ABSTRACT
CarSharing is known as the professionally organized sharing of one or more vehicles by several users. The vehicles are not privately owned, but instead belong to the CarSharing organization (Millard-Ball et al. 2005). The idea of shared car-use originally emerged from self-organized, informal initiatives started by neighborhood communities. Sharing cars between neighbors or acquaintances shows a renaissance as a sort of private CarSharing but no longer falls strictly under the term CarSharing; the essential characteristic of CarSharing is the commercial nature of the offers presented by CarSharing organizations (Sakhdari 2006). The first CarSharing organization ShareCom, following the current understanding of the term, was started in Zurich in 1987. This was followed in 1988 by the first German CarSharing organization STATTAUTO in Berlin (Petersen 1995). The roots of this can be traced to what, at that time, was a new social orientation: the motivation to reduce costs and, more importantly, to reduce the fleet of cars caused by the congestion of the transport system, as well as the concept of sustainable and ecological forms of transport. It is therefore the purpose of CarSharing to enable a more efficient usage of available vehicles and to provide people with access to individual mobility in order to cover certain needs, despite to their decision to live without owning a car (Shaheen and Cohen 2007, Koss 2002, Wilke 2009).
