Shell Drive

Heiko posted about Shell Drive, which is very similar to the DB Bikes you see in lots of cities in Germany really. The idea is that you get a special keycard, simply call a special number to get a car, pick it up (with your keycard), drives an hour around town to pick something up, give the car back, done. You pay by the hour and kilometer and it seems that it’s cheaper than having a car as long as you drive less than 10k Kilometers per year. All insurance and petrol are of course included. It’s a very nice idea I’ll look forward to using. When I recently wanted to pick up a car at Sixt, it took 1 hour because their PCs kept on crashing.

Heiko goes on with an interesting idea though. Petrol to cars is like ink to printers. You make money on the ink, not on the printers. The problem with this that you will have to make sure that the car can only pick up gas at that exact station chain. You might get stuff like Cash Group in banks here where you can get money out of cashing machines for free in a group of banks… that might be the direction. What you do is you sell gas cheaper at Shell for people who have a Shell Car.