Introduction to car clubs

Now that we’ve been introduced the concept of shared mobility and its potential benefits and challenges we will begin to look at a number of different forms of shared mobility starting with car clubs. Fundamentally a car club is a car sharing scheme run by a rental company and differing in a number of key areas versus a conventional car rental business. Instead of being restricted to offices and opening hours car clubs allow its users to hire a car as and when they need to whether that’s online or via an app. This means that vehicles can be booked and collected 24 hours a day.

Compared to a conventional rental company car clubs have the benefit of only paying for their use as and when you need them. This allows vehicles to be booked for a few hours or a few days at a time whatever is needed by the user. When it comes to pricing, car clubs tend to offer a few different and flexible methods of payment this could include paying hourly, daily, or even subscribing to annual subscriptions; it all depends on how much you think you may use the car.

Having a car on the road can be extremely costly during the course of a year with a car club as you don’t own the car there’s no need to pay for road tax motor insurance or costly maintenance bills or parking permits. Additionally another key benefit of using car club is for those who find it difficult to park in their area or simply don’t have the space.

Over the next few steps of this course we will go into further detail about the potential benefits and challenges that car clubs face as well as having a look at what the future of car clubs may look like. In the meantime why not go online and see where your nearest car club is and how much it might cost for you to join them.