Give me some credit. I know that. I am trying to understand why a different car is required for the trip home. Can you just leave the C2G vehicles wherever and whenever you are done with them or do you have to bring them to designated pick-up/drop-off sites? And, yes, I am confusing some of the details with C2G with ZipCar and it does look like C2G have figured out some things (like fractional hour pricing).

There's no guarantee that same car will still be there for the trip home. Someone else can grab it in the meantime. You can reserve a car 30 minutes in advance, but that won't work if you're going be at whole foods longer than that. You can just hold onto the keys and not "end the trip" but you will be charged for that hour that you're holding the car. This is a problem. If you've got several bags worth of groceries, you're not going to want to hunt down a car2go.

The charge is .41 a minute plus a $1 per trip for insurance. There are different pricing levels for 30 minutes, an hour, or a whole day. This is for the Twin Cities. Last year they provided a card you could use to refuel and they would give you free minutes if you took the time to do it. Their app shows you the fuel level of the cars in your area. People would find ones that needed fuel and gas them up just to get the additional minutes. I'm sure having 6 cars being parked in front of the same guy's house wasn't a desirable outcome even if the tanks were full. ;)

Now it looks like you have to pay for any needed gas yourself and send them a picture of the receipt. The way the system is intended to be used though, it's not likely you'd need to get fuel.

They will also "rebalance" the cars as far as where they are parked. I got a bunch of free introductory minutes and over the course of week or two, used them up just getting a feel for the cars and the system. After I burned through my minutes, I noticed the cars would just sort of show up in front of my house overnight. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I think that was intentional and the results of analyzing their trip data. I'd bet anything that heavy users don't usually have to go far to find a car. The cars come to them.

I used to do that. 20 free minutes when your commute takes 17 minutes, I got quite a few trips for free :)

One of my recent disappointments was when Car2Go in Vancouver got rid of that policy. Now their fleet guys fuel the cars, no more free minutes :(

I've seen them trucking away cars from where I work because so many end up there; not sure where they end up.

Very true. At this particular Whole Foods (3rd St in Brooklyn) you're almost guaranteed that if the car you came in isn't still there then another will be. It's a very popular way of getting there. If one isn't close then it's Lyft time (Uber has become exceptionally unpopular for both their invasion of privacy and mostly their anti-bicycle statements).

It'd be interesting to know the monetary and energy/pollution economics of this. I think that overall car share is a great deal, especially if it allows people to go without owning a personal car and encourages them to walk, bike, and transit more.

It's a good question. I've wondered as well. They do the same thing with bike share bikes. I like to think of them as a greener way for people to get around but I'm concerned about how much of that is lost by the fact that the bikes themselves get moved by pickup truck.

Very different for bikeshare. They can carry about 18 bikes with one truck (and about another 30 on a trailer). The bikes are light so trucks aren't carrying a heavy load. They are rebalancing among numerous locations so can create fairly efficient routes for a single truck and these are getting better each year. From an energy standpoint it is more than offset by people having ridden a bicycle rather than drive a car or bus. Not sure about the monetary side.

BTW, we've done a bit of study of bikeshare systems and you've one of the best run in Minneapolis. Bill Dossett and his crew have done a great job and folks all around the world look up to them.