The faux-car-lite ambitions of P2P car-sharing services in SG (a la BlueSG)

Car-sharing: one of the cornerstones for Singapore’s car-lite ambitions. There are broadly two types: round trip (A-to-A) and one-way (A-to-B, Point-to-Point/P2P). There are a couple of round trip car-sharing services (and even getting more!), but for P2P, only one remains in Singapore: BlueSG. There was another older one called Smove, but they went bust in mid-2020 “due to COVID”/ “because gahmen did not deem them as essential services (or so they claimed)”. Of course, this article touches mainly on point A-to-B services, and very much pointedly on BlueSG, as it is the one and only A-B car-sharing operator left in Singapore, and it is fair to say that it is synonymous with A-B car-sharing service in SG in general.

Inherent problems with P2P

Non-homogenous driving patterns

Here’s the thing about people commuting to and fro work (assuming without COVID):

• In the morning, people usually drive out of their homes to drive into workplace carparks.
• In the evening, people usually drive out of their workplaces back into house carparks.
• In addition: houses are typically zoned in locations distinct from workplaces/business parks

From there, you can say that the inflow and outflow (and its demand) of each station is different and very asymmetrical across different times of the day.

Which, if you can imagine further, results in cars just parked in mainly workplaces and business parks in working weekday, and then parked mainly in residential areas after working hours… which is almost no different than drivers driving their own car to work, and then back home after knock off.

The only time where this asymmetry is somewhat less true is on a weekend — but that is assuming that everyone is driving to someone else’s house for a visit. In reality, most will be driving to shopping malls instead on a weekend. Which works well, only if there are ample amount of cars in the mall in the first place. More on that in later sections.

By some common sense, the below list ranks the locations with most homogeneous inflow and outflow, to least. That is, the station where we can expect almost equal inflow and outflow, to the least expected, assuming wide usage of car-sharing services:

1. Airport (pre-COVID) (almost any time)
2. Shopping Malls (mainly weekends)
3. Residential Estates (asymmetric on weekdays, may have some homogeneity on weekends)
4. Workplaces (nearly 0 during weekends, very asymmetric on weekdays)

Which then leads to the next problem:

Lack of revenue due to displaced cars

Let us explore the previous angle further: so everyone living in, say, Punggol, all take their BlueCars out in the morning to go to work (be it to stations in CBD, Orchard, Airport) — and that is it. The cars will essentially be “stuck there” until evening, except maybe for lunch time where some may just drive around to get some food (which may be less of a case for BlueSG, which I will touch on later). By being “stuck”, means little demand for the cars in that duration until knock-off time, which means no revenue. Here is a very rough sketch of how the revenue earned in a typical car during a typical pre-COVID weekday may look like

Rough typical utility for A-B services on typical weekday

In comparison, this is how a typical A-A utility may look like (whether or not if user actually drives the car or parked it elsewhere):

Typical Utility for A-A sharing per car on average

It is no brainer that A-B car will, more often than not, typically has lesser utility than A-A car, when averaged out over days.

To combat this asymmetry, one immediate solution is to rebalance the fleet. Just get some crew to take the cars out of CBD and park into residential areas in the morning peak, and then do the same but reverse direction in the evening peak! Alas, there is a huge cost in doing so:

• Cost for hiring N ‘chauffeurs’ and N * x ‘rebalancers’, where N is the number of stations to rebalance and x is the number of cars per station (on average) to rebalance
• Fuel cost to pick up rebalancers (or they may even take taxi/PHV in the end!)
• Even if the approach is to use tow, it is also costly, and probably three times slower to rebalance than just using the former approach.

Fleet rebalancing is what Smove had done (also because they allowed pre-bookings well in advanced, hence they had to fulfil those commitments)… and well, they initially did find success in their model — back when they can command premium car-sharing fees, but when they lowered their prices in 2019… well we saw what happened to them in 2020.

Which is why BlueSG does little to no rebalancing.

Not to mention, fleet rebalancing utterly destroys the notion of car-lite society leading to sustainable environment, for close to twice the emissions are being emitted to rebalance the fleet, than if the drivers drove to work (and back home) on their own.

The only other approach is then apparent from the utility graph above: to have something like A-A elements in the pricing model, which is what BlueSG has done with their 2/3/5hour packages. But it comes with an existential problem — by adopting such pricing model, isn’t it slowly turning its back towards its original goal of serving A-B service? More will be touched on later.

