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Is car sharing profitable in 2025?
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Is car sharing profitable in 2025?

🚗💡 Is car sharing still a profitable business in 2025? Short answer – yes, if done right. From rising fleet costs to smarter user behavior and green transport trends, the shared mobility game is changing fast. Learn what makes a car sharing business work today – and why some succeed while others shut down. 👉 Real stories, data-backed tips, and practical advice for operators and mobility founders.

In 2024, the global car-sharing market was valued at approximately €8.9 billion, with Europe accounting for over 50.2% of that total. Analysts forecast it will grow at a CAGR of 11.8% between 2025 and 2033, reaching roughly €24.4 billion by 2033. This blend of urbanization, environmental regulation and a growing preference for flexible mobility continues to create fertile ground for operators - yet not every service finds a clear path to profitability.

Success hinges on your location, business model, fleet, operations and local market dynamics. There are strong success stories, but also many high-profile failures. Here’s a closer look at what really affects profitability in today’s car-sharing market - and what you can learn from real-world cases.

What makes a car-sharing business profitable?

Profitability in car sharing boils down to securing enough paid usage while keeping costs under control. Every unused hour or unnecessary expense erodes margins.

Key factors:

  • Fleet utilization – the most important metric. Cars need to be in use several hours each day to cover fixed costs.
  • Operational efficiency – cleaning, charging, relocation, maintenance and insurance add up quickly.
  • Fleet acquisition – leasing usually optimizes cash flow and scalability, but still carries fixed monthly expenses.
  • Pricing and competition – too low cuts margins; too high drives away users. Finding the right balance is essential.
  • Tech stack – a robust platform automates operations, improves customer experience and reduces support costs.

The operators who win are those who combine solid daily usage with lean operations.

❌ PANEK S.A. suspends its car-sharing service to focus on rental

29 March 2025 marked the end of Panek’s car-sharing experiment. Despite peaking at 2 700–3 000 vehicles, Panek never turned a profit in over seven years.

About Panek

  • Launch: Car sharing added in 2017 by Maciej Panek, entirely internally funded (no VC)
  • Fleet mix: City cars, hybrids, EVs, cargo vans and vintage models
  • 2023 acquisition: Regional Rent (+ 45% fleet), making Panek Poland’s largest integrated rental/operator

2024 performance

  • Revenue split: Car sharing ≈ 20 % of total. Traditional rental 80 %
  • Utilization: 0.7–1.0 rides/car/day
  • Maintenance & overhead: Up to €690/car-month
  • Profitability: Negative since inception

Why it failed

  1. Under-utilization: < 1 ride/day vs. ~ 2-4 rides/day needed to cover fixed costs
  2. Price wars: Fierce competition in Warsaw eroded margins and drove up customer-acquisition costs
  3. High OPEX: Parking, maintenance, insurance and vandalism pushed costs > €690 per car each month
  4. Tech drag: Two-year outsourced app development cycle meant poor UX and slow feature delivery
  5. No public support: Missed out on parking incentives or EV subsidies

Faced with persistent losses, Panek’s leadership refocused on profitable core segments: daily/weekly rentals, corporate leasing and Fleet-as-a-Service.

🚗 WiBLE Spain finds its profitable lane in Madrid

WiBLE (50/50 joint venture between Kia Europe and Repsol) launched in 2018 and has just closed its second consecutive year with positive EBITDA.

  • Fleet: 600+ plug-in hybrids (Kia Niro, XCeed, Ceed Tourer)
  • 2024 revenue: €6.93 million (+ 5% vs. 2023)
  • Usage: ~1 500 trips/day ⇒ 2.5 rides/car/day
  • Diversification: Monthly rentals (€599+) now 5% of revenue
  • Market share: ~19% of Madrid’s car-sharing market

Key enablers:

  1. Higher utilization – rides up 15% YoY, driving a 10% lift in core revenue
  2. Fleet scale efficiencies – added 150 vehicles in 2 years, lowering per-unit costs
  3. Service diversification – multi-day and monthly rental options opened new revenue streams

After five years of absorbing fixed-cost drag and depreciation, WiBLE now leverages Madrid’s regulatory environment (low-emission zones, parking benefits) and delivers lean, tech-driven operations.

🚗 SOCAR South Korea: scale + longer rentals

SOCAR (backed by SoftBank, SK Inc. and Lotte Group) operates 20 000 vehicles, generates nearly €300 million in annual turnover and has 20% of South Koreans signed up.

  • Model: Station-based, pay-per-minute with average rental duration of a whoping 12 hrs
  • Segmentation trick: Aging cars shift from on-demand sharing to long-term monthly rentals (10% of revenue), extending resale life with minimal depreciation impact

By pairing massive scale with savvy car lifecycle management, extra-long rental duration, SOCAR converts high utilization into robust profitability.

