Carsharing business models in Germany: characteristics, success and future prospects

Karla Münzel (), Wouter Boon, Koen Frenken and Taneli Vaskelainen
Additional contact information
Karla Münzel: Utrecht University
Wouter Boon: Utrecht University
Taneli Vaskelainen: University of Jyväskylä

Information Systems and e-Business Management, 2018, vol. 16, issue 2, No 3, 291 pages

Abstract: Abstract Carsharing provides an alternative to private car ownership by allowing car use temporarily on an on-demand basis. Operators provide carsharing services using different business models and ownership structures. We distinguish between cooperative, business-to-consumer (B2C) roundtrip and one-way, as well as peer-to-peer (P2P) carsharing. This paper characterizes these different types of business models and compares their success in terms of diffusion using a comprehensive database of all 101 German carsharing providers in 2016. The key result holds that fleet size is significantly different across business models ranging from a few cars (cooperatives in small towns), to a few hundred (B2C roundtrip in larger cities), to over a thousand (B2C one-way in largest cities), up to multiple thousands (P2P across the country). By analyzing for each operator the number of cars per capita in the city they operate in, we do not find significant differences across business models indicating the viability of each separate business model type. Hence, we conclude that business models will continue to co-exist for a while, although some of the business models may well converge in the longer run due to Internet-of-Things applications and the introduction of self-driving cars.

Keywords: Carsharing; Sharing economy; Platform economy; On-demand mobility services; Business models; Future mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10257-017-0355-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infsem:v:16:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s10257-017-0355-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ystems/journal/10257

DOI: 10.1007/s10257-017-0355-x

Access Statistics for this article

Information Systems and e-Business Management is currently edited by Jörg Becker and Michael J. Shaw

More articles in Information Systems and e-Business Management from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().