The Car Nobody Owns
In a country famous for engineering the automobile — where Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz constitute something close to a national religion — a small cooperative in the Swiss canton of Lucerne decided, in 1987, that the most radical thing you could do with a car was refuse to own one. The proposition was not anti-car. It was anti-waste. Two people, looking at the economics of private vehicle ownership in a dense Alpine geography where the average car sits parked 95% of its life, arrived at a conclusion that would take the rest of the world three decades to reach: that access could be more valuable than possession, and that a shared fleet, intelligently distributed, could deliver the utility of ownership at a fraction of its cost — and its environmental footprint.
That cooperative became Mobility Carsharing, and it grew into something the Swiss transportation system now takes for granted the way Americans take for granted interstate highways. With roughly 3,000 vehicles stationed at approximately 1,500 locations across Switzerland — a country smaller than West Virginia — Mobility achieved a density of coverage that no subsequent carsharing entrant in any market has matched relative to population. The vehicles are everywhere: at train stations, in village centers, tucked into the parking structures of cities where a single space costs more per month than a studio apartment in most American metros. The red Mobility logo became as Swiss as the SBB rail network it was designed to complement.
What makes Mobility unusual is not that it survived. Plenty of cooperatives survive. What makes it unusual is that it survived while virtually every venture-capital-backed carsharing company launched in the subsequent two decades — Zipcar (acquired), car2go (merged, then shuttered), DriveNow (absorbed), Autolib' (bankrupt) — either failed outright, got folded into a larger corporate parent at a loss, or retreated to a shadow of its original ambition. Mobility endured because its model was designed around a different set of assumptions about growth, capital, and the relationship between a company and its users. It was not trying to become a unicorn. It was trying to make a transportation network work.
By the Numbers
Mobility Carsharing at a Glance
~3,000Vehicles across Switzerland
~1,500Pickup/return stations nationwide
~260,000Registered customers (approx.)
1987Year founded as a cooperative
95%Average time a private car sits unused
1Country of operation — by design
The numbers are modest by Silicon Valley standards, and that modesty is the point. Mobility never raised a venture round. It never blitzscaled into foreign markets. It never subsidized rides below cost to manufacture growth metrics for an IPO prospectus. Instead, it compounded — slowly, deliberately, station by station — into a network so tightly integrated with Swiss public transit that the federal railway system itself became a partner and shareholder. The cooperative structure meant that customers were members, members were owners, and the incentive to extract short-term profit from the user base simply did not exist.
This is, in miniature, the story of what happens when a business model is designed for durability rather than disruption — when the question is not "How fast can we grow?" but "How do we make this work, permanently, for the people who use it?"
Two Founders, One Parking Space
The founding mythology is characteristically Swiss: practical, understated, and rooted in arithmetic rather than vision statements. In 1987, two separate carsharing initiatives launched almost simultaneously in Switzerland — one in Stans, near Lucerne, and another in Zurich. The founders were not technologists or financiers. They were citizens who had done the math on car ownership in a country where fuel was expensive, parking was scarce, insurance premiums were high, and the rail network already carried you to within walking distance of nearly anywhere you needed to go.
The insight was not complicated. A car that sits idle 95% of the time is not an asset — it is a depreciating liability with insurance payments. If ten households share three vehicles instead of each owning one, the total cost of mobility drops dramatically, the number of cars on the road shrinks, and the vehicles themselves are used more efficiently, which means they can be replaced more frequently with newer, cleaner models. The cooperative structure was chosen deliberately: members would pay a refundable deposit to join, annual fees to maintain membership, and usage-based charges (per hour and per kilometer) when they actually drove. No one was getting rich. The surplus, if any, would be reinvested in the fleet and the network.
The two cooperatives merged in 1997 to form Mobility Cooperative, consolidating their fleets and station networks into a single national system. The merger was not a hostile takeover or a venture-backed rollup. It was a pragmatic recognition that carsharing exhibits powerful network effects — the more stations exist, the more useful the service becomes, and the more members join, which justifies more stations — and that two competing cooperatives in a country of 7 million people were simply inefficient.
We didn't set out to disrupt the automotive industry. We set out to solve a practical problem: how to give people the mobility they need without the waste of individual car ownership.
The Cooperative Advantage
Understanding Mobility requires understanding what a cooperative is — and, more importantly, what it is not. A cooperative is owned by its members. It has no external shareholders demanding quarterly returns. It cannot be acquired by a private equity firm looking to strip costs. It cannot IPO. Its governance structure gives members voting rights, which means that decisions about pricing, fleet composition, and expansion are, at least in theory, accountable to the people who actually use the service.
This structure imposed constraints that turned out to be advantages. Without access to venture capital, Mobility could not subsidize usage below cost. Every station had to be economically justifiable. Every vehicle had to earn its keep. This forced a discipline around unit economics from the very beginning — a discipline that carsharing companies backed by billions in VC funding never developed, because they didn't have to. Car2go could afford to scatter Smart cars across Austin and lose money on every trip for years. Mobility could not.
