Two Roads Diverged
I was intrigued by two different strands of thought in the news this past weekend. From the New York Times, in a piece on a car-sharing program in Europe, by Daimler.
“Car2go is a daring step for an automaker. According to the Ademe survey, when car owners adhere to a car-sharing program, most of them get rid of their own cars. Car sharing works because owning a car in a city can be a pain.
“In Europe, the relationship between people and cars is changing,” said Gildo Pastor, chief executive of Venturi Automobiles in Monaco. “Young people today want a computer, a telephone. The car is not at the center of their thoughts. In the city you can’t park, and it costs a fortune to insure it.”
Venturi is one of a dozen European companies developing small electric cars for proposed car-sharing programs. In 2010, Paris plans to introduce AutoLib, a car-sharing service with 2,000 electric cars in 700 Paris parking lots with charging stations and a similar number in suburbs…
Being environmentally kind is one attraction of car sharing. People in the Paris study drove half as far each month after they joined, and some car-sharing programs compensate for carbon emissions by paying third-party companies to capture carbon.
And then this bit of alternate reality, from the head of BMW:
“There are many studies that say it took 120 years to get to 800 million cars around the globe, and that it will take only another 30 years to double that volume,” he says. “If that is true, the best is still ahead of us.”
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:43 am and is filed under Cars, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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