the green company goal: how to develop your transportation services with Mobilize

Every day, businesses must plan travel, from the commutes of their employees, customers and users to the shipping of their products. My job is to let them know that Mobilize’s new shared transportation solutions can revolutionize their relationship to transportation, facilitate their logistics, optimize their costs and allow them to gain “green company” status. This can involve making a fleet of car-sharing vehicles available to their customers. This is actually what we’ve done with Ikea. We provide them with a turnkey digital transportation solution, operated by our network of dealers, right in front of their stores to make it easier for customers to bring their purchases home.

We’ll also be helping businesses pool some of their vehicles to provide a transportation solution for all of their employees. A system like this is also an opportunity for them to optimize their overall transportation cost and reduce mileage-related expense claims and taxi use. Finally, we work with the operators of automotive fleets, offering them supervision tools to better manage costs related to fuel and damages or simply to help them “green” their fleet by replacing combustion systems with electric or electrified vehicles. Everything is designed with an eye to simplification, optimization and of course environmental protection, a concern that’s becoming more and more important to citizens in both their private life and professional spheres.

At Mobilize, we’ve already mastered two car-sharing systems thanks to Renault Group’s prior experience.
First, there’s the option we refer to as “free-floating”. The idea is that you can borrow a vehicle that you identify using geolocation, and then leave it at any of our parking areas within a geographic area covered by the service. This system is for the general public, but can also be used by businesses for their employees’ work-related commutes. It has already been launched in Madrid and Paris with fleets of Renault ZOE car-sharing vehicles, within the service Zity by Mobilize, operated by the Group. Free-floating is the perfect means of transportation for brief commutes in dense areas!

Next, we have a closed-circuit car-sharing offering. Customers return the vehicles to the same place they borrowed them at. This solution allows us to meet other transportation needs over periods of time ranging from one hour to several days. Because they return the vehicles to their point of departure, users are able to reserve them in advance and be sure of having transportation available at the time they need it. It’s in this framework that we’ve been working more and more with city planners to design shared transportation solutions for the eco-districts of the future.

These two car-sharing solutions are complementary. The free-floating option is used like the subway. But if you’re traveling far away, closed-circuit car-sharing is more advantageous because you can reserve a vehicle in advance.
At Mobilize, we provide support for the introduction of these services, with new vehicle models adapted to or even entirely designed for car-sharing on a medium or large scale. We’re able to design the vehicle from start to finish to ensure optimal connection to our services.

Since every business has its own specificities and constraints, we take a co-creation approach with our customers. The goal is not to offer a single solution to everyone but to adapt the service to each customer’s needs. Finding solutions is also part of our added value. Introducing fleets of vehicles for car-sharing, recharging solutions for vehicles, energy storage… there are many things that can be optimized.

We’ve had a partnership with Ikea for the past three years. We make utility vehicles available to the public in Ikea’s parking lots. After exiting the store, a lot of shoppers discover that their purchases won’t fit in the vehicle they drove there in. Having to rent a vehicle for a whole day, from a location at the other end of the city, only to bring some furniture home just isn’t practical. With our offering, Ikea customers can rent a utility vehicle right after they pay for their purchases. If they only need a vehicle for an hour and forty-five minutes, they pay just for that hour and forty-five minutes. It’s a mere €11 per hour, including fuel and insurance. This solution is perfect for Ikea too since we manage the entire rental via our network of dealers. So they know they can count on us as a specialist. We have the same system set up outside home-improvement stores such as Leroy Merlin and Bricorama. It’s an approach that accurately summarizes all the added value Mobilize has to offer businesses and the general public alike: customized services, in the right place at the right time!

• Setting up fleets of electric vehicles available to customers on a car-sharing basis, like here with Ikea
• Introducing car-sharing vehicles into businesses’ fleets to optimize their corporate transportation costs and make the system easy to use
• Converting fleets to electric
• Pooling automotive fleets between different companies and organizations
• Digitizing transportation services