As any BBC Top Gear fan has learned, driving in London is an absolute pain. Between congestion, tolls, and impossible parking, the city has made it extremely tempting to ditch your car and find any other possible means of traveling to, from, and in the U.K. capital. Ford has a possible solution with GoDrive, a London car-sharing program that allows one-way rentals—and guarantees a parking space at your final destination.
-GoDrive is basically Ford’s London-based take on car-sharing services like Zipcar, offering short-term car rentals to city dwellers who might occasionally need the kind of mobility that only an automobile can provide. With 20 locations across London offering 50 cars—half of them Focus Electrics, the rest 1.0-liter Fiestas—Ford says GoDrive is intended to complement existing public transit infrastructure in the city.
-The system is pay-as-you-go, with pay-by-minute pricing that includes congestion fees and rental kiosks near major public transportation hubs like Waterloo and Victoria railway stations. Users reserve their vehicle using a smartphone app, which displays running costs and navigates you to your reserved parking spot, whether you’re doing a round-trip or a one-way rental. Drivers get up to five minutes to familiarize themselves with the car’s controls before the meter starts running.
- -In the U.S., car-sharing service Zipcar offers a similar one-way option with reserved parking spots for users in the Boston area. Like Ford’s GoDrive, Zipcar One-Way is currently in beta testing, with 200 vehicles available at parking pods throughout Boston including Logan International Airport.
-Ford’s interest in car sharing is just one facet of the company’s more than 25 “smart mobility” experiments, the automaker’s “plan to use technology an innovation to take the company to the next level in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience and big data.” That’s the corporate-buzzspeak way of saying that Ford anticipates a future shift away from traditional car ownership—particularly in crowded urban areas—and the company wants to stay relevant even if future city-dwellers aren’t all yearning to buy a car of their own.
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While Ford didn’t express any plans to bring GoDrive beyond London, the company is running an experimental Car Swap program at its worldwide headquarters in Dearborn, MI, allowing Ford employees to borrow company-owned vehicles when they need, say, a pickup truck, but only have a hatchback in their own garage. Between GoDrive, Car Swap, and Ford’s other data-gathering experiments worldwide, the Blue Oval hopes to get a grip on the ambiguous future of the urban automobile.
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via Agya
