In 2013, after an initial pilot period, Bremen’s Senate Department for Environment, Construction and Transport managed to reduce its CO2 emissions from business-related travel, while also lowering costs by replacing its own fleet of vehicles with membership to a local car-sharing service. The CO2 emissions of the car-sharing fleet are much lower than the city’s fleet average.

The Department previously owned (or leased) a fleet of 11 cars, but the utilisation rate was low, with most cars used less than three hours a day. The CO2 emissions of the department's fleet were high, and staff costs related to fleet management and maintenance were also a concern.

The city negotiated with the provider to make more cars available at the closest car-sharing station. By switching to a local car-sharing service with an online booking system, Bremen has access to a more flexible and efficient fleet of vehicles, including electric vehicles, and saves on costs in terms of servicing, parking fees and staff management time. Using the external car-sharing service was no more expensive overall than maintaining leased or owned cars. An expense that is often overlooked is staff costs related to the fleet. As well as fleet management, it takes expensive staff time to take cars for maintenance, to the car-wash etc. When using a carsharing operator, vehicle servicing is included in the overall costs - therefore no additional staff time is required to take care of the cars.

The 2013 fleet of the wider municipal administration had an average CO2 emissions level of 141 g/km CO2. The fleet of the Car-Sharing operator (including vans etc.) shows an average of 107 g/km CO2 in 2014 and of 102 g/km CO2 in 2015). The full costs including all taxes reduced from 45.5 cents/km (own fleet, not including human resources) and 39.8 cents/km in 2008 (car-sharing usage) to 35.9 cents/km in 2015 (carsharing usage). While provinding much higher cost transparency for car usage, car-sharing fleets with their range of vehicles showed that they are a good starting point to add in also super-clean cars with limited performance (e.g. electric cars) – as the user has the choice for every trip.

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