If you know in advance when you need a car, Zipcar is usually better. The limitations and benefits of each approach are clear.
Car2Go, by contrast, depends upon a natural equilibrium that provides free (but not guaranteed) parking at any legal street space that is timed for more than 2 hours and lacks peak-hour restrictions). ZipCar’s guaranteed, reserved parking and round-trip requirement ensures reliable car availability and the ability to make reservations months in advance. ZipCar and Car2Go have radically different but exceptionally complementary approaches to fleet management. My own experience backs this up, my average Zipcar rental (2 hours) being 10 times longer than my average Car2Go rental (12 minutes). Zipcar’s round-trip requirement, however, can act as a de facto time penalty that can skew the financial calculation in Car2Go’s favor for longer than the 25-minute window.Īvailability and Parking No Cars Downtown?
Zipcar’s 1-hour minimum and round-trip requirement punish short trips, but Zipcar’s 30-minute increment pricing and flatter rate structure optimize it for trips of 1.5-6 hours. After 8 weeks of using Car2Go, I thought I’d write this post both as a comparative analysis of Zipcar and Car2Go and as a chance to give readers the chance to comment on the new carsharing landscape.Ĭar2Go has a much more aggressive rate structure than Zipcar, but its per-minute pricing (38¢/min) gives it a small window (trips of less than 25 minutes) in which it is considerably cheaper than Zipcar. Alongside Zipcar (née Flexcar), carsharing is now big business in Seattle. When I lived in the U.K., ZipCar was only available in London, so I used WhizzGo instead for my trips to places outside the rail network (such as Malham Cove).Įnter Car2Go. It made quite the splash on the Seattle carsharing scene in December, going from obscurity to near ubiquity in a matter of weeks (see our posts here and here). ZipCar allowed me not to own a car from 2005-2012, and has provided me with a level of urban mobility of which I couldn’t have otherwise dreamed. I’ve used Zipcars in Seattle, Washington DC, Vancouver BC, Boston, and Pasadena, even sleeping overnight in one (a long story involving a Delta Airlines fail and fully booked hotels near National Airport). One shrewd chap actually used a 0% APR purchase card and booked $15k in bookings.I’ve been a ZipCar member for 8 years, beginning in Boston in the pre-smartphone era in which I would (gasp!) call in to find available cars.
I know several people who have done this who made their Hilton HH Gold Status with $20k for free and another 10k in US Airways Preferred miles. the money is then refunded automatically back to your new credit card or if you put a debit card in your profile straight to your bank account. go back into your profile and switch the credit card or put in a debit card.Ĭlick CANCEL on each of your 52 reservations.
Wait until the transactions post which take a day or two. You can rack up near enought $20k in reservations. You can only reserve a maximum of 4 days in a row however there are 52 weeks in the year so there's a lot of days to be reserved. Your profile contains your credit card details and your account is billed instantly. The clever thing about Zipcar is that you can reserve online in advance. So there's in many cities across the US and in London too.