35 years of car sharing, 25 years of Mobility

Mobility is the fruit of multiple pioneers who founded two cooperatives in Stans and Zurich in 1987 around the same time with the common aim of providing members with cost-effective, flexible and sustainable mobility. That means car sharing. Looking back, Rolf Fischer, co-founder of the AutoTeilet cooperative, says: “We wanted to make mobility sustainable.” Another co-founder, Conrad Wagner, adds: “We were driven from the beginning by the idea of reducing traffic volume while creating a mobility solution with sustainability in mind.” For ten years, the two cooperatives pursued these objectives separately, even though there were aspirations to bring about a merger early on. In 1997, it finally came to fruition: ATG AutoTeilet and ShareCom merged and jointly founded the Mobility Cooperative. Choosing the name “Mobility CarSharing Schweiz” was a conscious effort to position itself as a broad and innovative mobility solution for the whole of Switzerland. 

At first, only a few idealists took advantage of car sharing – at least compared with today. After all, there were 760 vehicles available for sharing at the time. In part because there was no budget for large advertising campaigns, an eye-catching shade of red was chosen for the cars so that they would stand out on the road. The service soon proved rather popular: the cooperative regularly more than doubled its growth in the first few years of operations.

So much has happened since Mobility was founded that listing everything here would be beyond the scope of this report. Nonetheless, here are a few highlights: in 2000, the cooperative and its 100 employees in Lucerne moved to Gütschstrasse. This was followed by a move to Rotkreuz in 2018. In 2006, the Click&Drive service (now called mobilityEASY) was launched in collaboration with SBB. One year later, the popular budget vehicle category became available and shortly thereafter the app, which can be used to make reservations. In 2014, the free-floating experiment in Basel was launched and discontinued eight years later. Since 2017, Mobility has had a presence in every Swiss municipality with more than 10’000 residents. In 2020, the cooperative set itself the goal of electrifying its entire fleet by 2030 and becoming climate neutral by 2040. By late 2022, 10 per cent of the fleet was electric. Looking back over Mobility’s history shows the cooperative is a success story and is destined to remain so. Time to set some new milestones.