The one-way chartering service, car2go NA, has strengthened its commitment to road safety with the launch of a pilot program that rewards car2go members who take online road safety education courses provided free-of-charge by the company, through the National Safety Council, a nonprofit organization widely recognized as America’s leading safety advocate for more than 100 years.
car2go has also announced it has joined the Road to Zero Coalition, a body composed of private companies, nonprofits, city, state and federal government agencies dedicated to driving traffic deaths down to zero within the next 30 years.
“Although car crashes are 100% preventable, we lost 40,000 people on our roads in 2016,” said Deborah Hersman, NSC president and CEO. “NSC is pleased to partner with car2go in our mission to end preventable deaths on our nation’s roadways.”
“As the world’s largest carsharing service, car2go can play a major role in helping to achieve Vision Zero’s objective of eliminating road fatalities,” said Paul DeLong, CEO of car2go NA. “We are continually enhancing our vehicles with advanced safety features, and we are proud to say that of the 8.75 million trips our North American members took last year, just .01 percent of them involved a road safety incident. Today we take our commitment to road safety a step further with the launch of an innovative new pilot program that provides valuable online road safety courses to our members free-of-charge, and rewards them for strengthening their road safety knowledge.”
The pilot program will launch in New York and Washington, D.C. locations, where car2go members will be chosen at random. The program will enable those members chosen at random to receive car2go drive-time credit for taking NSC-approved online road safety courses. car2go will continually evaluate the success of the pilot with the goal of making it available to more car2go members – and in additional car2go locations – in the coming months.
The launch of car2go’s new road safety education pilot program and addition to NSC’s Road to Zero Coalition builds upon the service’s announced support for “Vision Zero” in March, 2016. Vision Zero is a road safety initiative championed by cities around the world with the goal of totally eliminating road fatalities and serious injuries.
car2go’s carsharing network of Mercedes-Benz and smart vehicles feature innovative safety technology that has helped Mercedes-Benz build a strong reputation as a producer of safe, innovative and comfortable vehicles.
car2go’s flexible, one-way carsharing service operates in the following cities with active Vision Zero programs: Austin; Calgary; Denver; Montreal; New York City; Portland; Seattle; Toronto; Vancouver; and Washington, D.C.
In 2016, car2go grew its global customer base by 43-percent to 2.2 million members, and today the service boasts over 2.3 million members. Every 1.4 seconds, a car2go member takes a trip in a car2go vehicle in one of 26 car2go cities spread across North America, Europe, and Asia.
In 2016, car2go’s global network of nearly 14,000 vehicles were rented more than 22 million times, a 21-percent increase compared to 2015. In January, car2go introduced Mercedes-Benz CLA and GLA four door vehicles to extend the accessibility of the service to families and groups of friends seeking to travel more places with more cargo.
According to an August 2016 carsharing report1 by Frost & Sullivan, the global carsharing market is expected to grow from 7.9 million people in 2015 to over 36 million people by 2025.
Source: car2go N.A., LLC
Edited by: G. Davila
