How much does car-sharing in Vancouver cost?
June 4th, 2011, 15 Comments »
We’ve been a member of the Vancouver car co-op, now named ‘Modo’, for about a year. Aside from the new prominence of their branding on cars (I signed up to use their cars, not advertise the service), I’ve been a happy car co-op member.
The other day, though, I was talking to somebody considering their car-sharing options. Now that a third option, car2go, has come to town, they were complaining about the complexity of the car share pricing models.
There are sign-up fees, and then costs based on time, day of the week, distance traveled or a combination of all these. I thought it’d be a good idea to look at how we’ve used our co-op car, and compare the price paid with the other services.
To start, let’s examine how we currently use our Modo membership. I looked at three recent typical months–we used cars for a few hours, usually to drive to some Vancouver suburb. All amounts are before HST:
|
Trips
|
Distance
|
Time
|
Cost
|
Cost/km | Cost/hour | |
| January |
2
|
35 km
|
8 hours
|
$38.04
|
$1.09
|
$4.75
|
| February |
2
|
29 km
|
8 hours
|
$43.13
|
$1.48
|
$5.39
|
| April |
3
|
39 km
|
12.5 hours
|
$52.83
|
$1.35
|
$4.22
|
Each month’s cost includes a $6.00 administration fee and something called ‘Fuel Fluctuation Adjustment’, which seems to be a few cents per kilometre, based on the changing price of gas.
Average trip = 22 minutes
Now that we’ve got those numbers, let’s compare them with Modo’s competitors, Zipcar and car2go.
To further confuse matters, car2go works slightly differently than the other two car shares. Car2go works much more like a bike sharing program. You don’t have to drop off the car where you pick it up. So, it will be somewhat tricky to make exact comparisons.
I happened to run into a car2go field marketer yesterday, and she told me that the average trip on their service is 22 minutes. That sounds about right for us–some are ten minutes, while others are forty. Based on the data above, our average one-way trip is 7.3 km, which one could easily do in 22 minutes in the city.
I’ll spare you all the math (if you’re feeling masochistic, here are the pricing breakdowns for Modo, Zipcar and car2go). Here are the results when I apply the aforementioned three month’s worth of driving to the other car shares’ pricing models:
| Modo | Zipcar | car2go | |
| January | $38.04 | $62.00 | $30.80 |
| February | $43.13 | $62.00 | $30.80 |
| April | $52.83 | $117.87 | $46.20 |
Other cost considerations:
- Modo is a co-operative, so you need to pay a refundable $500 as a ‘shares purchase’ when you join. Other family members can be added to your account for $250. There’s also a $20 registration fee.
- Zipcar charges an annual fee of $65 and an application fee of $25.
- Car2go charges a $35 application fee.
I should emphasize that this is strictly a price comparison. Each service has its own particular benefits, drawbacks, fleet size, geographic distribution and so forth. Please shop around.
Conclusions?
Despite car2go being seemingly cheaper, I don’t think we’d consider switching. We’ve been happy enough with Modo, and they’ve got a dozen vehicles within a block of our home. Even on this sunny Saturday morning, we were able to book a car just two hours before we needed it. I also like the variety of cars that Modo offers–sometimes we need a Nissan Cube and other times we want to drive a Mini Cooper. I also appreciate one under-promoted Modo perk: you can park their cars in any permit-only street parking in the city. This has been handy when driving to the Vancouver East Cultural Centre or Empire Field, where public parking is expensive or hard to find.
On the other hand, I did have to remove a banana peel from the backseat of the car we booked today.
But it wasn’t my intent to boost Modo with this analysis. I was really just interested in decoding the baroque pricing as the Vancouver car share market grows up.
To me, all the services are being overly transparent with their pricing. They should make all these details available, but then they should just offer some abstracted, straightforward pricing. Why doesn’t somebody offer a $29/month, a $49/month and a $99/month plan? The car shares all seem to be making it the consumer’s problem, which strikes me as the wrong approach.
Are you a car-share customer? Have you ever considered becoming one?
UPDATE: I snapped this photo of the parking lot where we usually pick up our cars. It’s interesting that the other two car shares appear to be annexing sections of it. The cars on the left are from Modo. You can spot the Zipcar spots by the metal signposts at the end of the row on the right. And I suspect that those newly-painted spots where the cones are now belong to car2go. Click to enlarge:
