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Paris Launches World's First Electric Car Share Program
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday Paris took a big step towards clean transportation as it launched the world's first electric car share program. Created by Vincent Bollore, the Autolib electric car-share is modeled off the city's popular bike share system, and it will be the largest program of its kind in the world. By December the program will include 250 electric vehicles, and it's planned to expand in 2012 if the first leg of the project is successful."
Let's see, it looks like they've uh... surrendered to... better... vehicle... um... hmmm.
C'mon, help me out here, people! Slashdot is nothing without terrible jokes that stopped being funny years ago! Don't let the dream die!
OK, not much of a car, but There was an electric car sharing program running in amsterdam in the 1970's. Here a link with some background info: http://www.visualnews.com/2011/03/08/amsterdams-witkar-the-first-car-sharing/
Amsterdam 1974:
The sharecar named "Witkar" small electric car , A'dam been there done that and got the T shirt..back in 1974
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witkar
The first was the Witkar in Amsterdam more than 35 years ago.
then what happens? 250km range? What happens if it's all hilly? Would that mean the car loses like 1/3 range?
[quote]"and it's planned to expand in 2012 if the first leg of the project is successful."[/quote] Haha if 2012 doesn't screw up everything first. *wink wink* ;)
I wash my M3 every week!
Only issue is how to maintain the battery charge. I'm guessing they just swap batteries to charge them unless they plan to have recharge stations at the pickup/drop points. Both seems expensive (lots of spare batteries over moderate charging vs expensive high current charges at various points). At 250 kilometres (155 miles), seems reasonable enough for a full day but that's only at initial output. As the cars and batteries wears out, it will definitely be lower then that. Aggressive maintenance and battery replacement every some odd years would work but that further increases cost.
From the customer point of view though, it's really is a awesome deal at only 12 euros (15.86 US dollars) a month especially since they themselves don't have to worry about the car maintenance or whatnot. Currently, France gas price should be at around $8.00 per US gallon ($2.10 per liter) in comparison.
Sadly, a public car here would sound to the masses like "public bathroom", "free lodging" and most surely "getaway vehicle"
such are things.
For short in-city trips electric vehicles are fairly efficient (especially with regenerative breaking). Moreover, these vehicles will have established parking spots where they can be efficiently charged. I can see this being a cost-effective alternative to taxis, and possibly to public transport (especially for several people at once). The question is what to do about them if they are driven until the battery is drained, which is not an issue for bicycles. If that becomes prevalent it will increase costs.
Somebody may have been doing the nasties the night before
On project better place. http://www.betterplace.com/
Not vehicle sharing so much, but infrastructure to support continuous use of electric vehicles via automated battery swapping.
This car share program seems to have been designed just to line the pocket of Bollore big friend of Sarkozy...
Problem... it absolutely ignore the needs of other electric cars drivers...
Renault have a full lineup from micro city cars to full size sedan and utility pro vehicles...
Something done to help those user in the city...
NOPE...
also, largest of its kind! One with the most features! Most customers! Most attractive customers! Shiniest cars! Only one that doesn't poison all of its clients! Least deadly of all of them! Most vacuously true of all of them!
The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club!
Clean how so?
It actually is less efficient to generate power far away, send it over the wire and charge that car than it is for it to be self powered.
All this does is move the pollution out of the sight of the privileged elites in the city.
All in the name of the religion of environmentalism.
With reserved spots, the infrastructure for charging becomes simpler for this sort of thing. My sister lives in Chicago, she doesnt own a car and bikes most places, but for things like bulk grocery buying and other shopping, that sorta thing, she has a zip car membership. If the charging stations are prevalent enough, i could see zipcar going electric. And after a minute of research it seems theyre already testing it in san francisco with plug in hybrids.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Ulm does this on a quite good scale since at least 2 years, so it's not the first
aaaaaaa
The company that exploited the bikes had some problems with their "popularity". The bikes are popular in the bidonvilles of Paris, Boekarest and Africa. The 20% left in Paris are popular when enough bikes are available in for example uphill Belleville in the morning, driving downtown in the morning is a lot easier than returning them in the afternoon or evening. In that sense the electric car might be more successful but one wonders if electric bikes could not do the same cheaper while avoiding the traffic congestions at the same time. And without proper charging stations they may not be so popular outside Paris.
