Microcars join the fleet
Car sharing fleets across Europe tend to have a far larger share of electric cars than the overall car electrification rate in the country. The age of fleets, more centralized planning through operators and in some cases public incentives are contributing factors to this trend. But even among car sharing fleets in other European countries, Italy stands out. For instance, in the Netherlands, which also have one of the higher shares of battery-powered vehicles in their shared fleets, electric cars only constituted 30 percent of station-based shared cars.Contributing factors to Italy’s high electrification are several operators exclusively providing electric cars and its adoption of microcars. Several car sharing providers operate fleets of all-electric microcars, which contribute to the high share of electric cars in the Italian fleet. Microcars are a relatively new addition to the market, with the car sharing market leader, Enjoy, only introducing them to their fleet in 2022. Microcars are cars that can seat only one to two people and tend to have limited carrying capacity and can be subject to less stringent license requirements.
Microcars appear to have found a niche in the Italian sharing market, which they have not been afforded to the same extent in neighboring countries. For instance, while only a third of Germans said they might consider using minimobility, which includes microcars, Italians were found to be far more favorable, with nearly half saying they could imagine using minimobility vehicles.
Milan: The capital of Italian car sharing
Milan exceeds most other cities in Italy on almost every car sharing metric. It had the largest number of vehicles available in 2022 and the largest number of cars per person, 18 cars per 10,000 inhabitants. Between 2016 and 2022, Milan consistently recorded the highest number of free-floating car sharing trips and, with nearly 40 million kilometers driven by shared car in 2022, also had the most used schemes in the country. However, the smaller schemes in Turin were able to achieve higher average numbers of trips per vehicle per day than Milan in 2022.While car sharing in Italy has not yet fully recovered from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, schemes are expanding again and are expected to continue growing in the coming years.
