Description

The car sharing market in Poland was established in late 2015, when GoGet started the fleet of 5 vehicles in Wroclaw, a city in Western Poland. In 2016, car rental companies recognized the opportunity of adopting a car sharing business model from Western Europe. During the same year, the car sharing fleet rose to 155 vehicles and 2 new participants appeared in Krakow and Warsaw, the Polish capital.

It was in 2017 when the Polish car sharing market experienced rapid growth. Three more companies started providing car sharing services, resulting in a 13 times increase both in terms of car sharing members and the number of vehicles in the fleet. Car sharing operators (CSOs) quickly scaled their operations and captured the most car sharing-friendly cities of Poland, where the number of young people and vehicle density are the highest. The first government initiative supporting the development of car sharing was introduced on a city level. The city of Wroclaw was the first to introduce city car sharing, providing service users with dedicated parking slots and parking fee waivers. The cities of Warsaw and Poznan, as well as the Tricity agglomerate, are considering the implementation of regulations that will allow car sharing users to benefit from the use of bus lanes, as well as parking fee discounts.

One of the factors that make car sharing appealing to the local government is the increasing share of hybrid and electric vehicles in the fleet, which perfectly aligns with Polands`s 2017 Electromobility Act, the aim of which is to have 1 million electric vehicles on Polish roads by 2025. 4Mobility and Traficar have started pilot testing electric vehicles in 2018 to identify whether consumers will welcome such kind of product diversification. Energy and utility companies, such as Innogy and Tauron, are expected to enter the car sharing market with electric vehicles in their fleet in late 2018 or in the beginning of 2019, following the Innogy EV pilot test that was held in March–April 2018.

Despite its rapid development, the car sharing market in Poland is still immature, and there are opportunities that CSOs are yet to discover. Significant increase of fleet size has allowed CSOs to obtain market share and increase the overall awareness of car sharing services among customers, but further innovation in the areas of business model, fleet financing, product placement, and technology must take place for CSOs to penetrate the market and increase profit margin.