Building a Meaningful Car Sharing Service of the Future: Four Principles for Radical Human-Centric Design

Established car sharing services such as Car2Go and DriveNow (both under the ShareNow brand), SIXT Share, Miles, and WeShare are nothing more than minimum viable products. Heralded as the harbingers of a new age of smart individual mobility at first, none of the free-floating, short-term car rental services have managed to progress significantly over the course of the industry’s more than a decade-long existence. Their services barely differentiate themselves, and further development of the industry remains stagnant. Car sharing, as it exists today, is marked by more or less the same basic business model that relies exclusively on point A-to-B commuter mobility, while struggling financially with increasing competition on a multi-modal mobility platform front, as we have shown in an earlier article. 

At the Human Futures Studio, we believe it is time to take the next step and move beyond the status quo. In order to become a growing and sustainable business, we argue that a car sharing provider needs to embrace an entirely different perspective in the service development process. This perspective we call radical human-centricity. Beyond just advocating empathy, radical human-centricity acknowledges customers as multifaceted human beings who are part of complex cultural systems with their own social logics. These must not only be decoded, but new products and services are best designed within and in relation to these logics, not against them. 

Applying a radical human-centric perspective to car sharing, this article outlines four design principles that enable a provider to improve their service design process in the shared automobility space. These principles build upon a range of social logics we have synthesized at the Human Futures Studio: First of all, a provider should craft a genuine community. Second, it should foster good practices of sharing among its members. Third, it should cultivate a shareholder mentality among the membership. And fourth, it is important to develop a culturally appropriate business strategy to bring it all together. A car sharing provider that manages to embrace these logics and takes the risk of deviating from the established service development norm, has the opportunity to create a unique and meaningful car sharing offer unheard of in this industry. 

The following four sections shed light on a range of unresolved problems the car sharing experience is currently suffering from. Consequently, we propose corresponding design principles as well as detailed action points to fix them. Serving as guidelines in the design process, they are intended to help car sharing providers craft a better, more meaningful car sharing experience of the future. Last but not least, we will conclude with an outlook on the industry and discuss how car manufacturers could prepare for transforming into mobility providers.

Principle 1: Craft a genuine community

For car sharing to work in the long run, a provider first and foremost needs to make the service part of a functioning community and provide value to the users, and the larger community, by being embedded within this community’s desires, needs, and expectations. As we have argued in a previous article, current car sharing services are designed in such an anonymous way that undermines social accountability and encourages egotistical behavior, thus contradicting the principles of the sharing economy and ruining the experience for everyone. 

To fix the problem, we pointed out that a collective identity among members – a shared conceptualization of ‘We’ as a community of drivership – would ensure that people handled the shared vehicles and the service in an collectively respectful, sustainable manner. They would be accountable to, and empathetic with, one another, rather than (mis)treating common vehicles as their own property, or worse yet, as someone else’s problem. This means that membership has to come with mutual responsibilities and accountability to the collective.

Harness mechanisms of ”communitification”

Now, the big question emerges how one could possibly create a community that was “genuine.” One option would be to use existing communities that already have a positive impression of mobility in cities where a car sharing service does not exist yet. By recruiting community advocates and leaders, they could introduce the new mobility service to their base – as done, for instance, in the case of the Kootenay Carshare Cooperative in Canada (ND, 2019, November 29). The local community would adopt the new mobility option, but the provider would have to bend its rules according to how the local community operates. Admittedly, this is a rather difficult approach that does not scale easily from a business perspective.

The second – and in our opinion, more viable – option would be to create a completely new community with a separate code of conduct. But to craft this community, we must take the sociologists’ Hartmut Rosa et al. (2010) concept of so-called “mechanisms of communitification” (p. 66 ff.) into consideration. In the words of Rosa et al., “we should not talk about community [as a static concept] but communitification [...] through which the coming into being of communities and its mechanisms of communitification become visible.” (p.66). Focusing on the social processes at work, we will briefly recap a range of mechanisms that these sociologists identified to contribute to the creation and reaffirmation of a community. 