Residential lots >> workplaces/shopping lots

Compounding this asymmetrical inflow and outflow problem is that more often than not, there are far more stations in residential areas than in workplaces and shopping malls — especially in Singapore. Simply because it is easier to negotiate with the government who is ‘committed to car-lite society’ for lots in HDB carparks or open-air (URA) carparks. Shopping malls and business parks? Almost all are privately owned… and more often than not, these shopping malls already have problems with parking during peak hours. Business parks already have huge backlog in their carpark waitlist. Why would they want to give up their precious lots to this car-sharing company, without any beneficial quid-pro-quo?

In the case of BlueSG, their problem is compounded by the cost of installing their EV station — in which the mall would later have no control over, and practically none of the public can use, unlike other EV station providers (not car-sharing ones). Even if BlueSG bears the entire cost of installing 4 new EV lots, there’s opportunity costs incurred on the part of the mall/biz park operator. And all for what…? 4 lots. When they already have problems accommodating parking.

That is why in the case of BlueSG, you see virtually zero lots in major business parks, except for Fusionopolis One and JTC Summit which are owned by JTC — statutory board. CBD lots are typically found on roadsides — which are managed by URA and already quite a precious commodity, and nope, almost none in Orchard Road or shopping malls for that matter, save for Plaza Singapura. But PS is owned by CapitalandMall, and indeed another few of their malls also have BlueSG station, but CapitalandMall malls are exceptions rather than the norm. As well as RWS — which has massive number of lots. Only other exceptions are the airport and a single hospital (TTSH), which again, because they serve a public good, and henceforth they are likely to be officially on board with whatever “car-lite society” programmes that LTA is pushing, given that BlueSG initiatives are backed by LTA.

Even the now-defunct Smove had difficulty securing lots in CBD. In fact they had only one, in Guoco Tower, before they closed it months before they went defunct.

Constrained number of lots per station

In BlueSG User Group, there’s people who always complained why BlueSG no increase their number of cars. Here’s another uncomfortable truth about P2P car-sharing: the number of lots available must be much, much more than the number of active cars (not total cars — cars idling in workshop no count) in the fleet. NOT 1:1 ratio. Here’s a illustration why:

Imagine at 1:1 scenario…. How is the car able to move to another lot?

“How to move? All 0 avail lots!”, says the light-blue driver in a doomed P2P car-sharing scheme

Now imagine 1.5:1. Even then, it requires more people to be driving simultaneously, and that all of them have completely different destinations at that time frame. Otherwise, at least half of them will never be able to get their destinations, and have to resort to parking elsewhere. In reality, in a plainly A-B situation, it is almost impossible for all cars to be driven at the same time.

Typical scenario if there are still insufficient lots

Some thought that 2:1 is the golden ratio. That is likely true if:

number of lots in residential ~= number of lots in workplaces ~= number of lots in shopping malls

In reality, there needs to be much more lots than number of cars available.

The advantage that Smove had was that their fleet are just normal gasoline cars, which means that they can ‘overload’ their allotment of lots in many of their locations. E.g. if there’s more demand for returning to HDB carpark in the evening, they can ask the drivers to park in another nearby non-Smove parking lot, input the lot number, and then should the car be rented out again, the next person can just look for the lot and unlock the car. I once saw 6 Smove cars parked in my HDB estate, 3 more than their allotted ‘green lots’.

So if you think about it, without any administrative bounds, the number of lots that Smove can potentially occupy is probably >10 times more than their fleet — per parking location. Of course any carpark operator wouldn’t allow that, but this is just an illustration leading to the next point —

Not so for BlueSG, whereby due to the rather low battery capacity of their cars, the BlueCar must be docked to a lot, and henceforth they cannot ‘overload’ their parking allotment. The fact that BlueSG’s BlueCars had to be docked raises further problems, to be uncovered later.

Now that we have talked about the primary problem of P2P car-sharing, it is only appropriate to explore what BlueSG, currently the only P2P car-sharing operator in Singapore, does, and explore the issues that is unique to BlueSG’s operating model.

What BlueSG Did

In addition to just being a P2P operator

Introduce longer-rental packages

To recap, here’s how utility of a P2P car looks like on a given weekday

As you can see, there’s much idle time in between morning peak and evening peak. How do we decrease the idle time then? One way is to incentivise longer rental duration, and that is why BlueSG introduced 2/3/5 hour rental packages.

This concept is not new; in fact, Smove’s default operation was to rent in blocks of 3/6/12 hours, with only their pure P2P operations (Super Short Rental) only coming out later as a way to reduce their costs of fleet rebalancing.

