Global Offshore Drilling Bonanza Heralds the Era of Deepwater Spills
As the BP Gulf spill slides further from view, a deepwater drilling bonanza is set to begin.
As the BP Gulf spill slides further from view, a deepwater drilling bonanza is set to begin.
Bicycle Buses Let Dutch Kids Pedal Together to School
It's been said that the most important lessons in life are not learned in the classroom, and perhaps in no place is that more true than in the Netherlands where the act of heading to school is itself so enriching.
How Millennials Feel about Cars, Public Transit and Electric Vehicles
Millennials are not happy with the sustainable options for transportation
Toyota Unveils Next-Generation B-Segment Hybrid Concept (with PHEV, CNG-Hybrid Variants)
Based on this concept car unveiled in Geneva, Toyota seems to be thinking about creating natural gas powered vehicles. Maybe even CNG-hybrids.
Marriage Equality Could Pump $119M Into NJ Economy
A new study from the Williams Institute finds that New Jersey could generate as much as $119 million in just the first three years of marriage equality, including as much as $8 million in pure tax revenue. By vetoing the legislation, Gov. Chris Christie (R) deprived his entire state of that economic benefit, but the legislature has until the end of 2013 to overturn that veto.
Man Installs Wood Stove in Car to Fight Cold Snap (Video)
How one man is dealing with the weird cold weather in Europe this winter, after his car's heating finally broke down.
Chile Considers Bill to Boost Renewable Energy
High costs of energy due to a severe drought that has severely impaired hydro power plants coupled with restrictions in the capacity of transmission systems has once again put renewable energy in the sight of authorities as a way to decrease reliance of hydro and coal-based electricity.
Fox News Explains Why Presidents Can’t Control Gas Prices, In 2008 (Video)
To defend George Bush from Democrats' accusations that his policies were raising gas prices, Fox News put together a series of videos explaining why the President can't control prices at the pump. Too bad they seem to have forgotten this in 2012...
Energy News: Lakota Activists Arrested Blocking Tar Sands Trucks, Plus US Boosts Wind Power Support
No one ever said the transition from dirty fossil fuels to renewable energy would be swift, neat, or orderly.
70 Members of Congress: Curb Wall Street Speculation On Oil
Seventy Democratic members of Congress pushed for measures to prevent Wall Street traders from artificially driving up gas prices, writing “the [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] continues to drag its feet on imposing strict speculation limits to eliminate, prevent, or diminish excessive oil speculation.” The letter cites a recent report from the St. Louis Federal Reserve urging CFTC to reign in speculators from manipulating prices. “If the St. Louis Federal Reserve, a conservative institution, is saying speculation is contributing significantly to the high price of oil and gas at the pump, then I think that is clearly what the case is,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said.
Canadian Government Attempted "Myth Busting" Tar Sands’ Image in Europe
Not quite Wikileaks-scale revelations here, but it is interesting to peek behind the curtain to glimpse the politico-media blitz undertaken by the Canadian government to support the tar sands.
Renewable Electricity Standards Have No Statistically Significant Impact on Rates
There's a thriving cottage industry devoted to debunking Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute.
Last October, Bryce said be believed a still-unproven experiment with neutrinos called our entire scientific understanding of global warming into question.
Car sharing, revving up
Who would have thought that Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Co., and GM Ventures, the venture capital arm of General Motors, would invest in peer-to-peer car sharing companies?
The big automakers historically craved market share, which means selling as many new cars as they can. If Americans decide that they don’t need a car–or maybe that they only need one, instead of two or three–the car companies could be hurt.
But Bill Ford’s Fontanalis Partners, a firm that invests in “the future of mobility,” invested last month in a campus-based car sharing startup called Wheelz, and GM Ventures is backing RelayRides, another startup that announced today that it is rolling out its service nationally.
Maybe the peer-to-peer car sharing biz is going to be a big deal. Certainly it’s revving up.
To learn a little about car sharing, I arranged to speak last week with Jeff Miller, the co-founder and CEO of Wheelz. Next week, I’ll interview Shelby Clark, the founder and chief community officer of RelayRides, at VERGE DC, a conference organized by GreenBiz, where I’m a senior writer. (Please join us a VERGE DC if you can.) I’ll also be interviewing Steve Case at VERGE; he’s been an advocate for the sharing economy as an investor in Zipcar and in a vacation home-sharing company. [For more, see How Steve Case and his company are driving the sharing economy in The Atlantic and my own blogpost, The sharing economy and me.]
Jeff Miller
Jeff Miller, who is 33, co-founded Wheelz last year with Akhtar Jameel, who formerly ran R&D for Mercedes-Benz North America. The company said last month that it raised $13.7 million from Zipcar and Fontinalis Partners. It currently operates on two college campuses–Stanford and Berkeley, with USC and UCLA coming soon–and it wants to expand, as rapidly as possible. It’s one of a slew of peer-to-peer car-sharing companies that want to scale up because, otherwise, they could be left in the dust.
That’s because peer-to-peer car sharing is a business that will be shaped by the network effect–that is, the business and its network will become more valuable and useful as more people participate. The network effect helped build eBay, Craigslist and, for that matter, Zipcar which has become the dominant car-sharing brand.
Unlike Zipcar, peer-to-peer sharing companies like Wheelz and RelayRides connect individual car owners with renters, who typically pay $5 to $10 an hour for a car. They rely on mobile and Internet platforms that manage reservations, provide insurance, make payments and use electronic and GPS technologies to make it possible for the renters to unlock (and then lock) cars. It sounds complicated, but it’s not. And as companies like RelayRides and Wheelz like to tell you, peer-to-peer car sharing solves a widespread problem–some people want mobility without owning a car, while some owners of cars that site idle would like to earn extra income (sometimes thousands of dollars a year) by renting. “Does it really makes sense that cars are parked for 23 hours a day?” Jeff Miller asks.
Wheelz launch on college campuses for a bunch of reasons. Students tend to be tech-savvy, early adopters. They tend to trust their classmates. They think about consumption in a different way than their parents do. Most of all, some kids have cars and others want them. “At every college in America, there’s supply and demand,” Jeff said. “The college and university is an ideal place to start–the key words being place to start, not finish.”
Boston-based RelayRides, meanwhile, is expanding from Boston and San Francisco, where it currently offers cars, to the rest of the country, with an assist from General Motors. GM has about 6 million OnStar subscribers, who will be offered the chance to rent through RelayRides. GM will get a cut of the rentals, as Steve Girsky, the company’s vice chairman, told the LA Times:
“Urban mobility solutions are a vital building block of the future success of GM,” Girsky said. “Peer to peer concepts such as RelayRides in combination with OnStar’s technology delivers against this target. We could stand on the sidelines and watch or we could choose to participate and try to make it into a favorable business model, which in this particular case, we have.”
All of this is unproven, of course, and it bumps up the very American idea of owning your own wheels. Then again, we’re in a sluggish economy–which makes sharing attractive–and the environmental benefits of car sharing are obvious.
Car sharing is one of many businesses made possible by the overlap of social media and sustainability, which will be one of the topics next month at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference, which I co-chair. I’m pleased that Jeff Miller of Wheelz has agreed to speak. On our agenda, too: Ford CEO Alan Mulally and and Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar. It should make for some interesting car talk.
