Daimler announced an expansion of Car2go in Amsterdam. This means that the new fleet of 300 electric vehicles Smart Fortwos will come by the end of this year, as an improvement of concept already implemented in Austin, TX.
In Austin you can pick one of electric vehicles Car2go Fortwo anywhere within 52 square mile service area and you can drop it off inside that borders. Using all electric vehicles will give two problems: you have to leave the car somewhere to be charged and the car will have to wait a while for recharge. The press release announcing the service that: “allow customers to rent the cars spontaneously with having the burden to commit to a specific return time or location”. Also, there’s this: “Further details of the service such as business area, parking/charging concept and start of customer registrations will be discussed in the course of the coming months” and for “Further details of the service such as business area, parking/charging concept and start of customer registrations will be discussed in the course of the coming months.”
For sure there will be a way to rent a car in Amsterdam and if you get one that is near empty, you can drive to a central depot to get a fully charged one. Perhaps low-charge electric vehicles will not show up in the system as available and Car2go employees will head out to get them charged up. Whatever the solution to these problems are, the Amsterdam expansion will be one of the first large-scale electric vehicles sharing programs in the world and we’re sure Daimler will learn so much about turning these kind of electric vehicles loose on the city that it’ll remain years ahead of its competitors.
Anyway we are happy that zero carbon emission is the target of the future.
