That was the conclusion the small city of Loveland in Colorado, USA, came to last year.

It disposed of some 40 ageing, insufficiently utilised, sedans, pick-ups and vans from its fleet and replaced them with 15 shared vehicles leased from Enterprise Fleet Management, saving itself over $300,000 (€228,745) annually. They are all equipped with automated rental technology used in Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s WeCar car sharing programme.

Employees who need transport to get to meetings or tackle jobs can avail themselves of motor pool vehicles stationed near their workplaces at four locations around the city. They can be reserved online for a few hours or a few days and the system automatically charges the individual’s departmental budget for the vehicle's use based on time and/or mileage.

Charges range from $25 to $60 (€19 to €46) daily and go towards the cost of leasing whatever the worker has been driving.

To make use of a vehicle the driver swipes a special membership identification card across the windscreen. A sensor recognises the card, records the date and time, opens the door and allows access to the ignition key in the interior.

When the driver no longer needs the vehicle it is driven back to its parking space, the key is relocated inside and the card is swiped in front of the sensor. The doors are locked and the duration of usage is recorded along with the mileage.

‘Our shared motor pool enables us to reduce maintenance and insurance expenditure while providing safe and fuel-efficient transport for city employees,’ says Loveland fleet manager, Steve Kibler. ‘All maintenance and repair work is carried out by Enterprise Fleet Management's local independent contractors so we have not had to recruit additional personnel to perform these tasks.

‘The motor pool programme is one of our efforts to make city government more efficient and effective both economically and environmentally,’ he continues.

‘In addition to giving us access to purchasing power that allows us to obtain vehicles at the best-possible prices and on the best-possible terms, the leasing agreement with Enterprise offers maintenance management, risk management and vehicle registration and reporting as well as a fuel card programme that automatically monitors fuel purchases and mileage,’ Kibler says. Future expansion of the scheme to add hybrid and zero-emission plug-in models is likely.

On the other side of the Atlantic, PwC Luxembourg recognised a while ago that transport accounted for about 70% of its carbon footprint and elected to do something about it. Working with LeasePlan and Avis it decided to introduce a car-sharing scheme for its 2,000 employees with the emphasis on low-emission models: Nissan’s LEAF and Renault’s Twizy are among the cars on offer.

‘By providing flexible mobility solutions such as electric car sharing and by encouraging alternative means of transport, including city buses and soft mobility (walking or cycling for example) we’re going a step further in our commitment to reduce our carbon emissions,’ says Patrice Waltzing, the partner in charge of managing PwC Luxembourg’s fleet.

Hertz is busy providing businesses, utilities, and municipalities in Germany with an electric car sharing service under the auspices of the Hertz on Demand/MoveAbout partnership. Based in Norway, MoveAbout A/S is an electric vehicle-sharing specialist and the two companies have signed a five-year agreement.

‘Hertz believes that electric cars and mobility on-demand services go hand-in-hand as the public and private sectors develop new and sustainable travel solutions,’ says president of Hertz International and executive vice president, Hertz Corporation, Michael Taride.

Hertz says that its electric vehicle sharing service offers a zero-emission solution to organisations wishing to reduce the carbon footprint of their fleets and meet sustainability goals without having to worry about the cost of ownership.

So far as the practicalities are concerned, the arrangement is not dissimilar to the one the city of Loveland has with Enterprise.

Drivers are given a smart chip-enabled card that gives them access to any vehicle in the fleet that they have reserved. A hands-free kit connects them to a Hertz representative should they have any questions, require assistance or need to hang on to the car for longer than they originally anticipated and Hertz can locate and unlock vehicles remotely.

Elsewhere in Germany, Hertz has recently embarked on a three-year agreement with Lufthansa to run its car pool. It is supplying and maintaining over 1,000 vehicles equipped with its car-sharing technology and is operating the car pool booking system.

Unlocked using an RFID-enabled token, the vehicles are available from a variety of locations including the airports at Munich, Frankfurt and Hamburg and bookings can be made via the internet, a mobile webpage or an iPhone app.

All the major rental fleets appear to be moving more energetically into car-pooling and car sharing with the aim of appealing to both private and corporate customers.

Some of this is by acquisition, with Enterprise Holdings buying the not-for-profit IGO CarSharing service in Chicago, USA, back in May with 200 locations in more than 40 neighbourhoods and over 15,000 members. In July it went further and bought Zimride, the largest ride matching programme in the USA with over 15,000 users.

One reason for their interest is the opportunity it gives them to meet the needs of local authorities that wish to provide an environmentally friendly car sharing service to local residents. That is the route the French city of Lyon has gone down with car2go Europe, a joint venture between car2go Gmbh, which is owned by Daimler, and Europcar.

Under the programme residents have access to a fleet of 200 low-emission smartfortwo microcars, which can be rented and returned, within an operating area of 44km2 covering the city centre. Programme members can find the vehicles on the streets, via the internet at www.car2go.com and with the aid of several smartphone applications.

The chosen microcar can be unlocked using a personal membership card and drivers do not have to bring it back to wherever the journey started. Instead, they can simply leave the car at their destination, in any public parking space and at all Lyon car-sharing stations within the car2go business area.

Says Lyon mayor, Gerrard Collomb: ‘Innovative urban mobility solutions like car2go offer a way to help meet the challenges of urban congestion, reducing carbon emissions and improving the quality of life.’

The scheme follows an even-more-environmentally-friendly initiative the city introduced in 2005: a bicycle-sharing programme operated in conjunction with Velo’v. 

All major fleets are seeking to minimise their impact on the environment and not just by operating electric or hybrid cars.

Last November Hertz announced an agreement with Liberty Tire Recycling to introduce what it says is the first nationwide tyre-recycling programme in the USA. It involves Liberty collecting over 160,000 used tyres annually from locations all over the country.

The recycled rubber feedstock from the tyres is turned into a wide variety of products including mulches for gardens and surfaces for playgrounds and is also used to help produce composite railway sleepers.

In addition it is being used to provide highways with a surface that is said to last longer, offer a quieter ride and use less material than more traditional approaches to road building. Up to 8,000 recycled tyres are used to help construct each mile of road, says Hertz.