What’s interesting about CarShare is how uncoercive it is, and at the same time how sneaky. On the one hand, it’s easy to understand why people use it. It’s cheap. It’s there. It works. Simple. But when you look at the big picture, CarShare is kind of a weird business model. A traditional company tries to convince its customers to use more of its product. If CarShare did the same thing, it would defeat the whole environmental point. What CarShare aspires to is a low-key ubiquity; instead of selling a lot of its product to a lot of people, it’s trying to sell a lot of people a little of its product. The holy grail isn’t mileage. It’s membership. More members equals more neighborhoods served, more cars, more convenience, thereby enticing even more members to join, thereby getting more cars off the street. “We’re not trying to get each person who joins to drive out and use the cars as much as possible,” Tanya explains.
Okay, but but but: Clayton and Tanya can’t actually come out and ask people to drive less, because as soon as they do, they become one of those preachy nonprofits that people hate — a Green version of a Sally Struthers commercial, all guilt and fear and we-know-better. And they’d rather not succumb to the South Park critique of the hybrid-car movement — that driving a hybrid is more about flaunting your piety than making a real difference. “We don’t tell people Drive less,” says Clayton. “People don’t want to hear that.” So what they’ve done is to trust the market.
Market-driven environmental solutions are hot right now; every day another lifelong tree-hugger goes to work for a company like Wal-Mart, hawking energy-saving fluorescent bulbs, and of course the Bush administration prefers to let polluters trade “carbon credits” on the open market instead of forcing them to clean up their smokestacks. What CarShare is doing seems both less impactful — after all, if we want to reduce pollution, the best way by far is to lobby the gov to tighten fuel-economy standards and crack down on coal-fired power plants; a single 500-megawatt coal plant pumps out about as much carbon dioxide in a single day as CarShare users have saved in five years — and more profound. If CarShare were, in Tanya’s words, “some policy thing that comes from above,” people wouldn’t integrate it into their lives. They wouldn’t change their ingrained routines the way CarShare has convinced them to, in a way that ought to be replicable with other categories of material things. Car sharing is what’s called a Product Service System — a fancy way of saying you don’t own the product, you only use it. Like a library, or like Netflix. PSS companies have sprung up to share camping gear, pricey art, even houses — but so far, nothing as iconically American as the car, and nothing that’s being pitched with anywhere near the reverse-psychology mojo of Clayton Lane and Tanya Seaman. Ultimately, the payoff isn’t in miles reduced. It’s in mind-sets transformed. These two are selling a service that they want people to use less of, in order to attract more people to sign up to use less of the service they’re selling. They’re like Milo Minderbinder, the capitalist prodigy from Catch-22 who figured out how to buy eggs for seven cents apiece and sell them for five cents apiece and still make a profit. Except Milo was evil, and Clayton and Tanya are good, because they’ve figured out how to sell deprivation as gain without really depriving anybody of anything.
On a crisp Sunday in October, my wife and I rented one of CarShare’s red Mini Cooper convertibles. We drove to Center City and bought some tacos at the Headhouse Square farmers’ market, then walked back to our car and saw a Parking Authority supervisor ticketing it for a meter that had been expired for six minutes. I yelled at the guy. My wife told me to stop. We drove to an apple orchard up in Bucks County. We bought some cider doughnuts, drove home, and returned the Mini Cooper. The final bill for the five-hour rental was a reasonable $51.94. That afternoon, driving a Mini that I did not own, with the top down and the stereo blasting, I saw the future. And lo, it was good. Even if I was the same old American asshole.
Jason Fagone last wrote for Philadelphia on Hershey’s.
E-mail: mail@phillymag.com