Create exhilarating experiences

According to Rosa et al. (2010), it is important to create a solid bond between members in the process of communitification. This is commonly achieved through “collective experiences and rituals” that are marked by moments of “exhilaration” (p. 68). The encounter of feelings such as joy, surprise, and ecstasy elevates the experience into a special sphere that sits outside the mundane everyday. Decisive moments are created, the collective memory of which forges people together. In simpler terms, people are more likely to perceive themselves as members of a collective when they share extraordinary, partially ecstatic experiences with each other. 

This implies that it makes most sense to activate meanings of drivership where the main purpose is not to be found in mundane A-to-B urban mobility but in the more visceral experiences automobility has to offer, such as racing, off-roading, or vintage car rallying events. We already outlined in a previous article what an experienced-based car sharing community could look like. In short, such a service would go beyond point-A-to-B commuter mobility and offer easy access to a wide gamut of automotive experiences found in different modes of drivership like road-tripping, racing, off-roading, etc.

Employ symbols of shared meanings

The second aspect of the process of communitification is for its members to create symbols that become elevated and shared in their meaning for the group. For instance, a national flag – technically just a piece of patterned cloth – is seen to represent the collective beyond the individual. It stands for the entity of a country and manifests the proclaimed values of the collective beyond the individual, such as democracy, individual freedom, and capitalism. It becomes fetishized to the extent that mistreating or burning the object is considered a serious offense in some countries. In mobility terms, such a unique symbol could be individual halo vehicles of a specific manufacturer that are special or desirable – similar to what used to be the sporty, premium-priced MINI One for DriveNow or what is currently the orange-colored, retro-styled electric motorcycle Govecs Schwalbe L3e for the scooter sharing provider Emmy. 

Re-affirm community through collective performances

The third aspect of the process involves the constant re-affirmation of community through collective performances. Communities that are not natural (e.g. like a family or tribe) can be largely “imagined,” as the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson (2006) called them in his book Imagined Communities. They are imagined to the point that is impossible for each member to know each other face-to-face; yet these people feel a bond where they all share the sense of togetherness without physical bonds, as is the case in geographically distributed or large countries. These communities require constant reaffirmation of supposedly shared meanings – i.e. what they all supposedly believe in or adhere to. Members need to perform their existence as a collective through special acts that conjure up the community. For a national state, this would include formalized, collective performances such as democratic elections. But it also entails more informal events such as watching world cup soccer games where the citizens of a country identify as one through “their” team. In car sharing of the future, collective performances could include car enthusiast meetings where the common interest is the binding factor that is performed through the exchange of anecdotes, demonstrating skills, trading expertise, and “talking shop.” The vast outreach of digital technology, especially via social online networks, makes constant reaffirmation easier across a wide range of members and physical distance.

Demarcate against competition

And the fourth aspect of communitification is that members demarcate their inside group against the external “Other” (Hall, 1996, p.4) – i.e. what lies outside the community or what is considered as competition. These self-orienting representations determine internal commonalities and establish demarcations against the external sphere through which a community with boundaries is imagined. Sticking to the national state example, citizens of a country identify as a particular nationality because they consider themselves different from their neighbors on the other side of the border, which is done through the concept of citizenship, cultural identification, but also territorial markers. 

In car sharing, boundaries between who is part of the collective and who is not are generally determined through organizational membership. The important relationship exists between the service provider and individuated customers, which precludes any other form of togetherness. As a result, there is no possibility of fostering a community beyond the very thin connections provided by what brand identity exists. In this case, demarcations towards non-members of the car sharing community, competitor services and their car brands are important, because the construction and maintenance of meanings that denote what a community stands for is only possible “through, not outside difference” (Hall, 1996, p. 4). 

