It’s been operating quietly for the last two months in Toronto, but last week Zipcar let the city know that it has arrived is ready for business.

Toronto is the fifth city in North America to get Zipcar Inc. open up shop. The idea is simple: Zipcar is a car sharing service. But you don’t have to post a message on a message board online or hook up with other people going to the same place as you.

With Zipcar, all you have to do is be over 21, sign up, reserve a car and you’re good to go. Cars are parked in various locations throughout the city. All the member has to do is swipe their key card and the car is then unlocked, the key sitting in it and then it’s off you go.

Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar Inc, says Toronto was the obvious choice for a Canadian launch of the service.

“We think it possibly has the greatest potential for car sharing in any city in Canada [by] looking at the market demographics and the potential size for the market. It looks to us like there are several hundred thousand potential users here in the city, who live in the city [and] who are over the age of 21. It was an obvious win for us,” he says.

The company began in Boston in 2000, and then expanded to Washington, New York and San Francisco before coming to Canada. Griffith says what sets his program apart from any other is the convenience of it.

“It’s very easy, very simple [and] 24/7. I think that is really our innovation and why we’re growing so quickly now – people look at this as easy as it getting cash form an ATM. So the idea is to put a car on every street corner and make it very easy to get to. We’ve put a lot of money and time into developing the technology which has made the difference I think,” he says.

Unlike most rental cars, you don’t have to be over the age of 25 to be able to use the Zipcar program. As long as you are over 21, with a clean driving record, you can use the service. Griffith says it was very important to try and get the minimum age to be 21 instead of 25 in Canada to target the younger demographic.

“We were able to secure an insurance policy at age 21 which was our goal. In fact it took us six months to do that … insurance in this province is quite difficult. We partnered up with our U.S. partner, called Liberty Mutual Insurance, they’re an underwriter here in Ontario as well. We started out with a discussion of 25, and we were able to show enough data from the States of [the] behaviour patterns of [drivers] aged 21-25 and we promised them Canadians would drive just as well as Americans,” he says.

In the other cities, Griffith says the majority of Zipcar users are under the age of 35, and that demographic is very important to them because for a number of people who are still going to school in the city or have started their first job out of school, owning a car can be a real expense. Zipcar is a positive alternative.

Griffith says the company is planning on announcing two more cities that program will launch in soon, adding that one of them could be another Canadian city ? like Vancouver.

“Vancouver looks like an obvious city for the project, it’s very environmentally aware, so it’s definitely on our short list,” he says.

In Toronto, there are 60 cars in nine neighbourhoods, concentrated right now in the downtown area, but Griffith hopes to expand out of the downtown core soon. Currently cars are in the following areas: Bloor and Bay, Church and Wellesley Village, Downtown Core, Queen St. West village, St. Lawrence Market, The Annex, The Danforth, U of T and Uptown.

So far the program has 500 users in Toronto, over 60,000 in the five cities combined, a number Griffiths hopes will only get bigger.

“We’re really on to something now. We’re kind of getting past that tipping point. We think there could easily be one million members across 15 cities in North America, so we feel like we have barely hit the tip of the iceberg,” he says.

For more information on the Zipcar program visit www.zipcar.com






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