How Mevo is ramping up carsharing in New Zealand

Find out how Mevo has successfully launched in the a market where electric carsharing is not the norm.

COMPANY

Mevo

LOCATION

Wellington, New Zealand

INDUSTRY

Carsharing

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Starting with more than 50 vehicles in Wellington, Mevo’s mission is to deliver mobility on demand by curating a network of hybrid Audi e-trons that members can pick up and drive as they need.

WELLINGTON. June 21, 2017 We sat down with Erik Zydervelt, Founding Director and CEO of MEVO, to ask a few questions:

Can you give us an overview of the carsharing in New Zealand?

When it comes to vehicles, New Zealand’s mentality and our urban form closely resemble a traditional North American market (with the exception of Wellington, which is more European). Currently, carsharing is not common.

However, New Zealand moves very quickly once there is a superb technology that makes sense to the mass market, which is what Mevo is seeing now. NZ has seen this many times before with other offerings, such as streaming services Netflix and Spotify, or Uber’s success here, not to mention our uptake of Fibre Optic broadband, the fastest in the western world.

Alongside Mevo, there is currently a rapidly growing peer-to-peer provider along with one other non-EV traditional provider. As most readers would know, we see private vehicle ownership as our biggest competition to carsharing.

Overall, Kiwis are pragmatic, innovative, and really excited for carsharing to be a big part of their cities.

Why was the Audi e-tron the best car model for your operation?

We had strong goals for the vehicles that we selected to make up the Mevo network. They had to be safe, environmentally conscious, beautiful (both inside and out), and, above all else, they had to be effortless and fun to drive.

We toyed with some options across a few manufacturers who met some, but never all of those goals. Too often, we found the models which were environmentally conscious weren’t fun to drive or pleasant to sit in, and the ones that looked beautiful consumed so much fuel that they’d be crazy expensive to operate.

The Audi A3 e-tron struck a perfect balance between our goals. On cross-city trips, it’s more fuel-efficient than the most common conventional hybrids on New Zealand roads, while maintaining the subtle and timeless experience that is synonymous with the Audi brand. Most of all, driving a Mevo Audi A3 is a joyful and elegant experience for our members, rather than just a simple transactional activity.

What is your carsharing model (one-way, round-trip, free-floating) and why?

Right now, we operate Mevo as a round-trip service, where our clients pick up and drop off their Mevo at one of our home “Pods” (made up of three adjacent vehicles) dotted across the heart of Wellington City.

Next year, following a local government policy review, our goal is to expand out to a free-floating network encompassing much of the city, with several additional satellite Mevo Pods covering public transit hubs, points of interest, and central suburb areas where our members converge. We’re crowdsourcing suggestions for those areas directly from our members by taking their votes on our locations page.

What is the subscription model (free registration, pricing per minute/hour…)?

Something we found very early on with our customer testing is that our market demands choice, so we built that into our model. Our clients can select from either a pay-as-you-go rate or one of two weekly memberships. They can swap between the options as they wish to ensure they’re always getting the best value.

While they’re out on a trip with a Mevo vehicle, we bill one hour upfront, and then per minute until they reach a maximum of 6hrs. After 6hrs within a 24hr period, we “cap” the hourly rate, meaning that a Mevo member could pick up a vehicle and have it for a full 24hrs while only paying for 6hrs.

Our capped rates are very attractive to our customers, many of whom see the potential value of picking up a vehicle on a Friday evening and not returning it until the following Sunday afternoon. We, however, see our longer trips more often at 7–8 hours so the average discount is actually much lower than the perceived value (without limiting it)

How will your partners (the Wellington City Council, Vulog, energy partner Meridian, Trade Me Insurance, and vehicle partner Audi New Zealand) contribute to your project?

Each of our partners comes with years of experience in their sectors and together creates a structured network to help deliver the end Mevo experience for our customers. We work collaboratively with them on everything from the design and construction of our chargers to creating new protection products specifically designed for carshare services like us, to our marketing and the placement of our vehicles. There isn’t a Mevo without our partners; we couldn’t be happier to be working with them.

Where do you see Mevo in the next two years?

Simply put: Bigger and better. We see Mevo being ubiquitous with transport in Australasia, and with a connected and autonomous future on the horizon, we’re perfectly primed to make that goal a reality.

Vulog, the world’s leading tech mobility provider, is proud to power Mevo, New Zealand’s first free-floating carshare service in New Zealand. Erik is the co-founding Director and CEO of Mevo, where his desire to build better cities and harness business to regenerate the environment led to the founding of Mevo.

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