The writer is the founder of Carsharing Portland so he’s very well versed in the economics of carsharing. According to the post, “Zipcar made the decision that Flexcar had been unable or unwilling to make for several years… Mostly I think it’s a textbook example of how not to do things - in contrast to Zipcar’s “eyes on the prize” style of doing business - concentrating on fewer cities and greater emphasis on direct contact with prospective customers.”

Let’s analyze that — people in the industry have known for years that Flexcar’s opreations in SoCal were in trouble. ZipCar had the guts to take a black and and tell it like it is. Don’t shoot the messenger.

Sometimes, you’ve got to increasing rates and cutting services to the point where you’re no longer losing money. I’m sorry you lost most of your Flexcars when Zipcar came in. But I don’t see the difference between that, and Flexcar going bankrupt by staying independent and offering service in areas where it is losing money.

I’ve always thought that a good dose of Economics 101 would do wonders for this country. Should be taught in high school, so everyone gets it. How many people know that subways are 60-80% subsidized, when complaining about fare increases?

The zipcar/flexcar merger was a huge mistake for this area. Since it was hard enough finding a car with reasonable public transportation to and from the car, I don’t think many people seemed to be thrilled with the idea of Flexcar, and to me the idea of a small customer base would be entirely plausible from that standpoint. After all, that was the biggest reason why I (and, well, pretty much most of the people I know who were interested) didn’t sign up even though I loved flexcar up in san francisco - every time I looked at cars on their website it usually required something like a 5 mile trek to the car. And well, this is Los Angeles. Home to really awful public transit.

So their idea of servicing southern california is removing something like half the already tiny fleet of available cars and then only making their services available from campuses where there’s usually halfway decent public transit available. Wonder why campus cars stay, are they that profitable? Maybe because of the convenience of the location to students and faculty..that isn’t present anywhere else…hence nobody else really using it..

Complete genius.