In a white paper released for the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, this week, German car rental company car2go has identified five factors they say are needed for the management of autonomous car fleets.
The company stated that free-floating car sharers are going to only be as successful as the level of software they use. Failure to learn and keep up with learning algorithms, data, and apps will leave them behind. Olivier Reppert, CEO of the car2go Group, said no other mobility sector could prepare itself as comprehensively for the technology update as theirs.
“The use of autonomous vehicles will be a further quantum leap for carsharing, as was the change from station-based carsharing to the free-floating approach,” Reppert said. “We are looking forward to this future and are ready to go with it.”
According to their white paper, the five items needed for similar companies include professional fleet management, demand prediction, intelligent charging options, and customer experience. The key component, they said, will be “so-called fleet intelligence.” Fleet intelligence is an algorithm that determines which vehicle will satisfy which demand, essentially organizing and affecting all other vehicles in a particular fleet.
car2go, at least, has already moved on the algorithms side of things and put it to use in the aforementioned demand predictions to calculate in advance when and where cars will be needed. Car2go currently manages a combined fleet of 14,000 vehicles in 26 cities.