VIDEO: Zipcar has $1 billion dreams... and 46 members per car?

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Zipcar’s $1 billion ambition - Click above to watch the video after the break

How many cars do you think Zipcar owns around the world? Did you know it was 6,500?
How big could Zipcar one day become? How about a $1 billion company?

These are two of the numbers mentioned in an interview that CEO Scott Griffith gave to Fortune recently. Griffith also said that, today, Zipcar has about 300,000 members, which give us an average of about 46 members per car. That seems incredibly high. In order to reach the $1 billion goal, Zipcar will need to get to the one million member level, Griffith said.

Before that happens, Griffith needs to convince a lot more organizations to adopt the Zipcar model. We know about how Zipcar can work for individuals - basically, easy car rentals by the hour - but Griffith is more excited about the behind-the-scenes operations. For example, people need to clean and maintain all 6,500 vehicles, right? The backend work that Zipcar is doing today to make sure there is time in the schedule for all of these cars to be prepped and ready for customers when they want them will help tremendously as the company begins to add more and more electric vehicles to the fleet. Griffith says it is just a step away from scheduling maintenance to finding time to recharge electric cars:

Our system is going to integrate very well with electric vehicles, and that’s one of the things that governments and universities and corporate partners are very interested in. How are they going to schedule all of this and manage the logistics of having electric vehicles.

The next city to get an electric Zipcar, Griffith said, will probably be Washington, D.C. Watch the video after the jump.

[Source: Fortune]

Continue reading VIDEO: Zipcar has $1 billion dreams… and 46 members per car?

VIDEO: Zipcar has $1 billion dreams… and 46 members per car? originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 08:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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