GreenGo: An e-carsharing service launched in Budapest

Would you fancy using a car full of extras? A car that you can use anytime you want to? After which you don’t have to pay taxes, for petrol or parking? Then the GreenGo e-carsharing service was designed for you! According to forbes.hu, Bálint Michaletzky came up with the idea to better the transportation in Budapest.

“In the beginning I found it hard to explain what this was going to be, but then I managed to reduce it to two words: Bubi (Budapest bicycle) with cars” says the inventor, who used to manage an energetics project until he decided to have a go at the electric car business.

If you start an enterprise in the field of public automobilism, you probably cut off more than you can chew, and this even doubles when it comes to electric cars. GreenGo, launched last Tuesday, wants to contribute to this business field by serviceable and available cars all over the capital city.

The culture of public automobilism hasn’t been developed in Hungary yet, we are behind the West European mentality by a few years. A personal car is still a type of status symbol so the conversion is not easy: it’s not clear whether or not there will be market interest in GreenGo.

Bálint Michaletzky is aware of the conditions. “We travelled a lot to West Europe, to test and learn about the different systems, because it’s important to know that these kind of systems in other big cities still use petrol-fuelled cars in most of the cases.”

They had to work on the initial idea: three years ago they wanted a Renault Twizy fleet. “Then it turned out that we couldn’t fit on normal doors, it didn’t have a heating system so it couldn’t have been used all year long. Fixing these problems would’ve been way too complicated for us.” So they finally chose Volkswagen’s transformed electric car, the e-Up.

Next, they had to look for an investor and luckily Ce Rent Inc., occupied with car renting, saw potential in the business: besides the current 45 car fleet the company also implemented further investments and got majority ownership in exchange. They expect to be paid back in 12 years’ time.

Attila Milanovich, the managing director of Ce Rent, told Forbes.hu that they plan on tripling the number of currently available service locations and providing 300-500 cars to at least 10 thousand users. “We aim to stabilise our exploitage rates at 15-20% and supply the needs of 3-10 families with one car.”

The test period hasn’t revealed any major faults yet. “We hope that we learned our lessons in three years” says Bálint. “However, we hoped that the charging network would develop a bit faster, or, that we could plant our own charging stations, but, unfortunately, this didn’t happen, and this is why our starting fleet is not too big.” The planting of a charging station costs 2-3 million forints and they would need at least 100-150 stations for the ideal functioning. The e-Up goes dead in two days, but the application informs its users about the charging info of each car.

“The biggest obstacle is like the hen-egg problem: electric cars won’t spread until there’s no established charging network, but they won’t develop the charging network until there are not enough electric cars. This is what we want to overcome now!”

How to use GreenGo?

You can download the GreenGo application to your phone after a quite long registry (it asks for your driving license, ID number, address etc.) and then look for available cars and their charging info on the map. During the registry, you have to add a 5 digit pin code, which you have to type in after you unlocked the car. Then you will see an identifier code on a small screen in the right corner of the car’s windshield, which you have to type into your phone to unlock the car.