Swiss Review 6/2020

Swiss Review / November 2020 / No.6 17 The long road to success More and more of Switzerland’s urban households manage without a car – not least thanks to car-sharing provider Mobility, who now want to switch their entire fleet to electric. JÜRG STEINER In Swiss cities, customers of car-sharing cooperative Mo- bility are just a fewswipes away fromtheir next vehicle. The Mobility app shows where your nearest free vehicle is. You can book it in a matter of seconds, use your Mobility Card to unlock the vehicle, drive off and then return the vehicle to its original station before the end of the reservation pe- riod. Fees are charged based on the number of kilometres travelled and the duration of use. This business model has made Mobility Switzerland’s leading car-sharing platform. Mobility’s customer numbers and fleet size have been growing for years. “We believe there is no limit to how far we can grow,” says Mobility spokesman Patrick Eigenmann. Car sharing belongs to the smartphone era, yet it took decades for it to become main- stream. Mobility dateswell back into the 20th century, to a time before the internet and smartphones but when green awareness was starting to grow. Conrad Wagner, who would later become a Green politician and a mobility con- sultant in the canton of Nidwalden, founded the car-shar- ing cooperative Auto Teilet Genossenschaft (ATG) in Stans along with a number of colleagues in 1987. His company’s original fleet consisted of a redOpel Kadett (equippedwith catalytic converter) and a 125cc Honda motorcycle. This pi- oneering start-up from central Switzerland was regarded as a bit of a joke and had trouble finding an insurer that would issue a policy for more than one user of the same ve- hicle, Wagner recalled in a recent radio interview. Nevertheless, ATGkept going. In 1997, theymergedwith their Zurich competitor ShareComto formMobility – a new cooperative that began operating in Switzerlandwith a fleet of 760 vehicles and a membership of 17,000. Today, Mobil- ity operate a fleet of some 3,000 mainly bright red cars at over 1,500 locations. The company have over 220,000 cus- tomers. Mobility’s success as a company is down to two key de- velopment factors at national level: the growth of conurba- tions in the Swiss plateau and the heavily state-funded ex- pansion of public transport. “Seventy per cent of our locations are in cities or conurbations, and half of our cus- tomers live in one of Switzerland’s eight biggest cities,” says Eigenmann, adding that car sharingworks particularlywell in tandemwith public transport, which has a high service frequency to relieve road traffic in Swiss cities (see article on the traffic situation in Berne and Geneva, page 15). Mobility shed their hippy credentials on the road to business success. They took this too far the other way in 2019, drawing criticism from their own customers after in- troducing a premium category that consisted of high-con- sumption SUVs. Mobility quickly ditched the plan, because there was hardly any demand for the cars. Now the com- pany are taking major steps towards sustainability and have set 2030 as the target for converting all their predom- inantly petrol or diesel vehicles to electric drive. A fewmonths ago, the cooperative arranged a study to assess their own sustainability impact. According to the findings, therewould be 35,500more cars on Switzerland’s roads ifMobility did not exist. As impressive as this sounds, it is still a drop in the ocean given that 4.6million cars trav- elled on Swiss roads in 2019. JÜRG STEINER IS A JOURNALIST AND EDITOR WITH THE “BERNER ZEITUNG” A familiar sight in Swiss cities – the now-ubiquitous red vehicles of car- sharing cooperative Mobility. Photo donated