A bumper crop this month as we celebrate two super new reports – our familiar and vital car club annual report as well as our brand new shared micromobility report (covering both bike share and e-scooter share for the first time). Plus we have details of exciting new work in three regions of Scotland, as well as a ground-breaking project with an innovative, self-levelling three-wheeled electric scooter.
It’s not all good news, sadly: our latest car club report has seen the proportion of EVs in the car club fleet drop for the first time (35% down to 30%, still almost eight times more than the general car fleet). If you read our new research on car club operators’ costs in running EVs, you’ll see why. It’s an issue we will continue to engage policymakers on. Not least because other research from us also shows how much money consumers stand to save by using shared EVs rather than leased or owned ones.
Keep in touch,
Richard Dilks
Chief Executive, CoMoUK
News & insights 🗞️
Funding news
Stop press! We are delighted to announce that CoMoUK will be delivering 3 new pop-up hub projects across Scotland. The pop-up hubs will be installed temporarily in a number of locations in SEStran, SPT and Tactran areas to promote and support active travel, transport integration and mobility hub strategies.
This has been made possible thanks to People and Place grants funded by the Scottish Government and administered and supported by Regional Transport partners. Please see our pop-up webpage for information on similar projects.
Watch this space for individual project updates.
The UK’s first Shared Micromobility Report from CoMoUK
For the first time, we have published a report looking in depth at both bike share and e-scooter share in our new shared micromobility annual report. This is the only such piece of work in the UK. It includes operator data and survey data from users of each mode to illustrate the social, environmental and economic value of shared micromobility.
The report analyses a range of factors including the demographics of users, trip purposes and health impacts. It is interesting to see many of the benefits of bike share extend to e-scooters also. For example, both modes reduce car use, 16% of bike share trips, and 21% of e-scooter trips would otherwise have been made by car.
Read the report here and do cite it in your work, ask us questions about it, engage with it.
New CoMoUK Annual Car Club Report
As CoMoUK celebrates its 25th anniversary, the 2024 CoMoUK Annual Car Club report presents both long-standing patterns and new trends in the sector. Building on data from our user survey and operator metrics, we see that car clubs enable very "car-light” lifestyles where users mostly rely on active travel and public transport, accessing cars only as and when needed.
As a result, each car club car substituted 27 privately owned cars in 2024, freeing up an area as big as Hyde Park that would otherwise have been needed for car parking.
The report also highlights that the benefits brought about by car clubs could be even greater if car sharing provisions in the UK would match those in other European countries like Belgium or Germany, where the number of shared vehicles per inhabitants is almost 10 times higher than in the UK.
We were pleased to get a raft of national media coverage for both this and the shared micromobility report.
The rise and rise of the cost of operating EVs in the car club
Users have significant potential to save money by accessing an EV via car club rather than owning or leasing one, as our recent research finding annual savings per person of £5-6k found. Unfortunately, the picture for operators on the costs of operating an EV in the car club fleet has deteriorated significantly.
We find that taking all factors into account there is an average annual extra cost to a car club operator of around £6,000 per vehicle for an EV rather than a petrol or petrol hybrid car. This is made up of factors such as: the extra purchase or lease costs of the vehicles; staff time involved in recharging them; the cost of charging at public chargepoints (car clubs lack access to driveways on which to benefit from 5% VAT and lower night-time tariffs) and some reduced consumer demand. On that last point, although EVs in car clubs are given high satisfaction ratings in our annual survey, recharging them attracts far lower satisfaction ratings. So we wonder if this is about users avoiding the need to recharge during their hire period.
Adding to all of that is the fact that some of the credits available have reduced or are reducing: the ending of zero Vehicle Excise Duty in April; the ending of the EV exemption from London’s Congestion Charge in December.
We hope these figures will inform decision-making about EVs in car clubs. Car club operators remain committed to increasing the percentage of EVs in the car club fleet, which remains at almost ten times the level of the general car fleet.
The 3Scooter is a ground-breaking take on the mobility scooter, being much lighter weight and having intriguing self-levelling capability at its wheels so the seated rider always remains level. We are hugely looking forward to working on this project and bringing the learnings from it together with our other projects relating to disabled people.
Rural electric car club research
Dr Hannah Budnitz of the University of Oxford has won funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to undertake in-depth qualitative work on this topic.
Her project, SEMiTaSS – Shared Electric Mobility in Towns and Smaller Settlements – will look at case studies of long-established, recently established and yet-to-be established car club services in rural locations to understand how they relate to their communities over time. During the three-year project, she will interview and run workshops with users, operators and community representatives and apply academic methods and theories.
She already has agreed case studies with partners in Oxfordshire, Suffolk and the Northeast, but is keen to recruit further examples. If you are involved in running or interested in running shared electric car sharing services in rural locations, please do email her.
New staff member
We are delighted to welcome our new Project and Delivery Officer, Eszter Vlasits who will be supporting the pop-up mobility hub projects in Scotland. Eszter originally comes from Budapest and is now living in Edinburgh. She has a degree in Global Sustainable Development from the University of Warwick and previously worked as a Decarbonisation Research Officer in the Energy sector and Sustainability Officer at Edinburgh Airport.
Events 🗓️
Mobility Hub Roadshow 2025
Thursday 18 September, 12:00-4:30pm
CoMoUK and West of England Mayoral Combined Authority are pleased to invite you to a roadshow at one of the UK's first mobility hubs at the University of West of England in Bristol. We are very grateful to Trueform for sponsoring this event.
The event, which is free to join, will start with a sandwich lunch, followed by a range of presentations from CoMoUK and local representatives on the development of the West of England pilot hubs. Trueform will speak about their expertise in providing mobility hub infrastructure.
Following the presentations there will be a chance to join guided tours of the local hubs. There will also be a networking session with a chance to try out of a range of operators' shared bikes, e-scooters and cars. We will end the day with an optional social drink at the Beaufort Arms.
All the details of the venue and timings are shown on the registration page including directions to the venue.
"I think the service is great. For me, I find it particularly useful if I’m going out in the evenings. Bike or scooter readily available with lights so feel safer going home."
Female user from Norwich, 55-64, Micromobility Annual Report 2024
