While nearly every car-related company on the planet is integrating sensors and refining algorithms to create safer cars that eliminate human error, car2go is putting safety back into human hands. A pilot program in New York City and Washington, DC will give 1,000 car2go members free online driving courses.
The courses are provided by the National Safety Council, and the drivers who complete them will get drive-time credits with car2go. The car-sharing company plans to choose 1,000 members at random in those two cities in the next month, then roll out the program to other users and cities if it’s successful.
This is part of car2go joining the Road to Zero Coalition, a coalition whose goal is to bring traffic-related deaths to zero within the next 30 years. The coalition includes public and private organizations, like the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, AAA and the National Association of Counties.
Daimler owns car2go, as well as Smart and Mercedes-Benz, and the car-sharing service is already moving from a fleet of mostly Smart Fortwo cars to a fleet of mostly Mercedes-Benz vehicles. So far, the rollout has included Mercedes CLA- and GLA-class cars, which have high-tech safety systems like adaptive braking and blind-spot monitoring. So it’s not like car2go is foregoing the tech angle completely.
Even with a fleet of mostly Smart cars, which are not all that high-tech, the 800,000 members of car2go in the U.S. and Canada traveled 59 million miles in 2016 with fewer than 1,000 traffic incidents. The company already educates it users on sharing the road with bicycles and has a zero tolerance policy for impaired driving.