Initially, BlueSG introduced these packages only during off-peak hours (weekdays mid-noon). However, ever since Circuit Breaker (SG’s form of lockdown) ended, they had opened up these packages for use almost every day, with some tweaks to their packages and availability in October. While that may have helped increase their revenue, it also brought out a new set of problems.

Problems of BlueSG

In addition to the problems of P2P car-sharing in general

Even severe lack of cars with all-day rental packages

Sure, having all-day packages helps to increase utility during pre-COVID weekdays. But whether COVID or not, what happens if, say, 5-hour packages are also offered on weekends?

As mentioned before, unlike weekdays, inflow and outflow demand in each station during weekends in general are a little higher, and more homogenous. Meaning to say, there’s a much greater chance to see demand for cars at any time during weekends.

Now, imagine what will happen if 5-hour packages are opened for weekends:

Typical demand vs supply on a weekend with the damning 3/5 hour packages avail

In the context of BlueSG, this is what happened. Compounded by the fact that:

• Smove is no longer around, and:
• Renting 5 hours from BlueSG ($49.90 incl. everything) is essentially better than renting from even its cheapest return trip operator, TribeCar, during weekends (~$40 but must ownself fuel)

It is no surprise that demand is sky high on weekends! A good number of stations — both in residential and shopping centres — are seeing 1 to 0 available cars, simply because many are renting the BlueCars for 5 hours, and they are not even docking at shopping centres/CBD food areas!

This is worse than a pre-package era weekend, as at least without packages, one will still see some cars available after the previous users had docked their cars in the destination. With these 3/5 hour packages, users are essentially ‘hogging’ the cars, as these cars are never docked until the end of the package. After September, BlueSG did tweak to allow only 3 hour packages on weekends, and additionally disallow any packages for the end year festive season, but the problem still stays.

Which brings about the existential problem that BlueSG (and LTA) needs to address

Existential problem: Does P2P really work?

Let us walk back what P2P is — it is plainly to get the user from point A to B. A pure form will be without any frills or interruptions in between. Outside of car ownership, PHV and taxis fulfil such P2P almost purely, since they do bring a user from one point to another with minimal to zero first mile/last mile. BlueSG is also launched with pure point A to B in mind.

Car-sharing advocates have also used the notion that car ownership is wasteful, given that owned cars are parked in garages (home or workplaces) about >12 hours per day, and car-sharing, particularly A-B kinds, minimizes such wastage, by ensuring that each shared car are ‘on the move’ most of the time by different users throughout the day.

However, with the introduction of these 2/3/5 hour packages even during peak periods, car hogging still exists, those who really wanted to use BlueCar just to move to one point to another cannot (more often than not) on weekends, and it appears that BlueSG is very much on board with this plan, one can’t help but wonder, if that means that the very notion of pure P2P is a failure, that they have to rely on such packages to augment their revenue?

If that is the case, can BlueSG still be considered P2P? It feels as if it is turning into yet another Smove.

But at least in former Smove, they allowed pre-bookings — which is why a seasoned user would know that it is impossible to get any car during weekends, well in advanced. But Smove never boasted itself to be a pure P2P operator.

And yet, BlueSG can never be like Smove, for they face the next few problems:

Longer downtimes from charging

In the good old days of Smove, even with the Super Short Rentals, a car will almost immediately be available for rent after return. Even in pre-packages era of BlueSG, cars are typically available for rental immediately after previous users return, simply because cars were used just to get from point A to B, without any additional usage in between. Thus, even if the user drives between Jurong to Changi Airport, it is about 45km, thus still leaving lots of charge left for the next user to use.

However, ever since BlueSG introduced all day 2/3/5 hour packages, there is always a good chance that a car would have travelled even greater distances than if used purely for P2P. Unlike Smove, whereby a full tank lasts about 450–600km, a BlueSG’s full battery charge or “full tank” can only last about 200km. BlueSG also mandates that car must be returned with at least 30% charge. Thus, it is not surprisingly that more cars are being returned with levels dangerously close to 30%, or in some instances, even below 30%.

Now, unlike Smove, where the car type is gasoline and can be refuelled easily at the nearest gas station (they even mandate their users to do so!), BlueCars need to be charged. To compound the problem, BlueCars uses AC charging, i.e. slow charging, hence they need even longer times to charge from, say, empty to full, probably 5–6 hours or more.

