Hertz Connect Car-Sharing
I’m a huge fan of car-sharing. In talking about it on occasion, I’ve mostly stuck to Zipcar if only because it seems like they may be the most dominant car-sharing service in America. Well, it looks like Zipcar’s success has finally attracted a bigtime competitor - Hertz.
The Wall Street Journal says this:
Hertz Corp. launched a car-sharing service called Connect by Hertz, which rents cars by the hour at about two dozen locations in New York, London, Paris and Park Ridge, N.J.
A new company Web site allows customers to sign up for the service and start renting cars by the hour. The service will officially launch Dec. 16, but already some cars are available, says Hertz, a unit of Hertz Global Holdings Inc.
The Hertz site says the rental procedure will be very similar to that of the car-sharing market leader, Cambridge, Mass.-based Zipcar Inc. Customers will pay an annual or monthly membership fee, pick up cars in locations scattered around a city without checking in at a Hertz rental office, and then pay an hourly car-rental fee.
This is a big move, with lots of implications, but I like to think that it will help move us more quickly to ‘the service economy‘. In this case, I’m referring to “the servitization of products” definition of the service economy - an idea which is known in ‘green economy’ and ‘natural capitalism’ circles.
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