with an
average age of 46 in the mid-1990s.
"The young buyers are dying
off," said Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, who heads the University of
Duisburg-Essen’s Center for Automotive Research.
As a result, the
auto industry has embraced car sharing as a means of reaching a younger
generation for whom the idea of owning a vehicle is as outdated as their
parents’ record collection.
"I want to pay for things when I use
them," said Martin Blankenstein, a 35-year-old management consultant who
uses several different car sharing companies.
For decades such
services were station-based. Vehicles could only be picked up in certain
places and had to be returned to the same location. But six years ago
car sharing took a different turn, with the launch of the first one-way
offers.
These flexible services have spread to major cities across
Europe and North America thanks to the adoption of smartphones, and
have really taken off in Germany, where more than half of all the
journeys were booked last year.
Using a mobile app, customers can
find a nearby car, book it at short notice, drive it across town and
leave it there without having to return to the starting point.
Billing
is by the minute. Twenty minutes of use will typically cost 4-6 euros
($5.50-$8.20) with fuel, insurance and parking included. All-day rates
range from 39-59 euros for most flexible car sharing services.
What
might seem like a costly extravagance for regular users can become
attractive for people who rarely use a car. Advocates say the cost tends
to be half of what a taxi would charge for the same journey.
On
Tuesday, Daimler launched a new option for its Car2Go short-term rental
service that allows customers to take one of its Mercedes-Benz B-class
vehicles from Berlin to Hamburg, or vice versa, and leave it there.
The
move marks a departure for Car2Go, which until now has only offered
two-seater Smart cars for its 600,000 customers to zip around within 25
cities across Europe and North America.
Daimler is following in
the tire tracks of DriveNow, a joint venture between its rival BMW and
car rental firm SIXT, which began offering a similar service between
Cologne and Duesseldorf last year.
"We’re responding to requests
from our customers, who say they occasionally need a bigger car that
they can take outside the city boundaries," said Marcus Spickermann, the
head of Daimler Mobility Services GmbH, which operates Car2Go.
The
success of car sharing in Berlin, with its trend-setting image, has
attracted foreign manufacturers such as Citroen. The French automaker
launched its Multicity electric car sharing service in the German
capital.
Worldwide, over 8.5 million one-way journeys were booked
last year. More than 4.5 million of those were in Germany, and 2.2
million — more than a quarter of the global total — were in Berlin,
according to Benno Bock of InnoZ, a transportation think tank.
The
number of bookings per month reached 250,000 last year, compared with
about 40,000 in Washington, DC, the highest figure in the United States.
Spickermann
said Car2Go’s new city-to-city service may be rolled out to the rest of
Europe and North America in the coming years.
With the share of
the world’s population living in cities predicted to rise from half to
over two-thirds by 2050, Daimler needs to find a way to reach people to
whom the traditional model of car ownership doesn’t appeal, he said.
"Car sharing is a logical step for us, even though it may appear to be a
contradiction for a manufacturer."
The move is a risky one. Some
experts believe it could backfire on automakers by demonstrating just
how easy it is to live without a vehicle of one’s own — and the
insurance costs, repairs and parking headaches that come with it.
Manufacturers may have no choice than to follow the trend, for now.
"Many
of them don’t know in which direction the market is heading, but they
don’t want to be on the wrong track when change happens," says Kurt
Moeser, a historian who specializes in transport at the Karlsruhe
Institute of Technology.
"Mercedes is doing something completely
counter-intuitive for its own business model by offering people cars
they don’t need to own," he said. "This could be quite dangerous. On the
other hand, once a trend becomes clear it might be too late to jump
aboard."
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.