How to Save Money and the Environment

“Carpooling.com began as a stu­dent project at the University of Würzburg for Michael Reinicke, Matthias Siedler and myself,” Carpooling.com co-founder Stefan Weber told Organic Connections. “The desire to final­ly­commit to it full time came from the clear need for a solu­tion to con­ges­tion, expen­sive travel, and the under­used resource of empty car seats in thou­sands of jour­neys made every day. We had the vision that mobil­ity would change rapidly in the next cou­ple of years.”

Just a few short years later, Carpooling.com has become the largest car­pool­ing net­work in Europe, with 3.4 mil­lion reg­is­tered users who have access to more than 600,000 rides. There are 2 mil­lion unique users per month, and the ser­vice con­nects rid­ers and dri­vers in 5,000 cities in 9 coun­tries in 7 lan­guages. Through a com­puter, smart­phone or iPhone, any­one in Europe or the UK can con­nect with a lift, or with poten­tial pas­sen­gers if they wish to drive.

Made easy and con­ve­nient, car­pool­ing is for the first time a viable alter­na­tive to pub­lic trans­port in Europe. “The con­ve­nience and pri­vacy of a car is always attrac­tive ver­sus pub­lic trans­port, but the cost can some­times be pro­hib­i­tive,” said Weber. “Carpooling can reduce trans­port costs by up to 75 per­cent, which nat­u­rally makes it an afford­able and viable option. With our site, you can select the pas­sen­gers or dri­ver you wish, travel in the com­fort of a car and save money, which makes it very appeal­ing to our sub­scribers. We are giv­ing peo­ple alter­na­tive options, and in areas with no pub­lic trans­port we are the per­fect solu­tion. We also find that dur­ing pub­lic trans­port strikes our sub­scriber num­bers increase.”

The three founders began as stu­dents in their native Germany with a rideshar­ing site called mitfahrgelegenheit.de. Its pop­u­lar­ity grew quickly, gar­ner­ing 41,000 reg­is­tered users in its first year. As they worked on the site in their spare time, Reinicke decided to pur­sue a doc­tor­ate in infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and cloud com­put­ing, Weber went to work for Yahoo! as a senior prod­uct man­ager, and Siedler began a career with Akamai Technologies as a tech­ni­cal project manager.

After com­plet­ing his doc­tor­ate in 2006, Reinicke decided to pur­sue work in the com­pany full time to help develop its max­i­mum busi­ness poten­tial. Weber fol­lowed suit in 2007, and by 2009 Siedler had also come fully on board. With the three founders com­pletely com­mit­ted to their cause, things began to move very quickly.

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Following a ven­ture cap­i­tal invest­ment in 2009 and a part­ner­ship with German auto­mo­bile club ADAC, the site saw more suc­cess than ever. In 2010, they decided to expand mitfahrgelegenheit.de into an inter­na­tional net­work, and Carpooling.com was born.

For us here in the US, Carpooling.com may soon be assist­ing in unclog­ging traf­fic from our cities as well. “The USA is a very com­pelling mar­ket for us,” Weber remarked. “It’s a coun­try where peo­ple value con­ve­nient and afford­able ser­vices, they are very mobile, and there is a lot of polit­i­cal focus aimed at reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions. In some states, traf­fic con­ges­tion is very high and pub­lic trans­port is quite unre­li­able. The USA also embraces inno­v­a­tive ideas when they make sense.”

But prob­a­bly the biggest coup of all for Carpooling.com is what it has saved both for trav­el­ers and for the envi­ron­ment. “Since its incep­tion, we have helped save 323 mil­lion liters [just over 85 mil­lion gal­lons] of fuel and pre­vented 630,000 tons of CO₂ from enter­ing the atmos­phere,” Weber said. “We have also helped our users save 750 mil­lion euros and avoid 90,000 kilo­me­ters [just under 56,000 miles] of traf­fic, and all with a few clicks of a mouse or smartphone.”

For more infor­ma­tion, visit www.carpooling.com.