The flip side: the cooperative structure also meant that Mobility could not grow at the pace required to dominate a global market. It could not raise a $500 million Series D to launch simultaneously in twelve cities. It could not offer free rides to acquire users. It was, by design, a slow-growth organism in an industry that the venture world was trying to fast-growth into existence. But the slow-growth organism is still here. The fast-growth ones, largely, are not.
There is a lesson in this about the relationship between capital structure and business model durability that the technology industry has been slow to internalize. The cooperative did not merely constrain Mobility's growth — it aligned the company's incentives with its users' interests in a way that made the service genuinely better over time. When your customers are your owners, you do not need to invent engagement metrics or dark patterns to extract value. You need to put a car where people need one, keep it clean, and price it fairly.
The Swiss Rail Symbiosis
Mobility's most consequential strategic decision was not about cars. It was about trains.
In the late 1990s, Mobility forged a partnership with the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) that would define the company's trajectory for the next quarter century. The partnership was elegant in its logic: SBB had a train network that could get you to virtually any town in Switzerland, but it could not get you from the train station to your final destination. Mobility had cars stationed at train stations, but it needed a reason for people to join the service. The two organizations were complements, not competitors, and the partnership made both networks more valuable.
SBB became a minority shareholder in Mobility Cooperative, lending the carsharing service institutional credibility and, more importantly, physical infrastructure. Mobility stations were integrated into SBB station facilities. Ticketing systems were partially linked. Marketing materials cross-promoted the two services. For a Swiss commuter, the value proposition became seamless: take the train from Zürich to Bern, pick up a Mobility car at the Bern station, drive to your meeting in a village twenty minutes away, return the car, take the train home. No private car required. No parking hassle. No insurance payment.
This integration with public transit is the single most important structural difference between Mobility and every carsharing startup that launched in the 2010s. Zipcar, car2go, and their imitators positioned themselves as alternatives to car ownership in urban cores — competing, implicitly, with taxis, ride-hailing, and public transit rather than complementing them. Mobility positioned itself as the last mile of an existing public transportation network. It was not trying to replace anything. It was trying to complete something.
The combination of rail and carsharing creates a door-to-door mobility chain that makes private car ownership unnecessary for many Swiss households.
The partnership also gave Mobility something that no amount of venture capital can buy: trust. SBB is one of the most trusted institutions in Switzerland. Its endorsement of Mobility signaled to the Swiss public that carsharing was not a fringe experiment for environmentalists — it was a legitimate component of the national transportation infrastructure. That institutional legitimacy, compounded over decades, created a brand moat that no new entrant could replicate by spending more on Facebook ads.
The Geometry of Station Density
Carsharing is, at its core, a logistics problem disguised as a consumer service. The product is not the car. The product is proximity — the guarantee that when you need a vehicle, one will be close enough to be useful. This is why station density matters more than fleet size, and why Mobility's ~1,500 stations in a country the size of Maryland represent something closer to infrastructure saturation than mere market presence.
Consider the arithmetic. Switzerland has roughly 2,200 communities. Mobility has stations in approximately 1,500 locations. That means the service covers, in some form, roughly two-thirds of the country's populated areas. In urban centers like Zürich, Basel, and Geneva, station density is high enough that a Mobility car is almost always within a few minutes' walk. In rural areas, the coverage is thinner but still meaningful — a single car at a village train station can serve dozens of households that would otherwise need to own a second or third vehicle.
This density was not achieved through a blitz rollout. It was built incrementally, station by station, over three decades. Each station was justified by local demand — a minimum number of committed members needed to exist before a vehicle was placed there. This bottom-up approach meant that Mobility's network grew organically in response to actual need rather than projected demand, which is why its utilization rates have historically been strong enough to sustain the model without subsidy.
The density also creates a compounding advantage: the more stations exist, the more convenient the service becomes, which attracts more members, which justifies more stations. This is the classic network-effects flywheel, but with a critical difference — because Mobility's stations are physical (a specific parking space at a specific address with a specific vehicle assigned to it), the flywheel has a geographic dimension that digital network effects lack. You cannot replicate Mobility's station network from a server room. You need thousands of individual parking agreements, municipal partnerships, and fleet logistics decisions, each tailored to local conditions. The accumulated weight of these micro-decisions is Mobility's real moat.
Flat-Rate Thinking in a Per-Trip World
Mobility's pricing architecture reveals something about how the cooperative thinks about its relationship with members — and how that thinking diverges from conventional carsharing economics.
The model is layered. Members pay an annual subscription fee that grants access to the network. On top of this, they pay per-trip charges based on two variables: time (per hour) and distance (per kilometer). Different vehicle categories — from small city cars to vans and SUVs — carry different rates. There are discounted packages for frequent users and special rates for business customers, who represent a meaningful and growing segment of the user base.