🚗 Carguru (Latvia)

30 August 2024: Carguru (est. 2017) acquired EV-focused OX Drive (est. 2021), adding 200+ Tesla to the fleet.

  • Growth: From just 30 cars and total budget below 500 000 EUR (2017) to over 1 000 cars (mid-2025) via leasing and strategic partnerships
  • 2023 turnover: €4 million; 435 000 trips (+35.9 %); 7 million km driven; profit €375 600

Outcome: A combined ICE, hybrid and EV fleet—backed by local expertise and strategic acquisitions - has driven strong growth and high utilization.

🎯 Core suggestions for aspiring operators

  1. Target 2–4 rides/day per vehicle
    • Leverage dynamic/off-peak pricing, B2B partnerships (hotels, offices) and event tie-ins.
  2. Contain OPEX via automation
    • Use predictive maintenance, remote diagnostics and gig-economy cleaning/relocation.
  3. Secure municipal support early
    • Negotiate parking incentives, EV charging access and low-emission zone permits.
  4. Choose your tech wisely
    • Build an in-house development team for full control with higher costs, or adopt a proven white-label platform for speed to market, stability and lower costs.
  5. Validate unit economics before scaling
    • Prove break-even utilization in one zone before expanding to others.

With clear benchmarks and smart execution - drawing on lessons from Panek, WiBLE, SOCAR and Carguru - car sharing can still be a highly profitable component of a modern mobility portfolio.

If you’re planning to start or improve your service, ATOM Mobility is ready to help. We’ve built the platform and supported dozens of teams worldwide - reach out, and we’ll share what we’ve learned.

Image credit: https://kursors.lv/2018/03/13/carguru-palielina-autoparku-un-paplasina-darbibas-zonas-mikrorajonos

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The new improved dashboard is launched 🎉The new improved dashboard is launched 🎉
The new improved dashboard is launched 🎉

After analysing thousands of rides and hundreds of feature recommendations, we are excited to launch brand new ATOM Mobility dashboard that will help you manage shared micro-mobility services even more successfully. We listened to customer requests and also evaluated trends in order to enrich the new dashboard with more functionalities and richer capabilities.

Read post

After analysing thousands of rides and hundreds of feature recommendations, we are excited to launch brand new ATOM Mobility dashboard that will help you manage shared micro-mobility services even more successfully. We listened to customer requests and also evaluated trends in order to enrich the new dashboard with more functionalities and richer capabilities.

With a new updated design, technological superpower and data centric approach you will not regret the minutes you spend working in the new dashboard. Plus, it works super fast, too 🚀

The dashboard includes some structural changes but more importantly, we have added:

✅  More layers to Rides, Vehicles and Customers to help you drill down to an individual level and track every activity happened to particular ride, vehicle or customer at every moment. For example, track when ride was paused and for how long and did the vehicle entered no-go zone during the ride;

✅  Comments. Leave comment for each vehicle or customer if needed so your team keep track record of everything that need to be done with the vehicle;

✅  Activity tracker. Track which commands, by whom and why are send to particular vehicle;

✅  Additional filters. You will find options to filter vehicles by vehicle models, statuses, battery, IoT signal and last ride within a given amount of hours. Mix and match these as you please. These are intended to quickly locate problematic vehicles and also get a good picture of your operations;

✅  More user roles. To help you find business partners and effectively manage existing employees, we have launched new user roles in the dashboard. Choose from 10 different roles with various access levels to your operations, statistics, and confidential information. 

💡 Clever insights. In addition, we are now also showing insights regarding average customer satisfaction with your service, rebalancing of vehicles not in use, and problems with IoT signals. This information combined with heatmaps will surely set you ahead of the game as you will have the necessary data to optimize your operations.

If you have any questions regarding the new dashboard or would like to start using our platform, contact us. Chose ATOM Mobility as your partner in the upcoming summer season and stay ahead of competition.

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New product, new business opportunities - flexible subscriptionsNew product, new business opportunities - flexible subscriptions
New product, new business opportunities - flexible subscriptions

Following the global trend of subscription based businesses and popularity of subscriptions in the micro-mobility space, ATOM Mobility introduces a new product - Subscriptions. Last summer Lime expanded its scooter subscription service LimePass to include daily and monthly passes. A monthly pass with five rides a day would cost around $16.99 and 10 rides a day for $29.99. It was only the beginning of a trend as other operators like Voi and Helbiz also launched their subscription offering and in some countries this type of offer is getting good traction.

Read post

Following the global trend of subscription based businesses and popularity of subscriptions in the micro-mobility space, ATOM Mobility introduces a new product - Subscriptions. Last summer Lime expanded its scooter subscription service LimePass to include daily and monthly passes. A monthly pass with five rides a day would cost around $16.99 and 10 rides a day for $29.99. It was only the beginning of a trend as other operators like Voi and Helbiz also launched their subscription offering and in some countries this type of offer is getting good traction.

