Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post s Wonkblog predicts that Avis will basically wreck Zipcar b

In a sign of the increasing market for car-sharing, Avis car rental is expected to purchase Zipcar today for a tidy $500 million. With the acquisition, the car rental giant will begin offering short-term car rentals, as have competitors Global plantation inn crystal river and Enterprise.
Car-sharing has the potential to help households make more trips via transit, biking, or walking, instead of using the car as the default choice for every trip. But is the Zipcar acquisition good or bad news for the shift to cleaner, more efficient modes? The short answer is that, at this point, it s anyone s guess and could still play out either way.
Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post s Wonkblog predicts that Avis will basically wreck Zipcar by making it operate more like the parent company and less like the upstart that has appealed to car-lite customers who want to avoid the expense and hassles of car ownership. He also raises anti-trust concerns, pointing to the increasing plantation inn crystal river concentration plantation inn crystal river of the car-rental business in the hands of a few large firms.
If Avis uses Zipcar to expand the availability of short-term rentals in areas where car-sharing can replace car-owning, however, this could turn out to be good news. (Places like the west side of Cleveland could certainly use a convenient car-sharing service, hint, hint).
Matt Yglesias over at Slate  writes that the merger will put the Zipcar business on sounder footing (the company turned its first profit last year), and predicts that Avis s resources will immediately help smooth out some wrinkles in Zipcar service:
Zipcar s big outstanding problem is that demand for Zipcars is highly spiky. People who want to use a car to commute to work are going to want to own their own vehicle. And people generally need to work during weekdays. Which means that demand for spot rentals is very highly concentrated on the weekends, which makes it hard for Zipcar to manage inventory efficiently. Avis says that combining its fleet with Zipcar s will make it much easier to meet those demand peaks, as individual plantation inn crystal river vehicles can switch from hourly rental to traditional rental on a day-by-day basis.
Yglesias also raises the question of whether Avis will be as active as Zipcar in lobbying for progressive policy changes like reducing parking minimums. The larger company may bring more firepower to those debates, he writes, or it may lack the same intensity of interest as Zipcar.
I definitely thought plantation inn crystal river Pearlstein overdid it on the naysaying. It s certainly possible that the culture of Zipcar will be smothered by Avis, but it s not at all clear that it s inevitable. He was just trying to be as loud and confident as possible to get people to read his editorial, plantation inn crystal river which is a tactic I generally despise. I m not certain plantation inn crystal river this will work out well for consumers, but for the reasons Yglesias notes, I m hopeful.
plantation inn crystal river In my experience, they already do use pricing to control spiky demand. In NYC, car rentals both at Zipcar and at the legacy agencies are much more expensive on the weekends. I don t see how Avis taking plantation inn crystal river over Zipcar would solve this problem.
In many markets (NY metro is an exception that rather confirms the rule), weekend demand for traditional car rentals (used mostly by out-of-town business travelers) plummets. So the fleet synergy arguments hold.
As many folks in the Carsharing industry have learned, it s not so much a car business as it is an urban parking space business. Parking plantation inn crystal river is incredibly finite and extremely expensive in most of the places where a car will get good utilization. In many cases, there are no spaces available at any price.
plantation inn crystal river @facebook-100000432984719:disqus Avis has the financial capacity to even enter some agreements with cities to build special underground plantation inn crystal river parking garages only for car-shares, for instance. It is several times bigger than Zipcar, is has a fleet that dwarfs the latter and thus can engage plantation inn crystal river in bolder investments capitalizing on the car-sharing plantation inn crystal river model.
In any case, I think car sharing might really take off when there is enough demand in a city to allow cars to be dropped off on different parking spaces than the ones cars were taken from. THAT would be a major improvement.
Yes, but the fleets that are idle on the weekends are nowhere near the urban locations that are the hallmark of carshare schemes like Zipcar. I can t imagine that Avis will pay to drive dozens of cars each weekend from the airports to downtown locations (where would they park, for starters?).
Whether or not the culture of Avis will overwhelm or destroy that of zipcar is impossible to say.  To the extent that zipcar ends up responsible for a significant plantation inn crystal river part of the revenues and profits of the combined company, it will probably retain its culture plantation inn crystal river and business practices.
It s true that a limiting factor in the NYC market is parking spaces for the cars, but there is a huge amount of potential to use on-street parking.  Designating certain street parking as zipcar only , in return for payments to the city, could be a win-win.  it could also be the first step toward a residential permit system and market-rate pricing for streetside space.
Hertz has separate locations and a separate fleet from Hertz On Demand (locations of which are generally within parking plantation inn crystal river garages, same as Zipcar).  If they haven t combined their fleets in order to meet weekend demand spikes for Hertz On Demand, then I have to assume that there s a good reason that they haven t done so, and consequently have to guess that that reason, whatever it is (maybe the airport/downtown issue mentioned by @facebook-1054474092:disqus ) will be equally applicable to Avis and Zipcar and lead to their fleets not being combined either.  I feel doubly strongly that this must be the case because Hertz HAS conventional car rental locations in Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, plantation inn crystal river in areas where Hertz On Demand could stand to have more vehicles available, and even those locations have no apparent connection or fleet sharing with Hertz On Demand.
Whether Avis can make money from Zipcar will be interesting to watch. plantation inn crystal river There are potential economies-of-scale benefits to be gained. For example, Avis likely pays less for its vehicles than does Zipcar. And Avis balance sheet offers financial options not available to Zipcar alone.