London Looks into Electric Car Hire Scheme

Both visiting and living in London can be a highly enjoyable experience, with a wide variety of cultural activities and culinary delights on your doorstep. However, for the most populous city in Europe with a density of over 13,000 people per square mile, getting around can sometimes be a bit of a chore.

London is interested in a Electric Car Hire Scheme

Despite being well-served by an expansive underground and bus network, the crowds and traffic sometimes put people off, leading to Transport for London (TfL) to conjure up alternatives, such as the public bicycle hire scheme known as the ‘Boris Bikes’ (despite being the brainchild of Johnson’s predecessor, Ken Livingstone).

Whatever your perception of the success of the ‘Boris Bikes’ is, it is hard to deny the logic behind attempting to improve the green credentials of the city, while simultaneously trying to decongest the ever-crowded roads.
This concept is now being taken one step further by a Paris billionaire businessman who has just won a TfL contract to develop his point-to-point electric car hire scheme in London. Vincent Bolloré had previously introduced his ‘Bluecars’ in his home city as part of a project known as Autolib’ back in 2011, and the success of this is partly behind the decision to allow the Bolloré group to develop a similar scheme in the UK capital.

The concept is straightforward enough: similar to the bike hire options, users would be able to use prepaid cards or their smartphones to book an electric car and drive it for short periods between two of the many charging points located around the city. There are currently 100 Bluecars forecast for availability at the planned start date of March 2015, with that number quickly rising to an estimated 3,000, providing the borough councils can agree to sufficient parking space.

There are currently 1,400 charging points already in existence in London, but their underuse is largely down to the preconception that electric cars are the playthings of the rich; an image that Bolloré hopes to reverse. In just 3 years following the launch, he hopes to have increased the number of charging points to 6,000 based on the proposed success of his Autolib’-type scheme.

Owning and running a car in the capital, once road tax, congestion charges and increased fuel consumption due to heavy traffic are taken into account, can be a costly and frustrating reality, and Bolloré’s scheme could provide some relief from this.
The electric cars offer more than just the possibility of affordable transport, however. As things stand, London is currently in danger of falling foul of a hefty fine from the EU in regards to its poor air quality, and the Bluecar system could well be the best way of avoiding this.

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