TY - JOUR
T1 - Carsharing business models in Germany
T2 - characteristics, success and future prospects
AU - Münzel, Karla
AU - Boon, Wouter
AU - Frenken, Koen
AU - Vaskelainen, Taneli
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We thank Jan Blomme, Sam de Haas van Dorsser and Dennis van der Linden for their research assistance. Funding has been provided by Dialogic, the Rathenau Institute, and NWO under the ‘‘Sustainable Business Models’’ program (No. 438-14-904).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, The Author(s).
PY - 2018/5/1
Y1 - 2018/5/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Business models
KW - Carsharing
KW - Future mobility
KW - On-demand mobility services
KW - Platform economy
KW - Sharing economy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85018927720&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10257-017-0355-x
DO - 10.1007/s10257-017-0355-x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85018927720
VL - 16
SP - 271
EP - 291
JO - Information systems and e-business management
JF - Information systems and e-business management
SN - 1617-9846
IS - 2
ER -