In that respect, the consolidation of the two former competitors DriveNow and Car2Go into ShareNow was a counter move. Brand differences as a key distinction – BMW and Mini cars vs. Mercedes-Benz and Smart cars – suddenly dissolved and let the overt display of brand rivalry between Daimler AG and BMW Group in other domains appear highly artificial. On the other hand, the service is still too close to a narrowly defined set of products to become brand-agnostic and seek alternative meaning in, e.g., a shared set of distinct values that would set it apart from the likes of SIXT Share or WeShare.

Allow for direct contact between members

A commercially set up user community is very different from other types of communities, of course. All of this requires the softening of anonymity to a large extent, the dialing back of individualism, the mitigation of a egotistic pay-to-play mentality, and the creation of opportunities that allow members to stand in direct contact with each other. People must realize that they are not the only users of the car sharing service – that their interactions with the shared vehicles have negative as well as positive consequences, regardless of how much they pay. If they “felt” the presence of the other members, behaviour would change drastically. They must realize that they are accountable and that they also have responsibilities towards the community at large. It entails that members’ car sharing-related behaviors are made visible to a certain degree and that they learn what collectively appropriate drivership looks like. 

So what

Humans are social beings who seek a sense of belonging. This is an undeniable social truth. By crafting a genuine community among the users of a car sharing service, a provider would lay the social groundwork required for a true sharing economy to work. As we have shown, this could be achieved by harnessing specific mechanisms of communitification, including the creation of exhilarating experiences, employment of symbols of shared meanings, re-affirmation of community through collective performances, demarcation against competition, and direct contact between members. Through these mechanisms, the users of a car sharing service would assume a collective identity, relate to each other, and gain a collective interest in protecting a good experience for everyone.  

However, the sole crafting of community is not sufficient; it is the bare minimum to set up a sharing economy. Any community has to live by a set of binding rules and practices that provide stability and the protection of the greater collective’s interests, which brings us to the next human-centric design principle.

Principle 2: Foster good practices of sharing

The second principle to which a car sharing provider should adhere is the fostering of good sharing practices among its members. The goal is to encourage responsible and accountable sharing behavior to keep the common goods – the fleet of shared vehicles – in the best condition possible that would ensure long-term use. This way, all members get to enjoy the same, high quality experience, while minimizing the need for the service provider to conduct frequent maintenance and repairs themselves. For that to happen, a few things would need to change how people share vehicles today. 

Overcome unwanted social residue

At the moment, customers are only getting the negative aspects of sharing vehicles with others, apart from the fact that a free-floating fleet is moved around the operational area. People see what we call “unwanted social residue” at best. This idea comprises unfavorable markers of previous renters’ activities, such as their discarded trash, horrid smells, scratches on the vehicles, or terrible parking jobs on private, inaccessible lots. Unwanted social residue ultimately takes away from the car sharing experience, as the consequences of the previous renter’s irresponsible actions compromise the quality of the experience for the next renter. 

Positive behavior, in contrast, does not add anything at the moment. As an incentive, people receive credits when they fill up the gas tank, connect an EV to the charger, or report previous renters’ misdemeanors. But these acts beneficial to the service provider remain invisible to the community. Instead, the individual reporting the misdeeds becomes an arm of the authority flowing only from the provider – a less than ideal situation. Right now, positive behavior only maintains the status quo but does not improve the collective experience. Moreover, there is no social aspect to this incentive, which means that it does not contribute to the creation and re-affirmation of community.

Institute do’s and don’ts of sharing

This is why it is of utmost importance to win people to adhere to certain Do’s and Don'ts of sharing not just the vehicles but, in fact, the whole service, including its ecosystem and membership. It presupposes the definition and institution of social user conventions, such as collective property rules, which protect everyone’s experience while using shared cars. In contrast to the legal terms and conditions to which most users are only exposed during the signup process, social user conventions have to be phrased as human-centric guidelines and best practices. They are the guardrails that keep the community alive and the experience equally pleasurable for everyone. That is why they need to be visible throughout the entire lifecycle of the service.

