By Morgan M. Hurley | Contributing Editor
Car2Go burst on the San Diego scene in October of 2011 and just recently celebrated its third anniversary with a big member appreciation party at the North Park Theatre that included live bands Fences and Bear Hands and 400 Car2Go members.
“It was a great event and I got to go out and announce the bands,” said San Diego Location Manager Will Berry. “I’ve never done that before, so that was very, very fun.”
Since their launch, the German-based company — a wholly owned subsidiary of Daimler, established in 2006 when Daimler acquired Smart — has amassed hundreds of members in San Diego, a high number of those living in or commuting to Uptown neighborhoods.
While Car2Go was not the first European car-sharing company to hit the market, its unique business model came about as a result of a perfect storm in technology availability.
“They took car sharing to the next level from being station-based to this free-floating model which required that GPS enablement and led to the collaboration of the phone app,” Berry said. “Without all that, it never would have happened.”
The first location was in Ulm, Germany, near Daimler Headquarters and the birthplace of Albert Einstein Berry said, in 2008. The first North American location was in Austin, Texas, in 2009, where Car2Go’s U.S. headquarters reside, then Vancouver, British Columbia, before rolling into San Diego in 2011.
Why San Diego?
According to Berry, San Diego County is one of the hotbeds for electric vehicle (EV) ownership around the country. In fact, San Diego County ranks within the top four EV-friendly counties in the U.S.
San Diego can also boast about being the only 100 percent all-electric fleet. Austin and now Portland, Oregon, have always had fleets with internal combustion engines and just a smattering of electric cars.
Fast forward to 2015, and the smartphone-interactive electric vehicle company is undertaking a huge rollout in San Diego of its third generation Smart cars to replace its current fleet, and they are doing it in a little at a time, but should complete by year-end.
With 380 Generation 2 (Gen2) cars to be replaced with 400 new Gen3 cars, it will be a bit of a shuffle, Berry said, because they want to keep the total number on the street at any time balanced.
“It’s not just an infleeting, but also a defleeting of the old cars,” Berry said. “We don’t want to put out 400 cars while we still have the 380, so it is a one-for-one swap; we’re taking 10 off the road and putting 10 back on by the end of the day.
“It’s like an orchestra to try to get all the moving pieces to come together,” he said.
To the undiscerning eye, the cars look exactly the same, but if you look a bit closer and then step inside, Berry said, you’ll know.
“There are a couple of ways you can visually tell that you are in a Gen3 car as opposed to a Gen2,” he said. “One is that the overall size of the Car2Go symbol [decal] on the front is almost double the size of the Gen2; there is also some instrumentation on the dash that’s a little bit different.
“If you miss those two visual clues, the way that you would really tell is the moment you hit that accelerator,” he said, laughing.
Old cars will be recycled; some will have components removed for spares and reuse, such as tires, while other parts will need to be destroyed or recycled, and the frame can be resold and reused in other vehicles. The Gen2 batteries, for instance, were manufactured by Tesla and contain proprietary knowledge, which must be stripped before the core is recycled.
As a business focused on sustainability by nature, Berry said it is important to Car2Go that every aspect of the Gen2 cars are being properly recycled, and they have contracted with a local company with the expertise required to manage the process.
“That’s the walk the talk piece,” Berry said. “You can’t do lip service to that and you really have to look out for it.”
Car2Go partners here in San Diego with several providers of publicly available EV charging stations, such as EVGO, Charge Point and NRG, the most prominent of which is Blink Network, mainly because as a network, Blink has more public stations available than their competitors.
As for coverage areas, Car2Go now has 45 total square miles; 1 mile on the San Diego State campus, 12 square miles in Chula Vista and 32 square miles in and around the center of San Diego proper. You can drive your Car2Go outside any of those areas or between those areas, but you cannot start or stop a rental unless you are within the boundaries. A coverage map is located inside each vehicle for easy reference.
The Car2Go headquarters Downtown, located at Ninth Avenue, has had many lives past and its design, by Paul Basile of Basile Studio on 11th Avenue, won an Orchid from the San Diego’s Architectural Foundation for its perfect mixture of industrial, old-school warehouse aesthetic reflecting its East Village neighborhood and the “cool comfortable feel” required of every Car2Go city headquarters.
Behind the walls of the customer service lobby facing Ninth Avenue is first the “employee den” and then the maintenance shop, which faces 10th Avenue. This is where all the magic happens.
Watch for part two of this series in a future issue, when we go behind the scenes at Car2Go headquarters Downtown and take a Gen3 for a ride. For more information about Car2Go, visit sandiego.car2go.com.
—Morgan M. Hurley can be reached at [email protected].
