The CarSharing Association is pleased to announce that Enterprise CarShare is now a CSA member. Both Enterprise CarShare and the Enterprise Rent-A-Car brand are owned and operated by Enterprise Holdings, the largest car rental company in the world and the most comprehensive service provider in the industry. The company – which acquired Autoshare in March – offers Enterprise CarShare with a suite of products and policies specifically geared to the car-sharing customer experience. Today, Enterprise CarShare is available on more than 75 university campuses, 40 government and business campuses, and in approximately 20 major markets.
Enterprise Holdings also operates a leading carpooling and vanpooling program for commuters, Enterprise Rideshare. In addition, it offers an online ride-matching program – Zimride by Enterprise – that connects hundreds of thousands of drivers and passengers, while partnering with colleges and universities to facilitate transportation-management solutions. In fact, Enterprise has been delivering transportation alternatives right where people live and work since 1957, an early example of today’s “collaborative consumption” trend. In 1997, it trademarked the term Virtual Car® and began featuring the “virtual car” concept in a Toronto newspaper ad.
The Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels was established in 2007 to create the next generation of alternative fuel technologies from environmentally sound plant and algal sources, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on non-renewable resources. Enterprise also works with the Arbor Day Foundation and the United States Forest Service to plant 1 million trees every year throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom as part of the Enterprise 50 Million Tree Pledge. Supported by a $50-million commitment from Enterprise, the private/public/nonprofit partnership already has resulted in nearly 9 million trees being planted in areas suffering damage from wildfires and other natural disasters (an interactive map of the plantings is available online).
Enterprise Holdings currently partners with the Initiative for Environmental Global Leadership (IGEL) organization at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and recently commissioned a Special Report on Innovation and Urban Mobility outlining the opportunities and challenges of carsharing, bikesharing, ridesharing and public transit. The company sponsored this report not only because it operates the largest fleet in the world (more than one million passenger vehicles), but also more than 6,000 neighborhood and airport rental locations located within 15 miles of 90 percent of the U.S. population.
For more information about Enterprise Holdings’ initiatives, please see its most recent Corporate Sustainability Report – or its www.DrivingFutures.com website, which articulates the company’s long-term strategic principles and holds it accountable.