Not owning a car and my carsharing experience

I do not own a car. 😲 Shocker. Even though we moved out of the city (Cologne) we did not buy a car yet. This area is not as bike-friendly as I would like it to be, but it works for us with the current circumstances.

Not owning a car does not mean I am not using a car. The Deutsche Bahn is just a bad joke. Too late, not coming at all, or just not enough train stations in the areas we want to go. Also, often it is super expensive! I would love to use it more, but it does not always work.

Anyway, I do not want to own a car. A pile of metal that will cost me a good amount of money every day and will just be used 2 times a week for a couple of hours.

Therefore I am a big fan of carsharing. But most people only know these free-floating models. These are cars you can just book via an app and you can park them anywhere later as long as you are in a distinct area. Mostly more or less neat to the city center.

But there is also a station-based car sharing and the one I am using is called cambio. The only downside for station-based cars is, you have to go to the station. Now that is a ~15 minute/4,7 km bike ride from our home. But the huge benefit: winter/summer tires, oil change, cleaning, gas, repairs, everything is taken care of. Everything is already included.

They seem to have the most presence in the west of Germany. But I bet there are other good competitors out there.

Let us get into some numbers because that might be interesting for you if you live near a station. I hope this helps you to decide if you want to buy a car or use a service like this.

In 2023:

• I rented a car 19 times
• for a total of 612:20 hours of booking time
• drove 4.927 km
• paid 2.117,13 Euro (including gas, kilometers, taxes, everything)

The average yearly kilometers per car in Germany is about 12670 km. This would be about times 2.5 and then the year would have cost me 5292 Euros.
Now, do not forget that this includes gasoline, tires, repairs, etc. Everything.
Another thing that would make the price drop a bit is switching to their COMFORT plan. That would lower the price as well.

In total from 30.06.2018 to today 16.03.2024:

• I rented a car 77 times
• for a total of 2131:33 hours of booking time
• drove 15.127 km
• paid 5.810,89 Euro (including gas, kilometers, taxes, everything)

Data for you

Since it might help to get a feeling, here is my whole history and the cost for each renting time. We used the cambio for vacations, weekend trips, and day trips.

That is it. I hope this lets you think about buying a car or going for a local station-based car-sharing solution.

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