A valid concern is the question how many different sets of rules one can obey at a time and what makes a person slip from certain rules. Generally speaking, car sharers are more likely to obey the traffic code than collective property rules. First of all, traffic codes are more universal and easy to live by than good sharing practices that are more culture-specific, hard to register, and assimilate. Second, people usually learn the traffic code once they start their driver’s education. They have a significantly longer time to internalize it and it is inextricably intertwined with the practice of driving on public roads. And third, a breach of traffic code could have wide-reaching financial and participatory consequences beyond the sharing service, such as risking a traffic ticket or losing one’s driver’s license. 

Incentivize positive behaviors

At the same time, “good drivers” – purely judging upon their adherence to the traffic code – might still abuse the collective property rules. While the enforcement of traffic codes all over the world exclusively depends on a system of penalization upon breach, trying to encourage good sharing practices entirely through penalties would send the wrong message. From the perspective of users, the new car sharing service should not feel like it was governed by an overly observant, restrictive, and overprotective nanny system. That is why positive behavior towards the service itself needs to be incentivized by providing a reward that also contains a direct social benefit. But how do you obtain social benefits from a car sharing community beyond the vehicles getting moved around? 

Provide social benefits

Many digital communities already employ badges and ranks that let users denote a hierarchical difference in service-related spending behavior or activity levels. Different from these purely symbolic markers, social benefits must enable people to do something new within the community – e.g. gain a new, pleasurable automotive experience with like-minded members at an exclusive community-organized driving event. In consequence, the service provider actively has to assume the role as a facilitator of community and an enabler of communal experiences. 

The indirect social benefit of being a member of a car sharing community would be that people build friendships and gain a sense of belonging under the umbrella of automobility. By making the car sharing community relevant beyond the mere aspect of mobility, people become invested on a personal level. Ideally, they would gain an intrinsic interest in not hurting or agitating other community members as they care about them.

So what

Human life takes place in a myriad of different contexts, the specific rules of which might vary tremendously. At the moment, the car sharing context is overshadowed by what we identified as “unwanted social residue.” In order to know what is socially acceptable and what is not in a sharing economy, people require guiding pointers that provide binding orientation. By having a provider foster good practices of sharing that apply to automobility, the adherence to collective property rules becomes a moral objective among members, rather than just a legal obligation. This can be achieved by instituting do’s and don’ts of sharing, incentivizing positive behaviors, and providing social benefits. Hence, it is no longer exclusively about the maintenance of motor vehicles and the avoidance of financial penalties but also about the fostering of human relationships – essentially what keeps a car sharing community together. 

From a business perspective, however, it is not sufficient to protect the common goods and turn individual users into a community of members who stick to the social rules. For a business to become sustainable in the long run, it must also win advocates among its user base and become equipped to progress and transform itself according to the desires and changing needs of the people it caters to. This means the provider must proceed with egoless intent and shift some of the responsibility away from itself. This is a brave move, but essential to win in the business of providing a sharing service that also fosters positive experiences. The following principle will further clarify this in detail.

Principle 3: Cultivate a shareholder mentality among the membership

The third principle a car sharing provider should follow is to cultivate a shareholder mentality among its members. More simply put, to put “sharing” back into the community with all of the social norms that this brings. This would allow many responsibilities of maintaining, improving, and progressing the car sharing service to be carried by the people who use it, rather than just the service provider company behind it. For this to succeed, new forms of customer engagement must be embraced that give customers a greater degree of agency. Customers do not passively receive a given service dictated by a company anymore. Instead, they become active shareholders who shape what they are using according to their emerging needs and contextual shifts in society and the market. By facilitating active participation among members and increasing their personal investment in the car sharing community, the business becomes more sustainable in the long run. After all, people usually have a heightened interest in the continuation of things in which they are heavily invested. 

Employ co-creative design methods

One way to cultivate a shareholder mentality is by harnessing co-creative design methods. The service provider and its customers engage in a dialogic relationship. Such co-creation, however, should not only occur in the initial service design phase, but become an ongoing activity throughout the service’s lifecycle. Reoccurring in-person co-creation labs, standing online panels, sprint-like hackathons, open surveys, or the traditional suggestion box are just some of the myriad of continuous improvement measures that allow people to address their problems and contribute to the collective crafting of solutions. 

