Vehicle sharing is a much bigger step towards fixing the climate crisis than the mass adoption of electric cars, according to a British firm that claims to have the technology to make it a reality.
Coastr, whose software allows traditionally paper-heavy automotive firms – such as car rental, car subscription and car sharing firms – to be fully digital, claims that the world’s 2.4 billion cars are utilised to their full potential just 6% of the time, meaning for 94% they are “just sitting there idle”.
“What we want to enable is more of the idea of asset sharing,” said boss Biswajit Kundu Roy. “To solve the global climate problem, EVs aren't a long-term solution. It's about how you increase the utilisation of existing assets. And that in turn then solves a whole lot of other problems around parking-space issues or congestion in cities.”
This is what the tech start-up has already seen in its green four-year lifespan. Its end-to-end fleet management system is used by an array of firms from across the globe.
In a nutshell, it means everything from the customer's first interaction with a company to – in the case of a car rental firm – when the vehicle is returned is paperless and near-autonomous, reducing administrative work.
Such is its success that the company, originally based in Edinburgh, has already expanded to London, California and India.
Kundu Roy added: “If 2.4 billion EVs are created, how do you control the amount of impact it would have on electric grids? How do you even sustain that kind of volume of cars? The answer then isn't just electrification; it's actually how we reuse what we already have as well.”
Get this right and there’s a share of £1.49 trillion to unlock within the next four years, he claimed.
He cited the mobility as a service (Maas) concept of enabling users to plan, book and pay for multiple types of mobility services - from hiring cars to taxis to, in the future, utilising self-driving ride-hailing services.
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