Volkswagen has rolled out its take on car-sharing services with the launch of WeShare this week. The service is available in Berlin with a full-electric fleet of 1,500 e-Golf-vehicles hitting the road.
By 2020, the OEM will add 500 of its e-Up! electric vehicles (EVs) and expand the program to Hamburg, Germany, and Prague, the company noted in a press release. To rent the EVs, consumers need the WeShare mobile app and a credit card.
The program is “free-floating,” which means the EVs can be picked up and dropped off anywhere in the Berlin operating area. Consumers can rent the vehicle for $0.22 per minute, but the price will increase to $0.33 per minute in September, the OEM noted.
As the program starts, Volkswagen will take responsibility for recharging the vehicles but will begin to provide incentives for consumers to charge the vehicles themselves. To that end, Volkswagen has built 70 charging stations in the Berlin area.
The German automaker is turning to mobility as a service as the number of car-sharing users in Germany has risen 14-fold since 2010, the OEM noted. The number of consumers registered as car-sharing users grew to 2.46 million in January, compared with 180,000 registered consumers in 2010.
“Once we decide to scale our service to new markets, our goal is fast implementation,” company spokesperson Manuela Hoehne told Auto Finance News. “It took us [about] a year from the start of development to launch in Berlin. This shows that we are able to bring new mobility services to the streets quickly. With the technical and structural base in place now, we will be able to roll out WeShare to new cities considerably faster.”