From September, UrStrom eG will offer its e-car sharing users a customer-friendly cooperative booking app. The goal is a common e-car sharing platform for energy cooperatives throughout Europe.
Mainz, 23.08.2019 Select, book and open electric cars with your smartphone. These are the functions of the cooperative booking app "e-Carsharing in Bürgerhand", which the UrStrom BürgerEnergieGenossenschaft in Mainz is the first German energy cooperative to use. "The smartphone becomes the car key," says Klaus Grieger, project manager for electromobility at UrStrom eG. The four-language booking app has already been in use for some time at energy cooperatives in Belgium and Spain. "The app is extremely practical," says Klaus Grieger enthusiastically.
After UrStrom eG, other energy cooperatives in Rhineland-Palatinate will use the booking app. "We first want to optimise the app regionally for use in Germany so that we can then attract energy cooperatives throughout Germany to use the joint platform," says Dr Verena Ruppert, Managing Director of Landesnetzwerk Bürgerenergiegenossenschaften Rheinland-Pfalz e. V. (LaNEG) e.V. There are currently eight energy cooperatives working in LaNEG's e-car sharing working group that want to launch local e-car sharing projects or are already doing so. Energy cooperatives can also use the cooperative app to offer companies and municipalities needs-based e-carsharing solutions. The booking platform is the first step towards establishing the cooperative brand "e-Carsharing in Bürgerhand" throughout Germany.
At the end of 2018, citizen energy cooperatives from four European countries founded The Mobility Factory (TMF) as an umbrella cooperative of European e-carsharing cooperatives. TMF provides a professional e-carsharing platform to its members. Currently, all TMF members can use the booking app as licensees and participate in the further development of the system. In the future, the entire value chain in e-car sharing will be in the hands of the cooperatives and thus be user-oriented and independent of purely profit-oriented corporate structures. "The use and further development will remain in the hands of citizens, in the democratic structures of cooperatives," says Michael König, Chairman of TMF.
Currently, about 100 electric vehicles are in use at member cooperatives in Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. In three years, there should be at least 1800 vehicles available to all users of cooperative e-car sharing across Europe.
Keywords:
CarSharing, DE-News, Communities, Mobility, News Blog Europe (without DE), News Blog RLP, Resource efficiency, eMobility, Ecology
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