Does Zipcar Leaving UK Have Any Relevance To Robotaxi Dreams?

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There’s news this week that Zipcar is leaving the UK is interesting in multiple ways. I was an early Zipcar user back in 2004–2007. I loved it, and it helped me not own a car. Over the years, I was thus a big proponent of carsharing programs and even tried to launch one myself. My colleagues and I never got the funding we needed to launch a carsharing company in Poland, but other companies did launch. These cars were then all over the city where I lived, and I used the popular program a little again myself. However, the program didn’t last, because it never made more money than it spent apparently.

This has happened in many markets by now. I remember being in Paris and seeing tons of totally beat up carsharing cars. (The carsharing cars in Wroclaw often had 10+ points of damage on them.) That Paris carsharing program, Autolib’, shut down 7 years ago due to massive financial losses.

While carsharing is very useful to many people, the finances of these programs typically just aren’t sustainable. Is carsharing the same as robotaxis? No, but there are some similarities. In both cases, you’re expecting a high volume of customers to use the cars — the cost has to be low enough to attract them, but high enough to make a profit on the use. In both cases, you need to manage maintenance, repair, and cleaning of these high-use vehicles.

There are also some differences. With carsharing, the car is not doing extra, useless driving. A user takes the car from where they are to where they want to go and leaves it there. A robotaxi drives to you from somewhere, and then after dropping you off, may stay in the same area or may go back to its home base or some popular area. Extra driving means more charging cost, more maintenance, more depreciation. On the other hand, the person using the car doesn’t have to focus on driving while using the car, so that provides more value (meaning the company can, in theory, charge more). Also, the car comes to you, so you don’t even have to walk down the street to get the car. That said, you also have to wait for a car, and that wait could be extended by traffic or confused navigation or something. As a CleanTechnica reader pointed out yesterday, “What are the chances that Waymo or Tesla will send someone to clean off all the cameras on their self driving cars? Its not like if it gets covered they can drive to a depot blinded…. Also who is liable the crashes/injuries that will enviability happen?” Yup, there are some more costs that have to be considered.

The core thing here is that many of the same costs that have plagued carsharing programs are going to be applicable to robotaxis. Will the costs be higher or lower? That’s an actual question. Will the value be much higher than with carsharing?

Both carsharing and robotaxis can find passionate, loyal users. “News that Zipcar is poised to shut its doors on its only remaining UK operation (in London) has prompted an outpouring of frustration from loyal users,” Autocar writes. “The restaurant critic Jay Rayner posted on Bluesky that he was ‘dismayed’ by the decision. ‘The car club availability was at the heart of our decision to abandon car ownership around five years ago,’ he added.” But having passionate, loyal users isn’t enough to make a company profitable.