BERLIN, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- The number of customers of car sharing services increased by 16.6 percent to a total of 2.46 million during 2018, the German car sharing association (bcs) announced on Wednesday.
Location based car-sharing services, in which a vehicle is picked up at a specific car sharing spot and returned to the same location, showed an "above-average" increase in the number of customers of 21.5 percent and is now available at 740 locations throughout Germany.
According to the German car sharing association bsc, this type of sharing would be the "backbone" of the expansion of car sharing services in Germany. Seventy to 80 percent of customers of such services no longer own a car.
"Cities and municipalities should promote this option, in particular by setting up car sharing stations throughout the country in public areas," said Gunnar Nehrke, chairman of the bsc association.
The strong growth of these car sharing services would be particularly pleasing, as several scientific studies in 2018 would have shown that this type of sharing had a "particularly high traffic-relieving effect", according to bsc.
For free-floating car sharing services on the other hand, cars do not have to be returned to a specific location. Customers can locate available cars using their smartphones. Such services were available in seven large German cities and a "few surrounding municipalities of these cities". Here, customer growth had slowed down "slightly" to 14.9 percent in 2018.
The share of electric vehicles in car sharing services was "50 times higher than in the national car fleet", emphasized bsc chairman Nehrke. However, electric vehicles would still be too expensive and there was currently no "promotional concept" for setting up charging infrastructure at car sharing stations.
Car sharing would be "good and right", Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, traffic scientist at the university of Duisburg-Essen, told the German press agency (dpa). "But the figures show that it is still a very long way to the top and that the significance is still very limited today."
Two German luxury car makers, BMW and Daimler, are currently planning to merge their car sharing services DriveNow and car2go. The intention of the two car manufacturers was to create one of the world's "leading providers" of car sharing services, according to Daimler. New details on this merger are expected to be revealed by the two companies on Friday.
Germany's largest car manufacturer Volkswagen is expected to start its new electric car sharing service "We Share" in the second quarter of 2019.