Anonymous
This is definitely not the first electric car sharing program, see the comment about Witkar. But it also isn't the first commercially successful or anything. The German railway association (Deutsche Bahn) has their Flinkster program, which includes electric and "normal" cars, depending on what you need. In my opinion a perfect fit for the current generation.
The website linked is for the care-share program in Lyon, France. The new program in Paris can be found at http://www.autolib-paris.fr/
Only 250 vehicles this is not going to work. If you want users to give up their personal cars they need to be confident they will find one when they need it:at rush hour. 80.000 users competing for 250 cars? I don't see this succeeding.
Well, in Brussels, Zen Car has had stations for a couple of months now.
the article mentions this program is unique as it only uses electrical cars.
The autolib website has a lists of cars you can rent. It contains many cars, none of which are electrical.
The article mentions this is 12 euro a month. The website mentions 12 euro a month, plus an hourly price and a price per kilometer.
(and the thing about them not being the first, but i think this may have been mentioned in other posts :))
The very same program has already been launched in several smaller cities of France for months. In the south-east part of the country, Nice, Antibes and Cannes had autolib cars since early April.
____
nico
Nico-Live
http://enews-evtrials.transport.vic.gov.au/link/id/zzzz4e64020eed6d4725/page.html
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It would be nice if the title could be fixed. Maybe something like "Paris gets the first electric car share program national media actually talks about" ?
Nice (on the riviera) has had such a system since march 2010, and it has been quite well received. You can read more here: http://www.nice.fr/Zoom-sur/Auto-partage (google translate, people).
It is a very common issue in france that something is actually talked about only when it happens in Paris. We had the same with shared bikes, that were implemented in paris only 2-3 years ago, while a few cities had had one for years already (Lyon, Barcelona, etc).
A lot of people are commenting that this is not "the first". Who cares?
It is not the first but, for one, it will be the first that will be heard of by people living far from it. Folks get over this: there are more international reporters in Paris than in all of the other quoted cities I've seen so far combined.
More importantly, given the monthly price, it seems to be a lot more geared to the occasional short trip. We (me+wife) used a car pool system in The Netherlands for a couple of years. The trick with it was that the monthly fees were so high that it only made financial sense if you needed a car for a couple of hours a week, every week.
The trick of this Parisian car system is that it costs a small amount to be part of it, that should allow (I hope) for people without constant need for a car to make use of it. It should also go a long way towards giving car-pooling more global visibility.
FWIW, The Netherlands also had an early bicycle sharing program in Amsterdam in the 70s that was a disaster, perhaps they were also the first in it, but again, who cares? It did not work, and was cancelled. France had a huge success with large-scale bicycle sharing programs which spread through all its major cities, and they work. The Velib in Paris (also not the first) works in every way it should, and given the amount of tourists that come to Paris, it is probably the most visible in the planet (i.e. it is the one that spreads the good news, and helps to convince the sceptics).
Check the chinese sim-city view, it's amazing to browse : - map.baidu.com - zoom in, then click on the top right corner on the second button ("3d view", with the number three as the first character, three horizontal strokes)
bzzzut alors!
http://www.communauto.com/electrique/index_ENG.html
You can't take the sky from me...
I can't imagine it'll work out very well. I'm in a club where we share airplanes. We don't let just anybody in, we know everyone, everyone has a stake in the airplanes. Yet, they still end up getting beat up, left full of garbage, etc. Even with a group of 2 (married couple), you can often see that. Both assumes the other will take care of keeping it up and as a result the vehicles rapidly suffer. Now tell me how this is supposed to work when sharing a car with hundreds/thousands of random strangers???
