With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

car2go coming to Minneapolis!

2013 September 05 08:33

I talked about Smart Cars and my experiences with car2go in a (relatively recent) blog post. That post was more concerned about the Smart Car itself rather than the car2go company, but it talks about that.

I ran across an internet post yesterday announcing that car2go is coming to Minneapolis, a city that I visit all the time. Whoo-hoo! I don't know that I'll always use it, but it's a very flexible option for some kinds of travel in the city.

For a very limited time while they're rolling out their service in a new city, they allow residents to sign up for the service without a fee. If you live anywhere at all in or near the Twin Cities metro area, I would encourage you to sign up for the service. There are no continuing membership fees; if you never use a car you don't pay anything, and they don't send you stuff unless you ask for it. They do ask for your driver's license information; a membership carries insurance with it, so they do the same level of check as getting new car insurance. The normal cost for signing up is something like $35.

The service is extremely slick and easy to use. One membership covers you for all their locations (at least on the same continent). I've used my membership to rent cars in Austin TX and Portland OR. You can rent any unused car any time and park it whenever and wherever you like, as long as it's a legal parking space.

It looks like the core area (where you can drop of a car) is the Minneapolis city limits. So it goes up to but doesn't include the St. Paul/Minneapolis airport. I wonder if at some point they're going to put a pod of car2go cars at the airport like they did in Austin; that would be really convenient.

And I do realize that there have been politics and bad feelings involved with car2go coming to the Cities. So there are definitely people who won't want to patronize them because of that, which is totally understandable. I'm certainly not saying that you should get a car2go membership instead of one of the other car-sharing companies in the area, just that it doesn't cost you anything to get this one (during the introductory period) and that way you can have it and try it out.