City to get fleet of small, efficient ‘smart cars’ for staff use

Beginning sometime next month, there’ll be a new kind of car on the streets of Austin: smart cars. City employees will be zipping around in 8-foot-long, two-seater cars courtesy of a unique pilot program between the City of Austin and European automaker Daimler.

 

The program, called Cars2Go, is Daimler’s first foray into the United States. The company is working with the city on a pilot program that will be “revenue neutral” for both parties.

 

“It’s basically a way for Daimler to work out the logistics of their system,” said Karla Villalon of the Transportation Department in a presentation to the city’s Urban Transportation Commission Tuesday evening.

 

According to the yearlong agreement, the city will provide 40 on-street parking spaces, as well as some off-street parking, for approximately 100 to 125 smart cars. These cars will in turn be available for official city business at no charge to city employees. Daimler will pay for gas, insurance and maintenance for the vehicles.

 

The Car2Go program, which the city is still negotiating, should be fully underway by November, according to Villalon, with a total of 200 smart cars operating in the city in partnership with the city and a handful of other groups. The company’s plan is to expand its Austin fleet after the initial pilot program and offer membership to the public.

 

The Car2Go program works much like a car share: members may instantly rent smart cars they see on the street by using an electronic key that tracks that members minutes of use and charges them automatically. Members can also reserve a car in advance at a specific location. Because of the compact size of the smart car, two such cars can fit into a standard parallel parking spot.

 

A representative from Daimler told the commission that the cars are not hybrids because they are gas-powered, but they average 33 miles per gallon in the city and about 44 miles per gallon on the highway. The vehicles have eight-gallon gas tanks.

 

The city’s interest in the Car2Go program, Villalon said, is to determine whether it might supplement or reduce the size of the city’s fleet in the long-term, and also to help introduce a large-scale smart car sharing program to the city.

 

According to a release on the company’s Web site, Daimler chose Austin as the location of its first Car2Go program in the U.S. because of the city’s size, economic structure and large college student population.