BMW’s Electric Car Rental Program

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 13, 6:40AM EDT

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As the popularity of electric cars grows, the increasing number of competitors have to find an edge to differentiate themselves in what has already become a crowded market. Among these is a BMW E-Car rental program called “DriveNow.”

BMW, due to its brand and a set of products already in the market, or about to be, is one of the few manufacturers that can challenge market darling Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA). Since Tesla is perceived as the gold standard of luxury electric cars, BMW has very few options in its work to move closer to the start-up in terms of reputation and sales.

The car offered by DriveNow is an adapted Series-1 coupe, which is near the bottom of the BMW product family.

BMW describes the E-Car engine:

The BMW eDrive gives you pure, emissions-free performance. The rear-wheel driven BMW ActiveE is powered by a 125 kW (170 hp) and 250 Nm (185 lb ft) electric motor which develops full torque from a standing start for aggressive acceleration.

The rental is not wildly expensive, except for people who want to drive long distances:

$12 for the first 30 minutes. $0.32 cents for each additional minute of driving. Free parking and charging at any DriveNow station. No annual fee. No monthly fee. No insurance needed.

Tesla is not likely to launch a similar program. Due to the popularity of its cars, it does not need to. BMW’s DriveNow will allow drivers to test its product, which will also get the German manufacturer free publicity.

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For American drivers, there is only one large drawback. DriveNow is only available in San Francisco. BMW has 13 charging stations there. To roll out nationwide, it would need hundreds and hundreds, as well as a fleet of cars. And it may take a very long time for BMW to find locations for the charging stations and to build them.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.