Last summer, Shelley Bontje went to a friend’s wedding in Markelo, a village in the east of the Netherlands. The venue was hard to reach on public transport, so most guests drove.
Bontje was driving an EV – but it was neither her own, nor a rental. Perhaps she could be considered the owner of one-tenth of it.
That car was part of the DEEL car-sharing network, which helps communities set up and manage non-profit car-share cooperatives. In Dutch, “deel” means share. Bontje lives in Bezuidenhout, a neighbourhood in The Hague, where a cooperative of 124 drivers across 80 households share eight electric vehicles.
“I pay a monthly subscription of 15 euros, then there’s a small time-based charge for each trip,” she explained. “One year the co-op did well and I actually got some money back.” Scheme participants tend not to make daily commutes, with most only needing a car at the weekend or during holidays. They use a car booking app and a chat group to discuss and schedule usage. “The eight cars we have are enough,” she said. “I can always get one when I need one.”
So how does it work? What are the environmental benefits? Could it work in other countries? Dialogue Earth spoke to DEEL officials and transportation experts to find out.
Making cities more liveable
In 1974, Dutch community activist Luud Schimmelpennink founded the world’s first electric car-share scheme in Amsterdam, as a response to traffic congestion and air pollution. Technical limitations meant the scheme never spread, but it lasted for 12 years and is seen as the ancestor of today’s EV-sharing.
Fifty years later, Schimmelpennink may like what he sees. There are 80,000 shared cars across the Netherlands, an increasing percentage of them electric – particularly those in community co-ops such as DEEL.
Lauri de Boer is chair of the Bezuidenhout scheme, as well as a member of the DEEL board. In 2020, she got a DEEL flyer in her mailbox and after learning about the car-share scheme, she decided to sell her own vehicle and sign up. Now, she’s a full-time DEEL employee.
She told Dialogue Earth that the original aim in the neighbourhood where DEEL got started was to give space back to the public and make the city more liveable. The Hague’s municipal government learned about the scheme early on and its transportation authority gave DEEL a EUR 20,000 subsidy. This was to cover administrative costs such as legal advice, support for six-month trials of new co-ops, and training for volunteers.
The co-ops, primed by government subsidies, spread to other parts of the Netherlands, including Nijmegen and Arnhem, both cities in the east. But not every city offers subsidies. Amsterdam, for example, has ended its subsidies for new projects, while Utrecht has never offered one.
“The subsidies aren’t used to fund vehicle leasing or maintenance, as the government is keener to encourage cycling,” said Lauri de Boer. She added that not all support is in the form of cash subsidies. Many cities help by providing parking spaces and chargers, and make a deal with the project: for every ten households signing up, the city will turn four parking spots into green space, bike parking, or social areas.
Bontje said that one attraction of the DEEL scheme is the use of EVs. There’s a lively market in second-hand cars in Europe, but most are traditional fuel-burners, which are noisier and emit pollutants and greenhouse gases. EVs are quieter and cleaner, but new ones are very expensive and used ones hard to find.
Currently, DEEL gets its EVs on long-term leases, then provides them to neighbourhood co-ops. This means members get to use EVs at a low cost, with no maintenance or insurance worries.
A 2024 report into GoCar, a car-sharing scheme in Ireland, found that electrifying half of its fleet by 2030 would reduce emissions (including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds) by an average of 45%. Those reductions weren’t just from driving. Lifecycle emissions from the car manufacturing process can be reduced if household cars are replaced with a shared EV alternative.
“It frees up public space, it’s good for the environment, and it brings neighbours together. All this makes living in the city a better experience,” Bontje said.
Just enough
De Boer and Bontje both mentioned that the non-profit community-based cooperative model brings neighbours together socially – and the fact that everyone knows each other moderates drivers’ behaviour. But the model also limits scale: DEEL’s biggest co-op has 130-150 households sharing 16 vehicles. And, as not all city governments provide support, starting a scheme can be difficult.