By actively involving the user base in the design process at the outset, a car sharing provider not only expands their capabilities beyond the confinements of their own creativity. It is also a symbolic act that demonstrates appreciation for the ideas of regular people who are experts on their own lives and how they use car sharing in their day-to-day life. And with appreciation comes ownership. While such an approach certainly bears some risks and may lead to volatility if left unguided, a rapid feedback loop between provider company and car sharing members could be established that deserves to be called “agile.”

Recruit members who want to invest in the organization

Naturally, not everybody who joins a car sharing club is necessarily interested in dedicating their spare time to improving its service or connecting deeply with other members. Not all people seek an automotive community but simply want to remain casual users on the fringes of the mobility service. Such lack of interest in a heightened level of member engagement is absolutely legitimate if these users are paying customers that contribute to the financial survival of the business. 

In stark contrast to naturally occurring communities such as families and tribes, it lies in the character of modern organizations that membership can be partial. According to organization theorist Walter Müller-Jentsch (2003), members are generally “involved in a [modern] organization’s activities with only one part of their personality” (p. 14). They are “partially included,” which “demands [...] purpose-rational conduct within a confined area of activity” (p. 14). It follows that a company cannot claim possession of every part of their members’ lives and personalities. The question therefore emerges how one could facilitate a shareholder mentality and recruit members who become interested in the core of things – who voluntarily drive the car sharing community and its underlying organization forward. 

Hierarchize and reward according to communal participation levels

You want the vast majority of people to get meaning from the service beyond individual mobility and who become attached to it. Incentives such as engagement-level-dependent rates and additional perks that can be gradually obtained through communal participation would pave the way. A hierarchy of people using the service could be established depending on how interested and engaged they are in their role as active shareholders. The higher the rank, the more access to attractive vehicles, events, special offers, etc. are available, deepening the car sharing club experience with growing participation. The overall idea is to design a car sharing community whose sociocultural aspect – not just the vehicles – is a major attractor.

So what

Humans tend to care about the continuing existence of things they have created themselves, contributed to, or invested significant time in. Current car sharing services, however, are merely made for passive consumption and do not allow for personal investment beyond spending money for service use. Apart from losing options and convenience, users thus care little if these car sharing services eventually ceased to exist. To ensure that not just the company behind the service but also its customers will work continuously on the progress of car sharing, it is of utmost importance to cultivate a shareholder mentality among the members of said community. As we have demonstrated, this can be achieved by employing co-creative design methods, recruiting members who want to invest in the organization, as well as hierarchizing and rewarding members according to communal participation levels.

How a company manages to win engaged shareholders highly depends on their knowledge of the specific markets they are trying to conquer. As our comparative analysis of the BMW DriveNow case in Germany and Finland has demonstrated in our previous articles, customer engagement and how people actually use a car sharing service in day-to-day practice may differ substantially from market to market. The local cultural context is not just a factor but the key determinant. This is why it is imperative for a car sharing provider to tailor its business strategy according to the culture in which the service shall operate, which the last principle outlines in more detail.

Principle 4: Develop a culturally appropriate business strategy

For a car sharing business to work in multiple markets, providers must understand and design against the different cultural contexts in which they are installing their mobility service. The days of one-size-fits-all tech solutions are thankfully behind us. However, setting up a business that integrates deeply with the complex and systemic ways of how cities operate, is not merely a tailor-made effort, but a continuously dynamic process of merging two evolving organisms to mutually beneficial existence. While new mobility services work to understand the local city-based ecosystem to reach market fit for their offering, the question is – have they taken into account what happens when the past logic is used to solve a mobility challenge in a different place and time – in a totally different ecosystem?

Challenge the default expansion logic

This would, of course, not be a challenge if mobility services would not have a built-in expansion logic inside their strategic core, but most of them have. After all, business partners and investors want to see services that scale. The sad news is that their expansion logic often resembles a default operating manual of how the market fit was reached in the original pilot city. This is an analytical approach based on historical data that does a bad job of making future-proof decisions. In short, the static model will not scale.

