Is Car Sharing About to Go Big-Time?

Is Car Sharing About to Go Big-Time?

The idea of the car as a timeshare must be catching on: Auto rental giant Enterprise Rent-A-Car is getting into the business, and Enterprise usually doesn't go where there's no money to be made.

The concept of sharing cars so that you didn't have to buy one only to let it sit idle most of the time began in Europe just after World War !!, when both money and working autos were scarce. It came to the U.S. in the 1960s as part of the back-to-earth movement.

Now it is seen as both an environmental and economic enterprise, In the U.S., the big player in car sharing  is Boston-based Zipcar, which recently merged with rival Flexcar and has operations in a dozen states and Canada.

Smaller, regional players – some non-profit and others for-profit -- include U Car Share, a unit of U Haul; Austin Car Share, in Austin, Texas; City Car Share, in San Francisco, and Chicago's I-Go.

Enterprise is entering the arena in its hometown of St. Louis with a new subsidiary called We Car and a fleet of Toyota Prius hybrids.It is partnering with the nonprofit St.Louis Car Sharing Cooperative. Like all car sharing services, it provides a number of vehicles, parked at convenient locations, that registered members of the sharing service can reserve via an online booking service, by the hour, or day.

Typically, car sharing services work best in central city locations or in compact metropolitan areas.

Places like Los Angeles, where urban sprawl is the rule and very few people live any where near where they work or go to school, aren't very friendly to the idea of short-term car use of the pick-it-up-here, drop-it-off-there variety.

It will be interesting to see, as Enterprise expands its We Car unit, if the company can use its vast network of neighborhood-based rental offices to offset the lack of centralized home-work-play areas for dropping off and picking up cars in LA and other sprawling locales.

John O'Dell:  is an AutoObserver Senior Editor. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.