Individual schemes are run by volunteers. As the co-ops expand, that work becomes more specialised and burdensome. When that happens, de Boer said, volunteers may no longer enjoy their experience.
Schemes that are too small, though, will struggle to take off. De Boer said: “To get started you need at least 25 households and four vehicles, otherwise it can’t sustain itself financially.” Persuading those first 25 households to get on board is often a challenge.
The scale of a scheme, both in terms of number of member households and management work, needs to be just right.
Finally, de Boer said, converting roadside parking spots to green space or bicycle parking is hugely complex, even with government support. People often regard the parking spot in front of their house as “theirs” and taking it away can be controversial. It takes a lot of time and communication to persuade a whole street of people to change how that space is used.
Can the Dutch model work elsewhere?
DEEL sounds like a great example to follow, but experts said the model could face challenges elsewhere – even within Europe.
In a 2023 report on shared and zero-emission mobility in European cities, Amsterdam ranked fourth of 42, with a full ten marks for EV-sharing. London came 24th, scoring 0.5/10 in that category.
Richard Dilks is chief executive of Collaborative Mobility UK, a shared transportation charity. He told Dialogue Earth that the shared vehicle sector in the UK is shrinking, with the entire fleet now consisting of 3,000 vehicles or even fewer.
While a significantly higher percentage (28%) of the shared fleet is electric compared to privately owned cars (2.2%), that figure is going down, while for privately owned cars it’s rising.
“This doesn’t mean people hate electric vehicles,” he explained. “Actually, they love them, it’s charging that is the problem.” Public charging costs in the UK, he said, are heavily taxed, at 20% compared to 5% if you charge at home. Shared EVs rely more on public chargers, which raises the costs.
He added that insurers are pulling back from the shared car market, hampering the sector. In particular, small community car sharing schemes can face very expensive insurance premiums, or not even be able to get quotes. Many schemes have had to stop running due to a lack of insurance products on the market.
In densely populated countries, the co-op model might face other challenges. Take China. Liu Daizong is East Asia director of the US-headquartered Institute of Transportation and Development Policy. He noted that with the community sharing model, journeys need to start or end at the same spot – a street or an office building, for instance. But in a densely populated area where most people live in apartment blocks and tend not to know their neighbours, it could be much harder to coordinate this, unlike a small co-op with membership only in the dozens.
He also pointed out that privately owned vehicles are treated differently for tax purposes compared to those owned by enterprises, and that larger sharing schemes may attract the attention of regulators and come into dispute with existing operators. In actual operation, there are problems with insurance and accident liability, as well as frequent disputes over breaches of agreements, cleanliness and charging. And there are no mediation systems in place to mitigate these.
Policy support and innovative models
Although the challenges are numerous, the car sharing model has been receiving widespread policy support. In China, the Ministry of Commerce and other authorities have called for greener car use, including car sharing, and encourage “green leasing services, innovative green consumption models, trip sharing and space sharing”. In April, the UK’s Department for Transport published its Better Connected policy, explicitly calling for more shared transport and a transition to EVs.
Liu thinks the sharing model has a bright future, but some innovation will be needed. For example, car sharing in China could happen through the companies that run apartment complexes. “The management companies could underwrite and coordinate the scheme, checking suitability of members and resolving disputes. That would reduce transaction costs. It could be a sustainable commercial model for them, via service fees or by adding the costs into apartment management fees,” he said.
China is also trying out shared parking spaces, he noted. Smart parking-space locks and similar tech means parking spaces can be rented out for certain time periods, potentially making better use of public space.
Dilks thinks targets on increasing car sharing and EV use should be merged, as seen in the Netherlands. At a higher level, more holistic urban transportation planning is needed, he said. Private car use could be restricted, for example by raising parking costs, while walking, cycling and car sharing are encouraged. This would achieve a better-balanced transportation system, he added.
