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Ouch. Regular car share user here, sometimes multiple times per day. The sheer number of cars that Car2Go/"Share Now" had (approx 700 here in Vancouver, I think) usually made it my first choice, with Evo a close second.

Did not see this coming. Is it possible this is another rebranding/acquisition exercise (like the Car2Go->ShareNow transition), or is the fleet gone for good?

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Surprisingly close to their departure from Calgary, Austin, Chicago, Denver & Portland.. one wonders why they didn't just do it all at once. I wonder where all the used cars go.. literally disappeared overnight (no small feat), surely enough surplus to upset secondhand prices.

https://blog.car2go.com/2019/09/27/important-update-car2go-n...

I am very disappointed about their departure, especially after all of the nonsense promises related to their merger with BMW's ReachNow. I asked their Twitter account re. used cars and they gave me conflicting information: one said that the Mercedes are leased from the parent company and sent back while the other (more recently) said that I should check local auction houses since that's where they dispose of them.

I suspect one answer may be for the Smart Fortwo and the other for the more recent Mercedes sedans. The Smart cars likely don't have much residual value.

The first answer last year said that the Smarts are sold locally and that the Mercedes are sent back to the parent company. My recent question, asked when they were leaving Austin, was specifically about the Mercedes and they stated that they sold those locally.

Car2Go/ShareNow had a unit in a shared office space across the hall from ours (in Vancouver.) They moved out at the beginning of December, sold all their office furniture to other tenants in the building rather than taking it with them somewhere else. Seems pretty permanent to me.

Also from Vancouver. I thought the service was quite successful here and didn’t see this coming.

I thought so too. But remember, Vancouver is one of the only major cities (that I'm aware of) which didn't allow Uber/Lyft. Until now.

I'm sure it was successful in Vancouver. It's elsewhere where it was losing money.

In Toronto they got in a spat with the city over street parking and pulled out about a year ago. Really unfortunate as it was a great service, and seemed successful in terms of adoption. There's a new one in its place called Commune Auto, but lacks the visibility, as those little Car2Go smart cars with their branding really stood out.

While that hurt car2go, I think Uber/Lyft would have ultimately killed them in Toronto anyway.

At least in Calgary, Uber was 2-3x the price of Car2Go. You could get halfway across town in 15 minutes, and pay ~$7 for the trip if you got one of the smart cars. It was great. Last time I checked Uber, it was $18 for the same trip.

I always thought about the market here as a healthy competition. With car2go gone, I wonder what that'll mean for the market now?

Also Evo has even less of an incentive now to fix their broken Android app.

So I figured I'd try Evo again after choosing to ignore them basically because their app is terrible, and I managed to count three issues in my first few minutes: It either takes way too long to populate the map with cars, or it just doesn't until your account is verified, or both. The pullout menu currently says "v[object Object]" at the bottom right (and I'm pretty sure it did this a year ago as well). And I can make it consistently crash by opening the map settings panel and pressing the OK button.

None of this stops me from renting a car (except maybe the map), but I don't think they understand that their mobile app is literally the first thing people look at when they hear about Evo, and if it's bad, many of them won't use it. Especially in Vancouver. Have you seen how many front-end developers there are in this city? A decent mobile app is worth a year's marketing budget for a service like this.

On some level, I'm excited for them because it's nice that the local company has this opportunity to win hearts and minds, but they definitely need to figure some stuff out.

I bailed from using Evo when their password reset form was indistinguishable from a phishing attack. I guess it's time to give it another try.

I wonder how easy it'd be to reverse their API and make a mobile app less terrible than you describe. :P

British Columbia’s essential prohibition on Uber/Lyft definitely propped up car2go/Evo.

Too bad this doesn't seem to be ending any time soon. The government previously promised they would be here by Christmas but time is running out.

I gotta say, this is really unfortunate. I’m in Vancouver too and I’ve been using Evo/Car2Go since I got here. I am really gonna miss the little Smart cars.

Evo now doesn’t face major competition, which I worry about. I like their service, but it definitely seems like they’ll jack up the price.