Nissan has announced a new car-sharing scheme that will be based around the recently announced Micra. According to a statement, the new Nissan Intelligent Get & Go Micra scheme was revealed by chief executive officer (CEO) Carlos Ghosn at Web Summit in Lisbon (Portugal). Under the plan, it will be launched in Paris (France) and "will match compatible owners with complementary driving needs to form a 100% digital, shared ownership community". Customers will be billed independently on a monthly basis. The service will be based around the Nissan Micra Acenta 0.9-litre gasoline engine model with manual transmission. The costs will include insurance, servicing, access to the online matching tool, smartphone app and in-car technology. Communities will also need to agree upon an annual mileage limit of 15,000 km. It is expected to begin services by April 2017.
Significance: With this new scheme, Nissan is looking at tweaking the traditional car sharing model. In the majority of cases, this gives the user access to a range of vehicles in what may be a number of cities to use when they want, depending on availability. With Intelligent Get & Go, this would see a customer take part ownership of the vehicle with other individuals in the same area with limited requirement to own a vehicle. By doing this, it would potentially offer more close at hand availability, particularly for customers that live on the outskirts of such schemes. Nissan will also avoid competing with other automakers and businesses in this space, which are becoming increasingly prevalent. It now remains to be seen how great the uptake will be for this scheme and whether the conflicts that Nissan has tried to engineer out with its use of profile matching and social media.
