Cost and revenue of an electric car sharing fleet
About ten years ago, my wife and I started using car sharing. First with car2go turned DriveNow turned ShareNow. The reason I started going with them was they offered the BMW i3, one of the first mainstream electric vehicles in a shared fleet. But only for a short time. Long before Daimler and BMW sold their assets to PSA, electric cars vanished from the service.
Then I stumbled upon ELOOP , a startup from Vienna with alumni from WU (Wirtschaftsuniversit?t Wien) who probably sat in my wife's Business English lecture at some point. They launched a 100 % electric fleet using Tesla's more affordable Model 3.
Last year, they pivoted to be the first European electric car sharing service to offer tokenised revenue sharing with low volume investors. Since then, I have insight in a dashboard covering their whole tokenised fleet (about 25 of their 300+ cars) which I asked if I can share here. They said yes.
50 % is insurance.
The first thing I find interesting is the cost structure. Fleet operators are typically shy of sharing information like this. I have seen the same reluctance across the whole mobility industry. But in this case, the information is open to anyone registering for the dashboard:
Half of the fleet budget goes into insurance (disclaimer: I work for Generali ?sterreich and Munich Re ) and this is a big bucket compared to hardware, the second largest slice of the pie, the actual cars. Energy costs sit at number three, and have been stably so over the last months. Same goes for operations. Parking is a drop in the bucket.
This is interesting for a number of reasons.
Not thinking about insurance and parking is one of the biggest motivators for me to use car sharing. The simplicity found in charging these days is another plus. These three are a financial and mental burden such a service takes away from me.
The one thing I'm mostly in touch with as a user is the car itself. Here's where the choice of Tesla as a single hardware provider make a key difference in user experience. Not having to adapt myself to a different car every time I use DriveNow, for instance, is a benefit that can not be overstated.
Some car manufacturers use car sharing or rental fleets to streamline their deprecating financial assets. A pure player like ELOOP (and I'd like to see other examples) play a different game.
Businesses use electric cars, but not car sharing.
Another thing that's interesting about a car sharing fleet is the revenue split across week days. There's an obvious peak on the weekend, where people take day trips or longer overnight stays.
Monday is still strong, a common return day and frequent bank holiday. But the usual work days Tuesday to Friday have an untypical low.
This is in contrast with the fact that most electric vehicles registered are company cars. They are heavily subsidised and more and more employers offer charging stations at the office. However, we also know that adoption of an electric corporate fleet is sometimes slow.
That leaves us with some questions: Is the growth opportunity for shared electric fleets in business and work days? Can operators attract business the same way they attract consumers – and what would they need to change in their service? Does the high insurance cost shy companies away from actually enforcing fleet use among their employees?
One Austrian startup that began focusing on B2B is vibe moves you . But I don't have any data yet :-)