Why is this so hard? The hesitance in building a strategic business model that emphasizes both a sustainable revenue logic and cultural compatibility on a city-level is a challenge for most of the mobility operators since they come from a product-first world. The product and its positioning are considered as universal. When entering into the mobility world, the positioning changes from owning something to using a communal good. For car manufacturers, this change is difficult.

Use design and discovery-driven business case prototyping

How should one create a mobility strategy that can deep-integrate itself in different city ecosystems? Firstly, the size of the investment opportunity in expanding to new cities should be carefully explored against the city dynamics on a systemic level. This is where traditional business development analysis tools fall short. The truth is, some cities are mobility goldmines while others are dead ends. While complexity and uncertainty at this scale might raise concerns about what can be estimated, the tools and methods that work better in this environment are already there. A combination of design and discovery-driven business case prototyping works well because of its iterative nature. Paired up with dynamic systems modeling to understand the impact of your decisions across the whole, and you will have a very powerful business case projection toolset in your hands. 

Pursue an inside-out approach

Secondly, a deeply integrated mobility service at a city-level should be based on an inside-out approach instead of an outside-in expansion approach. This would mean that the business model would have an element of shared ownership and an active affiliate partnership principle in its core. The reason for this is rather simple – by partnering up with local entities, one is capable of tapping into local tacit knowledge. Cultural awareness is key, actively standing in dialogue with the regulatory framework and communities. The list of sources of multidimensional and culturally habitual tacit data is long and wide. 

Make the mobility core dynamic

Thirdly, following a detailed map as a guideline on how to expand mobility services from a city to another, ticks the management box but will do more harm than good for the business in the long run. The conventional solution here would be to engage in a pre-launch market research project for the calibration of some efforts, while the strategic core would often remain untouched. The rigidness of the core is a problem that is easy to fix. Make it dynamic. A dynamic mobility core is set out to do what is needed, not what is wanted. And that is why it is so unpleasant and hard to do. If anything is to be gained from the pillars we have already discussed, it is the fact that to build within a community, the company itself has to be willing to change in response. Rigidity kills deployment at the best of times. When trying to enter several dynamic markets it guarantees failure. 

The third point above offers a universal guideline on how to calibrate one’s mindset when developing mobility-based business strategies in a real-world situation. We should leave a lot of space for organic and iterative mobility model growth on a city-level. This would mean that we would have to sacrifice a lot of the control to which we have become accustomed in business development. But what if we could retain control by making better, dynamic, and more deeply integrated models that are based on relationships and cultural awareness? Would our business partners be ready to give a green light to a better plan?

So what

Humans are different from market to market, which does not necessarily reflect in their income, attitudes towards car ownership, or spending potential on mobility options. A market is also a culture, or a subculture. Failing to understand this creates immediate, irrevocable problems. An aspect of a service that works in one market, may cause unforeseen challenges due to the cultural ramifications in another market. Most car sharing providers, however, still pursue a one-fits-all approach that rarely takes into account the subtle differences beyond the regulatory and economic. This is why it is pertinent for the creation of a radically human-centric car sharing service of the future to develop a culturally appropriate business strategy. As we have discussed in this section, this can be achieved by challenging the default expansion logic, using design and discovery-driven business case prototyping, pursuing an inside-out approach, and making the mobility core dynamic.

The shift from products to people is challenging 

The genuine pursuit of these radically human-centric principles ultimately requires a paradigm shift from products to people. This will be a challenge for some established car sharing providers. More than a decade ago, the automotive industry entered the car sharing business as an experiment, hoping to prepare for post-car mobility as a result of the ongoing decline of car sales in Western core markets (see e.g. Autoblog, 2011, March 24; Motorauthority, 2011, March 24). Wishing to eventually transform from carmakers into mobility providers while still being able to disseminate their vehicles on the road, the vast majority of car sharing services were designed within the business logics of product-centric automobile manufacturers. This inevitably created a domain that now suffers from narrow definitions and a specific positioning of car sharing that is limiting.

