Gig Car Share’s fleet of pay-as-you-drive Priuses and their pre-installed bicycle roof racks will leave town December 27 as the AAA-owned company ceases all operations, according to an email I received as a Gig member. Geekwire reports that the shutdown is for the whole operation, not just Seattle.
This is a huge blow to car-free households in Seattle because the Gig cars were by far the most useful of any of the free-floating car share services we’ve had since the launch of Car2Go in 2013. Gig launched at a very strange time back in 2020 when the news got very buried for obvious reasons, and it never felt like the service ever had a high-profile introduction to the city. It was just sort of here one day, and the people who found them and tried them out loved them. Thanks to SDOT’s data sharing requirements, we can see exactly how many trips people took each month since Gig launched:
I am one of the people who loved Gig. My family doesn’t own a car, and so we walk, bike and take transit for nearly every trip. But every once in a while, there are trips that are impractical without a car. Or just not as fun. That’s where Gig really shined. All their cars have roof racks installed with space for two bicycles, leaving plenty of space for whatever else you need to bring. So when our friends were getting married near Lake Crescent, for example, we were able to get all three of us plus our bikes out there easily and for about the cost of a regular rental car (their $120/day rate includes insurance, Seattle street parking, and gas). But unlike regular rental cars, Gig cars are likely to be available nearby and you can return them by just parking them on your street. No need to figure out how you’re going to get home from the rental company’s lot. Oh, and did I mention the bike racks?!?
Maybe there just aren’t enough car-free households looking for bike-friendly cars to rent to sustain an entire business like this. 624 trips per day in June 2024 doesn’t sound so bad, but I suppose it’s not enough to sustain a business with so many vehicles to take care of. To put Gig’s usage in context, scooter and bike share companies reported 18,300 trips per day in June 2024.
I love Gig, but I only used it a handful of times because I don’t like driving. It’s a real bummer to see it go since it is difficult for me to imagine a service that would ever meet my car-sharing desires better than Gig does. There was never very much marketing behind the service, and perhaps they were banking too hard on people being familiar with the concept even though it’s still a weird thing to rent a car with your phone.
So what do we do without Gig? There’s Zipcar, which can work well for some people but not really for my use case. There’s Turo, which is like Spokeo (or AirBNB) but for cars. That might work for you if you happen to be near someone renting the kind of vehicle you need for a reasonable price, but I do not have such a neighbor. Or there are regular rental car companies, which come with all the same old headaches as always and may or may not have a car capable of carrying your bicycles. Perhaps this is an opening for one of these services to start offering and advertising easy bike-hauling options.
Are you a car-free Gig user? What are your plans after December 27?
Comments
14 responses to “Bad news for car-free households: Gig Car Share is shutting down in December”
I’ve been a GIG member since we moved here in 2021 and I’m so bummed out by the news. We’re a car-free household and having GIG as an option has been a lifesaver, especially for some emergency vet visits we had to make. I’m also a Zipcar member, but having the one-way, park-anywhere convenience of GIG is going to be sorely missed.
I think the reason they had declining ridership was because the cars are often left with no gas in the tank. All the cars nearest to me have less than 10 miles in the tank, and nearest is completely empty and reporting one mile.
Also, there is a carshare coop called ZEV based in Bainbridge with cars in Seattle that wasn’t mentioned in the article, but I haven’t used them so I can’t vouch on how practical it is.
When people I know were using Free2Move vehicles in Portland (operations ceased last November) vehicles with empty gas tanks frequently had holes drilled in the tanks by people who were desperate enough to be willing to drill holes in gas tanks.
I lived car-free in Seattle until I was 28.
The reason I bought a car was twofold: (1) Car2Go and ReachNow shut down operations (2) Uber / Lyft became prohibitively expensive in the city.
People will argue your ear off about how Car2Go was a scourge on the city (usually these people are mad about parking) and how it *should* cost $95 to take a Lyft from Ballard to West Seattle, but at the end of the day these factors pushed me to purchase a car and become yet another driver on the already congested streets.
I am staring down the barrel of this decision too, and it really sucks because having to drive really ruins my day (I just hate it so much) and the thought of investing in that experience is just sad. But I’ve also noticed what you said, and additionally the complete disinvestment and lack of respect this city has for pedestrians, bike riders, and transit riders. I think about this a lot while waiting over half an hour in a ditch next to a busy road for my bus to arrive
I think it’s a chicken and egg thing. People like me want to ditch our cars but are waiting for reliable, sustainable car sharing but the car sharing companies can’t get to a sustainable level of business unless enough people ditch their cars.
meanwhile the start up people retire with a lot of money! we have learned nothing since the DOT Com bubble burst. it is the same story ove and over again!
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
While a bummer, at least my neighbors can channel their energy into something else besides complaining about them parking on “our” street incessantly.
While the ability to pick up a rental car without having to travel to a fixed location is going away for now, I am cautiously optimistic that advances in autonomous vehicle technology will, at some point, bring it back, but in a way that better for both the consumer and the business.
In particular, I’m imagining a rental car that deadheads autonomously, but once you have the car, you can drive it manually everywhere a conventional rental car can go. It would solve so many problems. The cars can park at a central depot overnight for refueling. The problem of cars accumulating in the wrong part of town, gone. Cleaning and maintenance for the company is much easier, as is electrification (just install chargers at the centralized depot, problem solved).
What remains to be seen is who will be the one that eventually offers this service? Will Tesla get into the business, as an outgrowth of their pivot towards AI and FSD, will traditional rental companies start doing it, or will be startups that don’t even exist yet today? I guess we’ll have to find out, but I think it’s a matter of when, not if, such a service becomes available.
From the perspective of these companies, once they have cars that can deadhead reliably and safely, why introduce the extra variable of customers driving instead of just offering a full robo-taxi service? If they give people the choice, the natural thought is that the people that want to drive themselves most are the ones you least want doing it.
As cyclists we surely recognize it’s not quite that simple. Engaging with the world around you and taking on responsibility around others in public is personally rewarding and socially good. It gives us opportunities to be selfish but then also lets us get past that and be good to each other. Driving isn’t the best way to do that — when we drive we’re separated by steel and glass, with such limited options to communicate that tilt toward aggression. But it does put at least some responsibility for ourselves and others in our hands. A mass-cycling society, or a mass-transit using society, where we’re in closer and slower contact, beats a mass-driving society. But a mass-taxi society? One where the experience of being alone with our phones while the algorithm feeds us what it will invades even more parts of our lives? That’s the dystopia to me.
there was also another service called ReachNow, I think, along with Car2Go.
I used both a couple of times before they shut down.
As for Gig, I’m signed up, but haven’t had a chance to use it, since i don’t actually live in Seattle, living closer to the Canadian border.
bummed to see it go, though, I think it’s a great service.
hope someone else starts one up.
I never once saw a bike on the roof rack
Regular gig user, really bummed to see it go. Very convenient for last minute driving needs and would have definitely paid more for the service. I wonder why they didn’t try at all