As such, should the car be returned with close to, or even lesser than 30%, the car will be “redded out”, i.e. not available for rent, until the charge returns to about 40+ to 50%, which typically takes another hour or two. With the introduction of all-day hourly packages, the unavailability of cars is much longer than just 2/3/5 hours, after factoring charging time.

Not to mention that since the BlueCar can be rented again only after the car has about 40–50% charge, this has the domino effect of the car not holding enough charge — again — after the next rental, and so on, in which then the problem of having to wait for the car to be charged again propagates down the line.

In the good old times of no packages, I hardly see a car with <80% charge. Now, ~50% is all too common, especially weekends

Apart from problems linked to the fundamental P2P problems, here are problems that are unique to BlueSG’s model:

Even longer downtimes (due to indiscriminate usage arising from no dashcam)

Nowadays, when I trawl the pages of BlueSG Users Group or even SGRV/RoadSG, I occasionally see photos of:

• Silly accidents
• Damaged returns — but still available for rent (i.e. previous user never report damage)
• Damaged interiors
• Car keys stolen (motivation is similar to personal padlocks on bike-sharing)
• BlueCars parked and stuck over ledges or stoppers — but still available for rent

Speechless. Photo Credit: BlueSG Users Group FB

Every car-sharing has their problems of such inconsiderate usage, but it seems that BlueSG has a far greater share of such problems. The reason is simple: there is no dashcam, nor is there any mechanism to hold users directly accountable for their usage of BlueSG service. With BlueSG gaining even greater visibility and exposure, trolls will inevitably troll, and without any way to hold users directly accountable (especially the lack of dashcam), that is why trolls achieve big success.

I have highlighted this problem since 2018, and then again in early 2020 in my HWZ blogs, alas, nothing was done to address this.

No matter what, if there is significant damage, the car cannot be rented out, it will be “redded out”, and the fleet technician has to be sent down to tow or move the vehicle away. This results in even longer downtime for those affected cars, sometimes lasting days or even weeks as these cars have to be “docked” in Indeco Engineering until the damage is repaired.

There are even inconsiderate actions from non-BlueSG users, but that can also affect BlueSG usage, such as non-BlueSG cars parked in BlueSG lots. For that, the user has to call customer service to get green light to park in another normal lot, and then later the user has to report this to carpark management. BlueSG will then have to send someone down to retrieve the car and dock — only after the offending non-BlueSG car is moved out of the lot, which increases downtime and complexities as well.

Maybe better solution to deal with errant non-BlueSG users? (Photo Credit: Mothership, ComplaintSG, BlueSG Users Group)

(In recent times though, there had been cases where, having failed to reach BlueSG customer services after repeated calls, the user simply parked the car directly in front of the offending car, and docked. Which may seem not legal, but it is actually far more effective than the former scenario!)

Sky high car insurance excess

Update 4th Jan 2022: On Jan 3rd 2022, BlueSG revised their T&Cs. One major change is the excess charges, which have increased significantly, to $5000 for experienced drivers, and $8000 for new drivers — in each direction (own excess and third party excess)! This means that should you be a new driver, you are liable to pay up to $16000 in excess! All the more, penny wise pound foolish! Or 1/4 BitCoin foolish (as of this writing). $16000 can get a decent, 1-year remaining COE car, just saying.

$.33 per min, $8 per month, only $15 from Jurong to Changi — sounds like a cheap proposition, no? In the midst of getting overly excited over how cheap the P2P drive costs, what many users failed to remember is the sky high excess that BlueSG charges.

All is good and dandy, provided that one does not get into accidents. But if one does, whether it is his/her fault or not, he/she is still liable to pay $2000, each, for damages to BlueCar and/or damage to other party’s car/property damages, in addition to any other fees incurred. Worse if one is a young driver (<27 age), or inexperienced driver (<2 years driving experience), whereby the excess is $5000 for each scenario.

So, if an inexperienced driver gets into an accident with a third party, it is immediately up to $10000 out of the box! Whether it is the driver’s fault or not. Sure, if months of investigations determines that it is not the driver’s fault, these excesses would be refunded, but still, the driver must live with a negative cashflow of $10000 for months. And with no dashcam in BlueCar, good luck on the part of the BlueSG driver to prove innocence.

It must be noted that on the A-A car-sharing realm, most of operators have similar excesses. Yet, almost all of them have dashcams in the car, and they also offer Collision Damage Waiver (CDW) to lessen the excess, at the cost of paying slightly more for rental.