Subscription offering is not stopping there with subscription based car rentals getting more popularity. Companies like Audi (Audi Select), Lexus (Lexus Complete Subscription), Porsche (Drive) and Sixt (Sixt+) are offering access to vehicles on a monthly subscription basis. This trend opens a completely new market for startups such as Borrow and Revolve. These companies are offering flexibility in choosing the car for a flat monthly fee with no long-term commitments.

Following this technological change in the market, ATOM Mobility is happy to support different types of businesses - does not matter if a subscription is just a nice-to-have feature in your vehicle sharing business or the whole business model relies on subscriptions only. 

Now you can offer unlimited access to vehicles that users can rent using subscriptions. Popular subscription types include daily, weekly, and monthly passes.  Set daily limits such as unlocks, ride minutes, pause minutes, and ride distance that are included in the subscriptions. Set an appealing price and watch your users benefit from this offer! You can create various types of subscriptions, launch them at any time and see statistics regarding the purchases and usage of the subscriptions, all from one place - ATOM dashboard.

First, ATOM Mobility launched the subscriptions feature in December 2020 adding significant improvements in January and February and planning to add even more features to this product in the future.

Interested to learn more about our subscription offering? Reach out to our sales team.

About ATOM Mobility

ATOM Mobility provides reliable and proven white label technology helping companies to launch and scale shared mobility platforms. Now serving customers in over 20 countries worldwide.

Blog
New partnership: Instant ID and driver licence verification powered by VeriffNew partnership: Instant ID and driver licence verification powered by Veriff
New partnership: Instant ID and driver licence verification powered by Veriff

With the growing number of shared scooters, bikes, mopeds and cars on our street, fraud-prevention and ID verification problems become highly important. Recently, several European cities required local operators to verify user identity even for shared kick-scooters. This may be a hard and time-consuming process, but not with Veriff.

Read post

With the growing number of shared scooters, bikes, mopeds and cars on our street, fraud-prevention and ID verification problems become highly important. Recently, several European cities required local operators to verify user identity even for shared kick-scooters. This may be a hard and time-consuming process, but not with Veriff.

In order to verify users’ identity and check that they have the necessary documents to enjoy shared mobility services, we have speed up the verification process by choosing automatic document reviews done by our partner Veriff.

Veriff's API enables ATOM Mobility to integrate verification processes directly to mobile apps making the process as smooth as possible for the rider. It takes less than 2 minutes for the Veriff to automatically verify the document.

How to add Veriff to your shared mobility app?

Super easy! Just open an account with them and let us know you would like to add verification to your app. Your users will be asked to verify their documents such as ID, passport, driver’s license before taking their first ride. You can choose which type of documents has to be submitted. The process is straightforward and you will not have to worry about anything. Users will submit photos of their documents and Veriff will do the rest notifying your clients of the verification process and outcome.

About Veriff

Veriff is building the infrastructure for trust online, they allow any website and mobile application to match a person with their government-issued ID. With the help of artificial intelligence, Veriff analyses thousands of technological and behavioral variables in seconds, verifying people from 190+ countries.

About ATOM Mobility

ATOM Mobility provides reliable and proven white label technology helping companies to launch and scale shared mobility platforms. Now serving customers in over 18 countries worldwide.

Blog
Handbook: How to launch your scooter and bike sharing operations before summer 2021Handbook: How to launch your scooter and bike sharing operations before summer 2021
Handbook: How to launch your scooter and bike sharing operations before summer 2021

Summer season in Europe is approaching - it is exactly the best time for most companies and entrepreneurs to enter the shared micromobility market. We have put together a useful handbook for everyone who still plans to start operations before Summer 2021. Yes, you still have time and using our guidelines you can be ready to launch in 1-3 months even if at the moment you have just the idea.

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Summer season in Europe is approaching - it is exactly the best time for most companies and entrepreneurs to enter the shared micromobility market. We have put together a useful handbook for everyone who still plans to start operations before Summer 2021. Yes, you still have time and using our guidelines you can be ready to launch in 1-3 months even if at the moment you have just the idea. 

What you'll discover inside this handbook:

- Business model. Different vehicle sharing business models and how to calculate the total costs and revenues;

- Financing. If you start a new venture, you can learn how other entrepreneurs get funded;

- Operations. What else you need to think about in terms of daily operations.

Click here to grab your free PDF guidehttp://bit.ly/atommobility-handbook

👍 Have some questions? We are here to help you with all the challenges you will face. ATOM Mobility provides reliable and proven white label technology helping entrepreneurs to focus on marketing and operations. Now serving customers in over 18 countries worldwide.

Check what our customers are saying: Story of RideStory of QickStory of GOON

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