Innovations in car rental services provided by German companies
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- Innovations in car rental services provided by German companies
Up to this day, a
car rental service has made a significant progress. It may seem like it is unreal to surprise customers of rental companies. However, it turned out it was possible after all. It was done by the guys who work with the German company called SIXT who along with BMW employees have successfully started to develop the product with a catchy name
DriveNow. What do a German car and a German bicycle have in common? No, it is not that they both have wheels and steering wheels. It is about the rental system. You can easily have a convenient and flexible car rental system using the app on your smartphone and a keycard. Only BMW cars are available for rental and they are equipped with special electronics for the convenience of use. The rental cost includes mileage, fuel consumption and an insurance policy in the event of unexpected circumstances. You can park the car in any designated place: in a supermarket parking lot, in an industrial area or on the roadside in the city center. In Berlin, for instance, there are more than 1000 facilities where you can quickly rent cars; all you have to do is to fill out some documents online for signing a short-term rental agreement.
SIXT is a large corporation with serious goals. Its staff is more than 6000 people in 100 countries of the world. These people are the ones responsible for the modernization of public transport and traffic in the city. The company was founded back in 1912 by Martin Sixt, a car enthusiast and innovator, who in 1951 started offering cars for rental from his own collection. Over the next few decades, the company opened its branches near each major airport in Germany. This step provided the company with quick and constant profits. Nowadays, SIXT has occupied 30 % of the rental-car market in Germany. It provides more than 70 % of the entire company’s profits. The excess profit is spent by company’s management on developing and implementing new types of services and one of them is DriveNow. New technologies and simplification of transport accessibility – this is the main goal of SIXT for the next decades.
The main advantages of the system are: - Car availability;
- Paperwork for rental is done quickly;
- No attachment to the car parking place;
- High reliability of German cars;
- Convenience of driving.
The representatives of a “classic” automotive industry such as the leading car manufacturer companies BMW and Daimler will receive a strong argument in the fight against new technologies in mechanical engineering. For instance, Google LLC, who has been working on developing an autonomous car, can lose a sales race to large car concerns that will introduce more flexible and simple possibilities for owning an auto for the masses.