More importantly, at the backdrop of such risk of incurring such high excesses, it is thus irresponsible to compare such mode of P2P commute with PHV or Taxi. (I was guilty of doing so in my 2018 article, sadly). At least when you take PHV or taxi, if there’s an accident, you don’t get $4000/$10000 deducted! Some said, driving BlueSG, with that $4000/$10000 risk, just to save that $10–15 of taking PHV/taxi from Jurong to Changi Airport, is just “penny wise pound foolish”. Some also said that with that kind of excess, new users might as well get a 1-year remaining COE car and drive for that entire year.

Unfortunately, this exposes another fundamental problem of P2P car-sharing. A naive solution will be to reduce excess. But it will be even more irresponsible to all road users in Singapore to reduce excess just to promote car-sharing. Thus, this will be another side effect of P2P car-sharing, in which users must be aware of, otherwise, they may end up getting shockers, and more shockers, and get angry at such shockers.

No verification of users

To be frank, BlueSG should never have to bother about this point. However, given that the government (and BlueSG themselves) is pushing strongly for car-lite society and pushing BlueSG as the bastion of car-sharing -> car-lite narrative, it is thus inevitable that there will be idiots lending their membership account to non-BlueSG users, and in some cases, even to those without driving licence, to joyride a BlueCar.

This has grave implications. Sure, BlueSG can easily track such offenders — but only after a mishap. But here’s the thing: given current laws, BlueSG’s insurance underwriter has the full right to deny insurance payouts to anyone, should the BlueCar be driven by someone else and not the account holder. Which means that in an accident caused by an unauthorised driver, the insurance would not be the one compensating the victim; the unauthorised driver him/herself would bear full liability. And what happens if the unauthorised driver has really no money, e.g. a si ginna? The victim gets no compensation, since effectively, the si ginna can declare bankruptcy immediately after a court trial.

It will be irresponsible to promote BlueSG, while not addressing this problem, for it may cause more non-BlueSG victims who cannot claim from BlueSG’s insurance underwriter.

Solutions

Drastically increase lots and cars at a certain ratio

4 lots per station is seriously quite a joke. There is no way a P2P operation can sustain with just 4 lots per station, unless the network is as tiny as LA (~30 stations), and ironically if the city has moderate to high car ownership. Why? Explained in prior paragraphs already. The way I see it, for the P2P model to really succeed with EV cars + charging points in Singapore, there needs to be

• >20 lots per residential station
• >30 lots per shopping mall / business parks
• >30 lots distributed uniformly along kerbside parking zone
• an average of about 10 cars per station

Figures are derived loosely based on just how car-lite the government wants Singapore to be.

Yes, in reality, such figures will bleed any company financially. but if and only if the company solely runs an EV car-sharing operation and sole ownership of EV charging stations. Also, in reality, even if HDB is ‘gahmen’, they will surely object a single company from occupying so many lots in many of their HDBs that other drivers cannot park, let alone private properties. Which is why I believe a more viable form will be:

• Every carpark has 50–100+ EV stations owned by various operators
• Each of these carpark has different EV car-sharing operators, that may or may not also own some of these EV stations
• These EV car-sharing operators are allowed to use any of those EV stations, under some cross-cutting leasing agreements, with some government oversight.

Think of it as just like Smove, but with lots being mostly EV, and cars are all EV.

The plan of installing many EV stations are already greenlit by the government with the target of having 28000 by 2030.

Even then, this still does not resolve the problem of idle cars in between peak hours. But at the very least, with many lots per station, users will have a better chance of getting a car, and consequently, it will instill confidence in the user that they can still get a lot when they return.

Meanwhile, I still stand by this: 4 lots per station for BlueSG, with about an average of 2 cars per station? Does not compute.

Add more business parks in HDB areas, get even more people to work night shifts (yeah, right)

There is a saying (or maybe I made it up): “if you can’t change yourself, change the environment”. Since there’s no way to optimize P2P further, change the way people work! When the number of people of working at night is equal to the number of people working normal office hours, and when business parks are also found in, say Punggol, Hougang, Bishan, etc, the inflow/outflow of each station will be constant throughout the day.

But of course, this ‘solution’ is made in jest, to highlight just how hard it is to achieve success with P2P with profitability.

Semi-autonomous vehicles (far future!)

In previous paragraphs, I mentioned that one way to resolve P2P issues is fleet rebalancing, which is, with our current state of technology, still requires pure manual labour work, which means increased labour costs and incurring twice the environmental emissions. The only way to bring down at least the cost is to have semi-autonomous vehicles, whereby the car can auto-rebalance itself to the nearest station in need, once the user ends his or her trip.

