Earth Angels: The Entrepreneur
The car-sharing business has made Zipcar cofounder Robin Chase a force in the drive to lessen fossil fuel's toll.
In 1999, Robin Chase was having a cup of coffee at a Cambridge bistro with a German friend named Antje Danielson when Danielson told her about a company back in Berlin that was wildly successful at renting cars by the hour. As a result of that conversation, Chase and Danielson founded Zipcar and set out to make good on the slogan "Wheels when you want them." At that point, carbon footprints and drowning polar bears were, for the most part, distant concerns for the driving public. "We knew it had environmental benefits, and for me, personally, I wouldn't have taken on the challenge if it didn't have those benefits," says Chase, 49, who lives in Cambridge. "But we knew at the time that the population didn't care about any of that, and that the company had to sell itself on its merits as self-interest."
Now, though, with global warming and emissions reduction at the top of many scientific, cultural, and political agendas, Zipcar and services like it (the company announced this month it would merge with Seattle-based Flexcar) have taken on a decidedly green hue. Susan Shaheen, who has a doctorate in ecology and is a researcher at the University of California, has studied car-sharing specifically for its impact on such environmental problems as air pollution and urban congestion. Her studies indicate that in the 17 American cities in which programs like Zipcar operate, each shared vehicle takes between six and 23 vehicles off the roads. The nearly 92,000 car-share members find that, on average, their miles driven drop from 5,295 to 369 per year, and somewhere between 11 and 26 percent of them end up selling the cars they owned before joining the service. 