Comparing Elecytric Vehicles and Fossil Driven Vehicles in Free-floating Car Sharing Services

Paper in proceeding, 2017

In recent years, free-floating car sharing (FFCS) services have been offered as a more flexible option compared to traditional car sharing. FFCS allows users to pick up and return cars anywhere within a specified area of a city. These can be either electric or fossil driven vehicles. We analyze the difference in usage of these two types of vehicles. The analysis is based on a dataset consisting of vehicle availability data sampled between 2014 and 2016 for 9 cities with EVs in the FFCS fleet. We find that there is no statistical difference in how EVs and fossil driven FFCS vehicles are used. When it comes to charging of EVs two main strategies are identified: widespread “slow charging” versus tailored fast-charging.