But yes, that is for the far future. 2077 maybe?

In 2077, cars can ownself reposition itself! But now is not 2077

Admit that A-A services are more viable form of car-lite society

With the need to determine tradeoffs for a P2P system, it is good to step back and ponder if P2P can really achieve sustainable car-lite society. Looking at the other car-sharing model, it is apparent that A-A is a more viable solution to the car-lite society at the moment, for:

• Cars are used only when truly needed by users
• There’s no problem of displaced cars, since cars must be returned to original destination
• Henceforth, there’s no need to rebalance fleet, or to devise any algorithm to handle P2P usage
• Consequently, it is way easier to set up and maintain an A-A car-sharing, compared to a P2P/A-B

Already, in 2020, we see more players on the return-trip car-sharing arena. These new players are backed by car rental or leasing companies who previously lease or rent their cars out for PHV, but due to the pandemic, a good number of PHV drivers decided to quit, resulting in more cars not being rented for long term, and thus, such companies have pivoted towards hourly, A-A car-sharing instead.

Interim Solutions (for BlueSG)

That is not to say that BlueSG cannot resolve some of the immediate P2P problems they face. Here’s what I think can at least reduce the problem — that is assuming that BlueSG is still committed to be P2P operator:

Remove all day 2/3/5 hour packages

As explained earlier, having these hourly packages smothers the P2P concept BlueSG was originally supposed to undertake. Removing them is the first step. At the very most, keep them only for off-peak hours, like during work hours.

Allow over-parking in biz park/CBD stations during work day peak periods

Rather than wait for more BlueSG EV lots to be built per station, it is theoretically possible to allow users to park in normal lots, on top of the existing BlueSG EV lots. This is similar to what Smove did in the past. If over-parking is allowed, at the very least, more users would be able to drive BlueSG to work, which at least partly easies the inflow/outflow morning peak asymmetry.

Of course, the challenge would mostly be bureaucracy and software: needing the biz park owner to agree on some over-parking arrangements, tweaking the system to keep track of cars that are over-parked, i.e. not being charged, and making sure to limit the next destinations of such cars (i.e. car must have an accompanying destination lot pre-booked, and cannot over-park in destination) — something similar to Smove’s mechanics as well.

And of course, for this interim solution to work, also requires all-day hourly packages to be removed.

Install dashcams, require users to take photo before/after trip

This is a no brainer and should’ve been done a long time ago. Install dashcam, more accountability on users. More accountability drives away trolls. With less trolls means less damaged BlueCars. Less damaged BlueCars means more BlueCars in active service.

Or just do it fully Smove style

Let’s face it: when BlueSG started all-day hourly packages and continued for months, it is apparent that they are somewhat learning like how Smove operated — which was actually a good model until Smove drastically lowered their off-peak prices.

Given that, perhaps BlueSG should just go the whole hog and continue the status quo — but in doing so, BlueSG would effectively be just like any other car-sharing operator, no longer primarily focused on serving P2P car-sharing.

Food for thought

Much has been celebrated about BlueSG’s apparent success in Singapore, and how it resolutely boosts Singapore’s car-lite ambitions. However, elsewhere in the world, its counterparts have either shuttered (Paris, London, Indianapolis, Lyon, Bordeaux, from earliest to latest), or sold off to a generic EV car-charging network (to Blink in L.A., and to LeasysGo in Turin). With that, can we really say for sure that Singapore’s BlueSG is truly successful in achieving car-lite society — given that Smove had struggled and eventually failed?

Update Feb 1st 2021

Oops, looks like we finally got the answer to the above: they are in talks of being sold off to Goldbell. Here goes the end of a very expensive P2P EV car-sharing experiment.

Update Jan 4th 2022

Long time since update! Not much has changed since I wrote this piece — Goldbell finalized acquisition of BlueSG, BlueSG sold off its EV points to TotalEnergies, hourly plans still remain in spite of my write-up, surprisingly lesser complaints on not enough BlueCar — perhaps people move on to longer term car rentals? — slight increase in pricing, basically nothing disruptive.

However, on Jan 3rd 2022, BlueSG revised their T&Cs. One major change is the excess charges, which have increased significantly, to $5000 for experienced drivers, and $8000 for new drivers — in each direction (own excess and third party excess)! This means that should you be a new driver, you are liable to pay up to $16000 in excess! All the more, penny wise pound foolish! Or 1/4 BitCoin foolish (as of this writing). $16000 can get a decent, 1-year remaining COE car, just saying.