Ford car-sharing comes to London with GoDrive

Ford has launched a small scale car sharing scheme in London – Ford GoDrive- offering a one-way car sharing service with pay per minute and free parking.

As cities get more and more congested – and more and more expensive to drive in – car makers are looking for ways to keep the car relevant whilst addressing the lack of appetite to take a car in to cities like London.

Daimler’s Car2Go was an early arrival in the easy car sharing space in London, offering easy access to a fleet of Smart cars, but they shut up shop a year ago declaring that UK drivers weren’t ready for car sharing.

But BMW are pushing quite hard with their DriveNow car sharing scheme, offering a fleet of MINIs and BMWs for one-way trips in London, and have recently added 30 BMW i3 EVs to the fleet to make it even more appealing. And now it’s the turn of Ford to turn up the dial on their car sharing scheme in London.

After months of experiment with an invited audience to get a feel for what car sharers in London want, Ford has launched GoDrive, initially available to 2,000 users free of charge, offering a fleet of Fords – half of which are Focus EVs – that are paid for by the minute and offer one-way trips in the capital with free parking at the end.

The new GoDrive service will have an initial fleet of 50 cars, available from major transport hubs, like Waterloo and Victoria stations, with the first five minutes free and the rest of your journey charged by the minute – with all costs, including congestion charge where relevant – included. Not only that, but at the equivalent of £10 an hour all in, Ford’s GoDrive is half the cost of BMW’s DriveNow.

Ford are calling this a ‘Beta’ service, and are looking to enhance and improve it with feedback from users. They clearly hope it will grow to be more successful than Car2Go was in London, so if you want to be part of the experiment you can sign up, free of charge, at https://www.go-drive.com/.