The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the BMW Group today signed a Memorandum of Understanding to form a strategic partnership concerning urban mobility. It aims to expand the Hamburg based fleet of electrified DriveNow vehicles to around 550 by 2019. DriveNow is the car-sharing joint venture between the BMW Group and SIXT SE. Plans call for around 400 pure electric vehicles and about 150 plug-in hybrids. At the same time, Hamburg intends to provide a total of 1,150 charging points in stages by 2019 and will become the first city in Germany to offer a significant number of parking spaces for car-sharing and electric vehicles.
“With Hamburg as our strong partner, we want to continue expanding our highly-attractive options for sustainable individual mobility in the city and help improve environmental conditions in urban areas,” explained Peter Schwarzenbauer, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, responsible for MINI, Rolls-Royce, BMW Motorrad, Customer Engagement and Digital Business Innovation BMW Group. “DriveNow is already a genuine success story – in Hamburg and in other cities. I firmly believe this is an important step to win over even more users for electrified car-sharing,” Schwarzenbauer continued.
“Hamburg is preparing for future mobility with state-of-the-art technologies. We want to make traffic cleaner, quieter and more efficient, thereby improving quality of life in the city. To achieve this, we are developing intelligent traffic systems and promoting electro-mobility all across the city – for example, by expanding charging infrastructure. This expansion programme will create the conditions needed to operate one of the largest electrified car-sharing fleets. This cooperation with the BMW Group will play a major role in systematically expanding e-car-sharing services. Integrated e-car-sharing, combined with classic public transport solutions, will ensure that future urban passenger transport offers greater flexibility and capacity, even at peak times,” said Olaf Scholz, First Mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
Step-by-step implementation will get underway in the summer of this year to ensure that the availability of electrified vehicles and charging points develop in tandem.
“By the end of this year, we will have 200 BMW i3s available in the Hamburg fleet, almost three times as many as the 70 we currently have,” said DriveNow Managing Director Sebastian Hofelich. “For us and our partners, this initiative is important to learn how and under what conditions rapid electrification is possible,” Hofelich continued.
Hamburg and the BMW Group aim for this strategic partnership to leverage electro-mobility all across the city on the Elbe and lower overall vehicle emissions. At the same time, additional car-sharing options will ease inner-city traffic by optimising vehicle utilisation and reducing the number of miles driven by individual passenger cars.
The BMW Group competence centre for urban mobility was founded at the beginning of 2015. It aims to offer impulses and ideas, working together with cities and local mobility providers to develop sustainable concepts for urban mobility and sharing BMW Group solutions for innovative and scalable alternative concepts with the wider mobility sector. Hamburg offers an example of how cooperation between local authorities and private companies can lead to the active creation of innovative and sustainable mobility concepts.
