I’ve found a rather unusual car club called Commonwheels. It has cars in several locations: Reading, High Wycombe, Poole, Portsmouth and (soon) Oxford. When I first found the website, I was surprised as these aren’t the large cities that are the normal locations for car clubs. I’ve since found out that they are car clubs that were going to close because they weren’t economic. They were then taken over by Commonwheels, which I assume is somehow publically funded.
What particularly interested me is that you can approach them to set up a car club. Once they’ve got sufficient people, they will set it up for you. So if you use yours2share to find people who live near you who want to share a car, once you have a group of people, you can ask Comonwheels to organise it for you. You can, of course, set up and run an informal car club yourself. But I think many people would prefer this to be done by someone else.
I’m one of the Oxford residents working with Commonwheels to launch East Oxford’s first car club. Ours will be the first UK car club born out of a collaboration between resident group and national car club and I think it offers really exciting opportunities. This model allows communities to offer members the technology, infrastructure and experience of a national car club whilst designing a scheme tailored to their particular area. For example, we found that few residents in our area were concerned that the cars should be brand new as long as they were reliable, clean, conveniently located and available at affordable rates. So we’re launching with a fleet that combines new Polo Blue Motions with several ‘adopted’ resident donated cars at £4 and £2.50 an hour respectively.
We’re really enjoying working with Commonwheels. We launch on Monday 24th November, just a few months after we started work together.
Let Commonwheels know if you want a car club in your area – info@commonwheels.org.uk. I’d also be very happy to talk about our experience.
I’m delighted to hear from you. Enabling collaboration between a private group and a national car club is a really interesting development. For the car clubs, finding the groups of people in less densely populated areas is expensive. But if people do this themselves, by asking their neightbours and/or using resources like yours2share, then once the group has formed, the national car clubs can step in to manage the club.
I’m also interested in your point that within your group, having a new car is less important than that the car is reliable, clean and parked close by, and that you have incorporated into your group members existing cars. I know many car owners would be keen to join a club and bring in their exisintg car.
I hope it all starts off well tomorrow.