Especially beneficial if you’re in Portland! What have your experiences been? What service did you use (car 2 go, etc). The good, bad, and ugly are greatly appreciated! Additionally, any feedback on car seats and babies with car sharing or ride sharing apps are appreciated!
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I used ZipCar in grad school, while living in a Cornfield State. It was the right experience for me at the time… The main benefit over traditional car rental was lower age restrictions. It was also helpful that gas and insurance were both included. A few uses a month are cheaper than car ownership (especially purchase price!), but I still found it hard to overcome cost per use to use it for convenience, rather than “nothing but a car will do”, like a trip. Also, this is probably a local restriction, but I had to book it pretty well in advance, usually, or there was no guarantee a convenient car would be available. Never had to use it with kids but I imagine the main issue is same as a rental: byo carseat and installing it each time.
Hope that helps!
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Sounds like a pretty different experience from Portland then! On the app, it looks like there’s 16 available cars within a mile of me. So I’m definitely considering it as a “grab a car for a quick trip” type situation. I guess we’ll see how it works out! Maybe I’ll do a write up after using it a while. And luckily we’re selling the second car before the baby gets here, so I’ll have some pre baby exposure to it.
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Car2Go here was amazeballs compared to HourCar. My neighbor used both extensively and I talked to her about it constantly when I was looking at going carfree. Needing to reserve HourCar/ZipCar ahead of time didn’t work for my situation even though there are a lot of hubs, primarily because of needing access when I’m on call for work but not really needing a car otherwise - the price just didn’t make sense for that scenario. Car2Go on the other hand was always available within 5 or so blocks from my house. I’m bummed they are no longer in our market!
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Did you ever end up using them? Or just running the numbers and so on?
I rode with people who had a membership for Car2Go several times but I ended up not using them myself.
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What was it like from a smells/cleanliness perspective?
They always looked new like rental cars.
Uber was already here so I’d guess the prone-to-polluting-the-vehicle crowd was more likely to go that direction - the very purposeful choice of Smartcars limits passengers to one person that can ride in a front seat. Everyone I knew that used Car2Go here used it for commuting or errands.
I would’ve used them a ton if the home zone extended to St. Paul but that rolled out shortly before they pulled out of our market entirely. Not paying a membership was a big draw for me.
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Yeah see most of ours are standard cars and cross overs, very few of the tiny smart cars. Glad to hear the ones you’ve seen were clean though, that’s reassuring!
Oh, interesting! I’ve only ever seen marketing for Car2Go that showed the two seaters 
I had the app on my phone and vaguely remember you could report or rate the cleanliness.
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I saw a car on 84 yesterday that had “enterprisecarshare.com” on the back of it. Might be something to check out?
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