Car Club

Comment by tony lewin on May 28, 2009 at 23:53

The idea behind this club is to get a critical mass of like-minded people so that we can put forward a case to attract an electric-car operator to set up a scheme in the village. The more potential users we have, the greater the chance of getting something up and running. I will post details of how such a scheme could work as soon as I can get hold of the information.

Comment by David Jonas on May 29, 2009 at 8:16

I look forward to seeing the detail.

Comment by Mike Grenville on May 29, 2009 at 11:41

Lewes BakedBean car Cub: an informal car club between four friends.
http://transitiontowns.org/Lewes/Bakedbean

A one car share club based in the Woodgate and West End areas of Leicester
http://uk.geocities.com/woodgatecarshare/

The Rusty car pool in Leicester.
The club currently runs 5 vehicles - a transit van, 2 hatchbacks and three estate cars
http://www.carplus.org.uk/carclubs/case-studies/rusty.htm

An FAQ and news of Car Clubs
http://www.carclubs.org.uk/

Comment by Naphia Reggiani on May 31, 2009 at 8:34

There is also http://www.streetcar.co.uk/

A friend of mine in London sold her car to use this service & is delighted with the results. If enough people in an area registers an interest & someone offers a parking space, Streetcar will provide a car or even a van [probably not an electric car, though ...]

Comment by Mike Grenville on June 1, 2009 at 22:56

You ask, they answer: Goingreen, G-Wiz electric car distributor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jun/01...

Comment by Ian Eiloart on June 2, 2009 at 15:35

Electric cars may not yet be practical for a car club. The club won't be economical unless the car itself is on the road about 50% of the time - unless you charge a lot more than the usual £5 or so per hour. As far as I know, the electric cars that you can get right now take a long time to charge up, and have limited range. There's a big risk that drivers will end up stranded - and that will put people off early.

In Lewes, we're looking at cars with less than 99g/CO2 emissions. New ones also have low particulate and nitrate emissions - which is a particular issue for Lewes.

Of course, electric cars have no local emissions at all, and the total CO2 from the electricity generators is probably lower, but that depends on the mix of generating technologies. Most power storage technologies (batteries, hydrogen compression, ...) only achieve about 50% efficiency. So, it's not clear to me that electric cars do in practice emit less CO2 than efficient diesel cars today.

In five years time, perhaps the national mix will be different, the electric cars will be more practical and more efficient, and you'll be looking to replace whatever you get now, so it'll be worth re-evaluating.

Now, it may be that your community has different requirements than ours. Or, maybe there's an electric car out there suitable for this kind of use that I don't know about.

Comment by Ian Eiloart on June 2, 2009 at 15:44

In Lewes, we're about to register a Community Interest Company (CIC) to own our cars. We'll probably get telemetrics installed, and booking system provided and managed by CommonWheels.

CIC model rules are available, in six varieties. Three are for "large" companies where not all the members are directors. Three are for "small" companies where all the members are directors, and all the directors are members. We're going for the large model, since we'd like all our car users to be members, we'd like hundreds of members, and we think that it would be impractical to have hundreds of directors.

We'll be looking to be limited by shares, not by guarantee. That just leaves us to choose who we can pay dividends to. The choices are "other CICs, or charities, only" or "other CICs, charities, and individual investors" where dividend payments to individual investors are strictly limited.

We'll keep you updated.

Comment by Rowena on June 2, 2009 at 22:22

I asked 'Streetcar' whether they might like to set up in Forest Row as they had a stand at the UK Aware show in London in April. We do not have a big enough population for them to offer their service here (and Naphia you are right, they provide non electric cars). I think groups of friends - informal or otherwise - getting together to pool a car of whatever sort is the most likely way this will work here first.

Or you could try an electric bicycle - I'm so thrilled with mine (thank you Mike for your help with the chain cover today).

Rowena

Comment by tony lewin on June 3, 2009 at 9:35

Would it be an idea if we had another session to share ideas? In the course of my work I've done quite a lot of research on the various potential schemes and also on the cars themselves. It's all going to start really happening surprisingly soon: this year in Portugal and Israel, next year in Denmark, and with plenty of things happening in Spain and France too.
My understanding is that the business model for electric car schemes will vary from country to country, depending on which organisation gets the deal. I have spoken with Better Place, which is probably the leader in this. The CEO for Europe told me in February that any community wanting an EV scheme would be considered.
I also have a lot of stuff on the actual vehicles: this is a topic we didn't really get round to in the discussion on hydrogen last week.
If there's enough interest in an EV discussion, I would be happy to organise it.

Tony

Comment by Rowena on June 4, 2009 at 23:18

Tony, you are in the know - I would be fascinated to find out more. Sitting here it all seems so far off, but as your post suggests it will probably come quicker than we can now imagine.
not evenings is really good for me, but some I can manage!
Rowena

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