{"id":537166,"date":"2010-04-21T11:36:36","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T15:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/earth2tech.com\/?p=56043"},"modified":"2010-04-21T11:36:36","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T15:36:36","slug":"zipcar-snaps-up-uk-car-sharing-network-streetcar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/537166","title":{"rendered":"Zipcar Snaps Up UK Car-sharing Network Streetcar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Zipcar has bought London-based car-sharing firm Streetcar<\/a> in its latest bid to expand across Europe, the companies announced this morning. The acquisition, valued at about $50 million, expands the size of Zipcar’s UK fleet more than fourfold, to 1,770 vehicles.<\/p>\n

Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith called the deal — which comes on the heels of an investment in Spanish car-sharing startup Avancar<\/a> — a key step toward making the company a “truly global” car-sharing network, which rents vehicles by the hour or day.<\/p>\n

Streetcar, founded in 2004, has vehicles in 1,100 locations in eight cities. Zipcar and Streetcar combined have about 400,000 members, up from Zipcar’s base of 360,000 drivers.<\/p>\n

In addition to expanding Zipcar’s footprint, acquiring Streetcar comes with an opportunity to also make that footprint a little greener. Griffith said in a call this morning that the company’s “been testing” the plug-in electric vehicles in Streetcar’s fleet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Already, Griffith said hybrid vehicles (primarily the Toyota Prius) typically make up 10-15 percent of Zipcar’s fleet. And in July 2009, Zipcar announced the launch of what it\u00a0calls its first EV Pod<\/a>, starting with a fleet of 20 hybrids and two plug-ins (an all-electric Citroen c1 and a plug-in hybrid Prius) in London, with plans to grow the EV Pod to some 400 vehicles by 2012, with 30 percent of them being hybrid.<\/p>\n

But don’t expect Zipcar to switch the bulk of the fleet over to plug-ins anytime soon. Griffith has told us<\/a> that more vehicle software and data (among other things) will be needed in order to get there. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to put new barriers up at a time when car sharing is really moving into the mainstream,\u201d and all-electric vehicles are still pretty foreign to most drivers, he said in an interview last year.<\/p>\n

Today’s acquisition comes more than two years after Zipcar absorbed its largest competitor: Seattle-based Flexcar, owned by AOL Co-founder Steve Case. The merger resulted in a company with 180,000 subscribers and more than 5,000 vehicles in 48 cities.<\/p>\n

At 10 years old, Zipcar has discussed plans to seek an initial public offering<\/a> since at least last year, and Griffith said today that equity in Zipcar made up the “primary consideration” in the \u00a0$50 million deal with Streetcar. Last summer, while Zipcar said it had \u201cno immediate plans to go public,\u201d it was reported to be targeting an IPO for 2010.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Zipcar<\/em><\/p>\n

Related GigaOM Pro articles (subscription required):<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mobility on Demand Takes Aim at Transit Networks’ “Last Mile”<\/a><\/p>\n

Location-Based Services: From Mobile to Mobility<\/a><\/p>\n

Electric Vehicles Give “Mobility as a Service” a Jumpstart<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zipcar has bought London-based car-sharing firm Streetcar in its latest bid to expand across Europe, the companies announced this morning. The acquisition, valued at about $50 million, expands the size of Zipcar’s UK fleet more than fourfold, to 1,770 vehicles. Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith called the deal — which comes on the heels of an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4499,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4499"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}