Car-Sharing Concept Traces Roots to ’60s Counterculture

Automakers are scrambling to ensure they are not left behind by the hot new car-sharing trend where one vehicle is used over and over by multiple drivers.

Car sharing isn’t a new idea, but rather one that traces its roots back to the counterculture of the ’60s in the U.S. and Europe and “hippie” notions of communal property, says Andrew Blauvelt, director of the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The museum is hosting a special exhibition titled “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Modernism.”

In Amsterdam in the ’60s, the “White Bicycle” plan suggested by a group of radical hippies and anarchists known as the “Provos” promoted the idea of communal bicycles that could be shared by people as needed, Blauvert says.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, two icons of the ’60s counterculture, had their photo taken with one of the White Bicycles during a visit to Amsterdam in 1969.

“The era’s blend of culture and politics defined a hopeful moment,” Blauvert says in the preface to the catalog for the exhibition.

Part of the Provos’ then-radical plan for Amsterdam was to limit traffic in the city center, an idea now employed in cities across Europe, Asia and even North America, where Mexico City has adopted sharp restrictions.

The principal architect of the Provos’ White Plan was Luud Schimmelpennink, who was elected to Amsterdam’s Municipal Council in 1967 and went on to become the founder of WitKar in the early ’70s. WitKar – Dutch for White Car – was a car-sharing program that went on to become the forerunner of similar plans now in place across Europe.

“It may just prove to be the biggest advance in inner-city transportation since trolleys took over from velocipedes,” Time magazine noted in 1974.

“Invented by an Amsterdam engineer … WitKar is a 2-seater, drive-it-yourself electric vehicle. It purrs peacefully at up to 20 mph (32 km/h) and 2.4 miles (3.8 km) between strategically located stations where it can be recharged in five minutes,” the magazine adds.

The WitKar experiment lasted more than a decade before it was dissolved in 1986. But by then, car-sharing experiments had taken root in other European cities, notably Berlin, where the counterculture was a strong and continuous presence thanks to a law that allowed young Germans to avoid mandatory military service if they agreed to live in the then-divided city.

The most durable of the Berlin-based car-sharing programs, StattAuto, was born in 1988 and survived the fall of the Berlin Wall.

StattAuto Berlin was launched as part of university research to demonstrate that car sharing could offer a viable transportation alternative for Germany, making it one of the modern pioneers of car sharing, according to an article published in Transportation Quarterly in 1998.

During the past two decades, car sharing has continued to expand in and around Berlin, which has emerged as a center for ventures such as Car2Go, a Daimler subsidiary, and DriveNow, a subsidiary of BMW. Drive-Now Berlin has 180,000 customers.

“Berlin is the world’s car-sharing headquarters,” says Frank Hansen, a BMW urban mobility expert.

Ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft are similar to taxi services since the customer hires a driver for a relatively short journey. But in car sharing, the user borrows a car from a specific location and drives to a desired destination, later returning the car to a specified location. The service is used extensively by customers who need a car infrequently, a pattern common in large urban areas.

Frank Ruff, senior manager-Society and Technology Research Group at Daimler AG, estimates there are only about 300,000 shared cars worldwide. But the number is still significantly more than there were in Amsterdam and San Francisco 50 years ago.

Technology is helping make car sharing more practical with a new network of apps that provide instant information and access, experts say.

Blauvelt notes that new technology is critical to spreading the ideas that animated the counterculture.

Product concepts and designs by entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates were heavily influenced by notions of personal creativity that came directly from the counterculture, Blauvelt says.

“You don't get to the (smart phone) without the counterculture.”

Without hippies, we may have never developed car-sharing, either.