by Carlo Iacovini

As car sharing is re-shaping mobility market car manufacturers have very different approaches to this business. Daimler group takes mobility as part of their own business. Since few years ago Daimler mobility services gmbh is a full operating company within the group and it develops a wide spectrum of innovative services. Through the Moovel platform the group goes much further than cars sales, integrating services and booking for trains, bike sharing, local public transport and taxi. A long term vision is bringing the company to lead the industry. Other brand like BMW tested small-scale traditional car sharing (Drive now) making sometimes pilots to use electric vehicles (like Renault with twizy) or to pioneer corporate services. Most of the others prefer to push providing cars to make people drive them but not investing in running operations. FIAT started to look at carsharing since early stage of introduction in national market in Italy (early 2000). By that time car sharing was a valuable promotional strategy to sell small fleets to local operators. In the city of Turin (Fiat headquarter at that time) the company is formal shareholders of local operators running more than 100 cars fleet. When national oil company ENI decided recently to enter into the free floating car sharing market Fiat become main partner to strength the Italian flag against German brand Car2go. 500 is official Enjoy brand vehicle according to the long history the car has for Italians ‘60’ 70 generations.

But how is the company embracing innovative business models targeting private owners to share their car to reduce total umber of vehicles? “If you can’t fight your enemy… it’s better to become friends”. The

partnership recently introduced by Getaround peer to peer car sharing operator and FIAT seems to go in this direction. According to official website Fiat offers a discount in car purchasing if customers share it with Getaround platform. User can earn up to $10.000+ per year and gets for free the “Getaround connect” device (priced 100$). Getaround doesn’t manage its own cars and the partnership is a valuable strategy to build a styling and glamour fleet that would make more attractive the service to new customers too. Car manufacturers thank you too.