Who invented zipcar

Today Zipcar offers car sharing in more neighborhoods, towns, cities, airports and campuses than any other provider. Over the next 15 years Zipcar will bring more car sharing to more people in more places around the world. The company is continuing its aggressive international expansion plans in Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions, as well as expanding its domestic footprint.

In doing so, Zipcar has had a profound impact not just on its members; but also on cities:. Throughout , Zipcar will be celebrating 15 years of making city living better by hosting a series of events and promotions which will begin with a birthday celebration on Thursday, January 15, More information on local happenings is available at www. Zipcar, the world's leading car sharing network, has operations in urban areas and college campuses throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Austria and France.

Zipcar offers more than 30 makes and models of self-service vehicles by the hour or day to residents and businesses looking for smart, simple and convenient solutions to their urban and campus transportation needs.

Zipcar is a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group, Inc. Maybe, or maybe not. The deal price is still less than half that value. Robert Frank robtfrank. Getty Images. Zipcar might seem like a fairy tale entrepreneur story.

Related Securities Symbol. As a founder of car-sharing companies Zipcar and Buzzcar, Chase is jumping into a mobility startup focused on the bigger picture for diverse transportation networks emerging in urban centers. For businesses and consumers, the equipment provides cell service and Internet hotspots. The bigger underlying goal, however, is leveraging that connectivity to pick up data being generated by sensors increasingly installed throughout "smart cities.

The possibilities — from more efficient deployment of city services to pursuing data-based sustainabile transportation policies such as dynamic pricing during peak driving hours — are vast. Chase told GreenBiz how she went from car-sharing to connected cities, how she hopes to bridge Big Data and sustainable urban mobility , and why she doesn't buy into the current hype about connected cars.

Lauren Hepler: What attracted you to Veniam after all your work in different niches of the mobility world? It was the beginning of smart cities and smart towns around I've always thought about all these sensors that are supposed to be around a city — how does that data get collected and actually into the Internet and worked on?

Being an entrepreneur, I was realizing that a whole bunch of stuff was not invented because the cost of sending the wireless signal itself was prohibitive. Hepler: How do the sustainability implications of urban transportation — things like carbon emissions increased due to traffic gridlock — come into play?

Chase: The second piece going toward sustainability very explicitly is that, given this issue around [the difficulty and expense of] sending and receiving data, think about dynamically priced electricity — the whole smart grid piece — where ideally we want to charge people more for electricity at peak times. We want that information obvious to people. Now think about the gas tax on cars, which we know has not been raised effectively for 20 years. One of the solutions is for people to pay a tax for distance using roads — road pricing.

We also think about congestion pricing, which is the same thing for roads as peak pricing is for electricity. Hepler: So data transmission tools like Veniam's could help provide the underlying data to help set accurate prices? Chase: All of these concepts require very, very low cost and ubiquitous wireless data transmission. That sounds very putative, but I mean it in a kind of informational way.

Some people need to be on the road at 6 p. Hepler: Interesting. How do you see this idea dovetailing with increasingly diverse modes of transportation in cities, like car-sharing and ride-sharing that you've obviously worked on a lot? I see this as part of a ubiquitous and local wireless network. To come in through another door, if I think about ZipCar and what I learned there about sharing — that you get a much better return on investment when an item is shared — I have been pushing for not only shared cars, but all shared assets : shared devices and shared spectrum and shared data.

The open data movement is sharing data so you get more value out of it. Hepler: So you s ee Veniam as part of an urban ecosystem of shared assets? Chase: I see Veniam in that suite of things. Just like we put apps on our smartphone, you can imagine apps on a device in your car. I look at vehicles with devices in them as collaboratively built, collaboratively financed and collaboratively installed wireless infrastructure.