The sharing economy, in stark contrast, does not know these limitations. It comes with their own ideology and a set of social logics that primarily focus around people, not products. This ideology elevates mutual responsibility among members, accountability towards other people (not just a corporation), and respect towards what is considered common property. It would be fatal to continue treating car sharing as a commercial mobility offering that ignored these social logics – whose only concern was product-centric vehicle utilization maximization, fleet density, size of operational area, fleet maintenance, and repair costs. To a car sharing business, the social fabric of people using and sharing the service is not just a soft factor that sits somewhere on the sidelines – it is what makes or breaks the sharing business in the long run.

The transition from product-driven to human-centric thinking is impossible with a product-driven brand, however. For instance, ShareNow is too close to the product and the two German premium automobile manufacturers Daimler AG and BMW Group behind it. By default (and out of habit), car manufacturers give customers a branded product lens through which they are supposed to look at their offerings. These product-driven values are essentially egotistical and speak to the highly artificial values of ideal target customer groups at best. They do not provide enough room for the emergence of new meanings and the integration of real people’s own relevance systems, based on which a community could manifest itself.

Admittedly, from a business development point of view, it would make sense not to gravitate too far off from a safe and comfortable mother brand when looking at car-sharing as a new offering. But the expenses are astronomical when trying to introduce a completely new belief system or a new set of social logics to the people through an existing brand lens. One might get it done if we were just talking about providing a little nudge towards an existing offer. But when we are talking about a revolutionary new offering, old beliefs would have to be swiped away and replaced by a set of new ones. This does not only require a good deal of risk-taking propensity but also a thorough vision.

Conclusion

Car sharing, as we know it, is ready to be overhauled and transcend its status as a minimum viable product. For that to happen, old logics have to be discarded and new ones embraced. Eventually, future car-sharing should be what Airbnb has become for traveling – while giving a mundane and loose definition of the process of travel itself, it yet remains rich in meaning and relevance when it comes to the myriad of ways of how travel is experienced and how the values of experience-driven traveling are shared as a communal code. Instead of traveling, the overarching idea for car sharing could be found in the enthusiastic embrace of drivership and the enablement of a wide variety of automotive experiences the world of mobility has to offer. Private, decentralized car sharing communities such as Turo and Getaround (formerly Drivy), but also recreational vehicle rental platforms such as Campanda or Shareacamper, are already leading the way in their respective automotive experience areas. However, the so-called experiential turn is still largely unharnessed in car sharing when it comes to activating the full gamut of what automobility has to offer via a single, easy-to-use platform. 

The future lies in a new car sharing brand that dares to do things radically different from current offerings. It needs to learn from other players’ mistakes, abandon outdated car manufacturing logics, incorporate the social logics of the sharing economy, and pursue a radical human-centric design approach. To achieve this in applied terms, we argued that a car sharing provider must embrace a range of design principles that help focus on people, rather than just products: it should craft a genuine community, it should foster good practices of sharing among its members, it should cultivate a shareholder mentality among the membership, and it is indispensable for a provider to develop a culturally appropriate business strategy. Such genuine people’s first approach would be unheard of in an otherwise technocentric automotive industry. 

At the end, the key to a sustainable car sharing business lies in connecting people and building communities of like-minded enthusiasts who enjoy experiencing a new realm of automobility. This would not only improve the current sharing experience for everyone, but it would also constitute a new automotive offering that was truly progressive and fit for the 21st century. In a recent newspaper interview, the sociologists Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett called the automobile an outdated “representation of a destructive economic order and a ridiculous lifestyle that humans started approximately 50 years ago” (Zeit, 2020, May 28, p. 21). A community-building car sharing service, in contrast, would manage to enrich people’s lives in meaningful ways while turning the automobile from an archaic, individualistic dinosaur of the 20th century into a positively-connoted enabler of social connection. 

by Dr. Daniel Mai & Antti Mäkelä

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