author: Claire

Swedish car manufacturer Volvo just announced the establishment of its own ride-sharing services, which will be made available across the globe.



The service is based on Sunfleet, a carpool company founded in 1998, as a collaboration between the City of Gothenburg, Volvo and Swedish Hertz. It now runs in over 50 cities in Sweden, with a fleet of 12,000 Volvo cars and 50,000 subscribers generating 250,000 transactions.

According to TechCrunch, the current Sunfleet service is a ZipCar-like system and is station-based. Users need to register on the company website to book a car, unlock it with an app and find a key in the glove box to drive the car. One can rent a vehicle, sign up for a monthly subscription or take it for weekend renting. However, renters must return the car to the station after use.

Although it's a local business, Volvo hopes to expand Sunfleet to other countries and said it will provide an entirely new range of mobility services to meet different customer expectations.

"Private car ownership will not disappear, but as an automaker we need to embrace the fact that it will reduce and - more importantly - change. We have a proven and profitable concept in our home market which we intend to leverage as we develop a global concept," Volvo chief Hakan Samuelsson said in its corporate website.

Volvo will release more details about the service in the coming months. Furthermore, it will become the latest auto giant to enter the ride-sharing field. It is important to consider that the Swedish company already partnered with Uber via a $300 million program to develop fully autonomous vehicles by 2021. There is a greater chance for Volvo to borrow Uber's ride-hailing experience and technology to integrate into its own service. Also, Volvo's mother company, Zhejiang Geely, launched a new car-sharing brand Lynk & Co in October 2016 to sell Volvo SUVs exclusively for customer-sharing purposes.

As for other automakers in the ride-sharing space, General Motors has Maven that already operates in nine cities in the United States. BMW's ReachNow is providing one-way rentals for BMWs and Minis in three cities. Mercedes Benz's Croove, which facilitates peer-to-peer car renting is now available in Germany. Toyota is also interested in doing a ZipCar-style of car leasing service. With more and more automakers joining the ride-sharing market, it's very likely that car-sharing will become an important part of life in the next phase of futuristic transportation.