This a a great step towards a clean transportation future. I envision cities where fleets of robotic electric cars will roam the cities like driverless taxi's. You pull out your smartphone and order one and the nearest one comes and gets you, takes you where you want to go, then continues on its way. When their batteries are low they automatically go charge themselves and repeat. There will be much less need to own a car under this system.
... was the tagline of an old french TV ad.
....
Because that's the case : every country wants to get rid of nuclear energy, but in the same time push for electric devices, cars, and so on
Anybody actually sees the paradox ?
Since 1999, La Rochelle (France) has setup an electric car rental service called Yelomobile (former Liselec). So Paris is not really "innovating" with this idea...
Let's take two people, and hit them both on the head with a block of concrete at 12mph. One is wearing a cycle helmet, and one is not. Which person do you think will take more damage?
I'd welcome links to documents on comparative head damage to cyclists wearing and not wearing helments, but if I am going to fall off a bike and hit my head on the road while travelling at a reasonable cycling pace (12 mph) I think I'll go for hitting that road with my helmet rather than my head directly. I'll take a less-than-scientific guess a helmet might help reduce damage.
I'd be interested to see some links for both sides of the argument, that would be great. Many thanks in advance...
Looking forward to a link to a decent scientific reference on this...
Just about anyone can make a drivetrain, especially an electric drivetrain. But he's making a promising type of batteries, and those represent the bulk of the cost and difficulty in making a viable electric car.
Internal combustion engines have about 25% efficiency at best.
Large scale thermal power plants achieve twice as much. You have some transmission loss, but since batteries, their chargers, electric motors and power electronics each have nearly 95% efficiency, you still come out ahead. Plus electricity can come from renewable sources, and on top of that battery charging can be deprioritized to accomodate for their intermittent nature.
Nope... your opinion doesn't count as a decent scientific reference, if you could link to something that would be great, thanks.
Funny you mention seatbelts, as this is a pretty bad comparison. Three months ago me/my girlfriend/another friend were the first people to arrive at a four-car pile up on a long straight country road, turns out the guy who overtook us at speed a couple of minutes before then tried to overtake a van and went straight into a car coming the other way, and another car behind this crash then hit all the cars and came through. Everybody survived apart from the guy who wasn't wearing a seatbelt, he died. The others: two with minor wounds and one with a broken leg and chest injuries (he's mending well apparently). So seatbelt or no seatbelt? I'll choose seatbelt. Unfortunately I saw it all, had to call in the ambulances, go round turning off engines, comfort the guy who was smashed up, nothing I could do for the guy wrapped up in his car dead with lots of blood and no seat belt.
Please mate, wear a seat belt. Seeing that guy in a mess still warm but obviously dead was really not nice, I am guessing he left parents or kids behind and certainly friends. Don't do it to your family and friends.
Nope... your opinion doesn't count as a decent scientific reference, if you could link to something that would be great, thanks.
I detect just a small amount of sarcasm there, which means you must be at least familiar with the stuff. I'd like you to turn that sarcasm detector up a notch or two, reread the posts, and then see what you think. Here, I'll help (without sarcasm, I promise):
We're actually in agreement. My original post references the sample bias that can lead to counterintuitive statistical trends when you look at the introduction of protective gear. There are plenty of examples of this: helmets and head injuries in WWI, Abraham Ward's observations about bomber damage in WWII, body armor and limb injuries in present day conflicts, etc. We're basically talking about protective equipment providing the opportunity to treat people after some event rather than bury them. Your anecdote is an excellent example of that. It boggles my mind that someone would willing choose to forgo a helmet when cycling at 20 mph or so, let alone forgo a seat belt at 60. However, there are people that feel very strongly about it, and they always seem to have some twisted statistic in their pocket to justify it. My original post was a sarcastic jab at both.
Montreal already has an electric car sharing program.
They have Nissan Leafs that you can rent.
The company is called Communauto.
Please read all the way to his last sentence.
is this what is planned for shared cars?