More than 50% of all European citizens live in big cities, so diverse transportation needs must exist to guarantee individual mobility. Car-sharing services in Europe offer a beneficial element within metropoles.
On the customer experience side, however, there are lights and shadows when it comes to serving consumers.
We’ve tested and rated the best car-sharing services in Europe for you. (Erica Vialardi is the co-author of this post.)
Car-sharing is a subscription business model in which people pay a per-use fee for transport. Car-sharing services in Europe are often organized via employers, transit/transportation operators, car-sharing businesses, or even neighborhood groups.
The benefits of car-sharing services include:
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Car2Go in Hamburg offers a great solution, but unfortunately the steps that need to be taken before you can access a car still need some fine-tuning.
Since it’s likely that a good majority of Car2Go’s customers are business travelers arriving via airport, the registration app should be far easier to understand and interact with. Nobody wants to stand around, trying to figure out how to make an app work when they’re supposed to be conducting business.
The first barrier encountered involved having to scan a 25 year-old German driving license and upload a current photo, then receiving a “you are not scannable” response from the app.
We discovered later that Europcar is the fleet partner of Car2Go, and offers an evaluation of your drivers license for a small budget (9 EUR). In Hamburg, it was a 20-minute effort to get driving license data manually into the system and finally approved. This was only accomplished once I verified that I was, indeed, the same person on my relatively old license. Additionally, the link for the manual process of entering information is hidden very small font, at the very bottom of this app section.
After hearing my experience, Erica skipped the process with Car2Go and booked Drive Now instead, which offered an easier registration process. She also registered with Fiat-powered Enjoy, and all went smoothly with that process as well, and was approved within 24 hours. The only complaint: Enjoy does not allow registration via mobile, which eliminates convenience for many users.
Although the apps of the car-sharing services in Europe are supportive and intuitive in the most ways, the registration process is still not fully digitized.
We’re convinced that the car-sharing service that will win customers over will offer the most convenient and intelligent ways to gather new customer data and make the registration process seamless.
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Despite the initial glitches, once you’re registered at Car2Go, the reservation of your car is pretty easy and similar to all other car-sharing services: Choose a car in the area next to you. Click on that car, and it’s reserved for the next 30 minutes for you.
I opened my Smart Fortwo with my PIN code on the app after receiving a 3-digit-code – a very cool experience. Mercedes Benz only offers a Smart Fortwo if you want to ride via electric car. BMW also allows a family of four to get into the city driving an i3, which is powered by electric. Enjoy in Italy relies a fleet of Fiat 500 cars.
We definitely want to see more electric cars in the future!
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The Car2Go app displays the current fuel or loading status of each car – Brilliant! But how to get out of the parking deck without a ticket? This is only a question for customers of Generation X and older, as a camera recognizes your car plate and opens the gate for you automatically. Extremely cool! Feels like a little VIP when you are driving and a bot is opening gates for you.
There is additional good news when it comes to parking: You can park your car within the border of the city you are in wherever you find a parking place. A paper card in the car shows available parking garages with reserved Car2Go places. It’s very suitable for your normal course of life: Arrive in the very heart of a city and avoid expensive parking expenses.
You don´t need to refill the gas tank, just close the doors and press “End rental.” After 15 seconds, you should double-check, whether your child, dog or suitcase is still in the car, as the systems closes the door and you receive an email with your invoice. Very transparent.
Conclusion: The user experience is overall very positive and delivers promise, not only on the actual service side, but also on the digital experience and e-commerce side.
The overall result with Car2Go: After a little frustration with the registration process, the brand experience was very cool, reasonably priced, and convenient for everyday life.
Enjoy in Italy was also reasonably priced and offered the advantage to save the city toll. Like DriveNow, almost all car-sharing services offered a kind of a starter voucher in order to motivate people to use their cars.
The usage of cars is a key factor to run into profitability. That’s why post-drive marketing tries to engage customers for their next ride. In our small survey, 44% of the testers had a neutral brand experience, but a third of all answers saw a positive or even very positive brand experience.
With Car2Go, DriveNow, and Enjoy, the future of driving is clear, as some of the major car companies in Europe are already fighting for metropole citizens – they’re truly an individual alternative to taxis, Lyft, Uber.
All companies are currently working on the analysis of their usage data to improve their offers and make their companies even more profitable.
