Design Options for Carsharing Business Models

Abstract

Carsharing clubs that grant members temporary access to vehicles have existed for more than half a century. Only recently, however, have technological advances such as the mobile internet begun to foster new carsharing business models, thereby increasing the attractiveness of carsharing for both operators and users. So far, these new business models were typically classified as roundtrip, point to point, nonprofit/cooperative, and P2P carsharing. However, not all operators fit into these rather broad groups; for instance, the carsharing company CiteeCar combines elements of several archetypes. Furthermore, important differences among the various design options of operators belonging to the same type are not addressed by this distinction. For example, the largest P2P carsharing companies, Getaround and Turo, employ very different business models: Getaround provides automatic access kits while Turo does not. Thus they address different use cases and customers. To account for such differentiation, we complement these archetypes by a classification scheme for carsharing business models, i.e., a taxonomy, listing the most important dimensions and corresponding characteristics. We proceed in three major steps: First, we create a global database of carsharing companies. Second, we use the database to create a taxonomy of carsharing business models. Third, we empirically derive more fine grained archetypes from the taxonomy. Our resulting framework allows researchers and practitioners to more accurately analyze and describe existing carsharing systems. Furthermore, it can be applied for business model innovation by copying successful business model patterns or systemtaically discovering new configurations.