Above, STAITAUTO's stand alone key access box. Inside the modernistic box are roof racks and baby/ children's car seats thdt may be used in the carsharing cars. The electronic key access system uses energy from the solar collector and water is collected in the roof basin for washing one's hands. Page 48 RAIN Summer 1996 Volume XV, Number 1 3. You have to allow hourly rental. 4. You have to charge for every kilometer or every mile. You can't say 500 km are included in a price which is normal for car rental agencies... The ECS did other things: like make contracts with the insurance companies and make a contract with Opal-GM for buying cars at better rates. And ECS communicated with people like you in the US, Scandinavia, Japan and all over to spread the idea. The first aim of ECS is to spread carsharing. And we had the contract with the railway system for an ACTION WEEK in Germany. This was a contact to other mobility systems... another important aim of the ECS. We want to do another ACTION WEEK in Autumn 1996 again with the railway system, but this time not only in Germany, but in Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands, all in"'one week. The railway companies are interested and they will finance it again. Letting members use carsharing cars from other cities was organized from the beginning. For every user it is important. We are not a big company all over Europe like Avis. We are local. It was not so easy because of insurance... so we built a special contract with a lawyer. Members do this very often. They call us and we make sure the car is waiting for them in the other city. The billing is done via the companies, not via the user. So if a Berlin user wants to drive in Cologne, he phones us and we fax to the Cologne people saying Mr. X is coming. He drives the Cologne car and the Cologne carsharing group charges STATTAUTO Berlin, not him. We charge him, because we know him. If he doesn't want to pay, we can do something. Cologne doesn't know him and it would be very difficult for them to reach him and get the money. And for the consumer/user, it is better to pay it in the normal bill. He has one mobility bill with the railway tickets, taxi rides, and the use of the car in another city. DJ: How do users pay? CP: Most users allow us to take the money from the Postbank or bank. If they don't, they get a normal bill. It is not a big problem because we have lOOODM of theirs [the deposit]. We always have something. DJ: If they don't pay, their membership gets cut off and you take it out of the deposit? CP: Yes, of course. Next time they want to call, the reservations people tell them they are no longer a member. DJ: How do you take care of the cars? CP: We have 31 stations now in Berlin and at every station we have one participant who takes care of the cars. He fills out the kilometer sheets and sends them to us. He washes the car weekly and lo9ks after the car. He is a participant who lives very near, so he can look when he goes shopping or something. And he gets a little money for that, 60DM per month per car. He has a list every week of what he has done, and he looks after the oil and all that. When a car has damage he just phones us. Twice a year, he brings the car to
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