Zipcar, Haringey's car club operator, to be bought by Avis

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Permalink Reply by Alison P on January 3, 2013 at 11:58

I have no problem with Haringey promoting this. It is about encouraging less car ownership and a greener way to travel by car, perfectly legit things for a council to promote.

I'm a member, the insurance surcharge is big but you can buy a policy elsewhere for around £35 pa that will cover it if you have an accident (far less than I was shelling out for car insurance). There are various posts about it on the site if anyone is interested.

I'd love to see more cars round here frankly. One every road, just imagine...!

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Permalink Reply by JJ B on January 4, 2013 at 13:52

I think the CarShare business has been quite a good thing for those of us non-car-owners who need an occasional short-term car rental. As a very occasional Zipcar user, I am still a member after joining when I lived in Finsbury Park over 3 years ago. So far the service has improved in my area where we now have more cars/vans available and as seen from Clive's cut out the price increase since 2009 has been only 1%, when prices of fuel and transport all round have increased much much more than that.
I agree that the term "club" can be misleading as we have seen that Streetcar/Zipcar has now become part of a much larger private shareholder-owned business and the objective of these businesses are to maximise shareholder value. Of course they'll need to balance customer needs and wishes with this but it still doesn't mean that their priority will be to optimise user experience and cater fully for user needs. This is a very important "nuance" which is borne out every year with the exhorbitant rises in non-regulated rail fares where people have no option but to cough up and pay.

Let's wait and see what happens now that Avis has taken over. We may need to get other car "club" vehicles to have their own bays in the same streets. If we are going to have capitalism lets have pure competition too. If the serice becomes too expensive I'll leave. I must admit that I would like to see synergies where i have access to longer term car rental rates when travelling. I am already a signed-up card holder at Avis. It didn't stop me from sending off an email comment to Zipcar about my concerns.
Witness the customer revolt with Instagram/Facebook over the last few weeks. It was purchased by Face(spy)book which try to introduced a change to its erms service that meant it owned users' photos. Instagram allegedly lost several million users (25% of it base!!!) in a very short space of time.
"Consumers" have power when they move in droves. Power to the people!

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