This structure has an important behavioral consequence: it makes the true cost of each trip visible in a way that private car ownership obscures. When you own a car, the marginal cost of driving feels low — gas and maybe parking — because the enormous fixed costs (depreciation, insurance, maintenance, financing) are psychologically invisible. Mobility inverts this. Every trip has a clear, visible price. Members become acutely aware of their actual transportation spending, which, for many, turns out to be far less than the total cost of ownership they were previously absorbing without realizing it.
For the cooperative, this transparency is both product and principle. It does not want members to drive more — unlike Uber, whose business model is built on maximizing rides. Mobility wants members to drive appropriately — to use a car when a car is the right tool, and to take the train or bike when it isn't. This anti-maximization ethos is only possible because the cooperative structure eliminates the pressure to grow usage metrics quarter over quarter. No one is trying to show a board of venture investors that rides-per-member are increasing 20% year-over-year.
The Graveyard of Venture-Backed Carsharing
To understand what Mobility got right, it helps to catalog what everyone else got wrong.
Zipcar, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2000, was the first carsharing company to achieve genuine scale in the United States. At its peak, it operated over 12,000 vehicles in hundreds of cities across North America and Europe. It went public in 2011, then was acquired by Avis Budget Group in 2013 for approximately $500 million — a figure that represented a significant premium to its trading price but a disappointing return for early investors who had imagined a much larger outcome. Under Avis's ownership, Zipcar's growth stalled. The service still exists, but it is a niche product within a rental-car conglomerate, not the transportation revolution its founders envisioned.
Car2go, launched by Daimler in 2008, represented the automotive industry's most ambitious attempt to own the carsharing future. It pioneered the "free-floating" model — cars could be picked up and dropped off anywhere within a defined zone, eliminating the need for fixed stations. At its peak, car2go operated in 26 cities across North America, Europe, and Asia with a fleet of roughly 14,000 vehicles. In 2019, Daimler merged car2go with BMW's competing DriveNow service to form ShareNow. By 2024, ShareNow had retreated from most of its markets, shutting down operations in North America entirely and consolidating in a handful of European cities.
Autolib', the electric carsharing service launched in Paris in 2011 by the Bolloré Group, was perhaps the most spectacular failure. Backed by a public-private partnership with the city of Paris, it deployed thousands of custom-built electric vehicles across the metropolitan area. It was, by many accounts, a wonderful product — convenient, affordable, environmentally progressive. It was also catastrophically unprofitable. Bolloré reportedly lost over €200 million on the venture before the city terminated the contract in 2018. The cars were scrapped. The charging stations were repurposed.
The pattern was remarkably consistent: launch with enthusiasm, scale with subsidies, discover that unit economics don't work at price points customers will accept, and either sell to a larger entity or shut down.
The common thread in these failures was not bad technology or insufficient demand. It was a fundamental mismatch between the capital structure of the enterprise and the economics of the service. Venture capital and corporate investment demand growth rates and return profiles that carsharing's unit economics cannot support without subsidizing users below cost. The per-trip revenue is thin. The capital expenditure on vehicles is high. Depreciation is relentless. Insurance is expensive. And customers, accustomed to the perceived cheapness of their own cars, are remarkably price-sensitive. The venture model requires either achieving monopoly scale (which no one did) or finding a way to extract significantly more revenue per user (which no one could without destroying the value proposition).
Mobility avoided this trap by never entering it. The cooperative structure meant the company never had to deliver venture-scale returns. It had to deliver a service that covered its costs and served its members. It turns out this is a much easier business to sustain.
The Electrification Bet
In the 2020s, Mobility began a systematic transition of its fleet toward electric vehicles — a move that aligned with both Swiss climate policy and the cooperative's foundational environmental mission. The transition is not trivial. Electric vehicles cost more upfront, require charging infrastructure at or near every station, and introduce range-management complexities that internal combustion vehicles do not. For a service that depends on guaranteed vehicle availability at hundreds of locations, including remote rural stations where charging infrastructure is sparse, the logistics of electrification are genuinely formidable.
But the economics are shifting. EVs have lower fuel and maintenance costs per kilometer than gasoline vehicles, which means that over the lifetime of a fleet vehicle — which Mobility can optimize because it controls utilization — the total cost of ownership is converging and, in many use cases, already favoring electric. The cooperative has partnered with Swiss energy providers to install charging stations at key locations, and the federal government's support for EV infrastructure provides tailwinds.
The strategic significance of the EV transition extends beyond cost. It reinforces Mobility's brand positioning as an environmentally responsible alternative to private car ownership. In a country where climate consciousness is mainstream — Switzerland held a binding referendum on net-zero emissions targets — operating a fleet of red electric vehicles at train stations across the country is as much a marketing asset as a cost play.
Business Customers and the Second Growth Curve
Mobility's growth story in the 2010s and 2020s was increasingly driven not by individual consumers but by businesses. Corporate carsharing — where companies replace part or all of their vehicle fleets with Mobility memberships — represents a significant and expanding revenue stream for the cooperative.
The value proposition for businesses is compelling. A company that maintains a fleet of ten vehicles for employee use bears the full cost of depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and parking for all ten cars, regardless of whether they are used eight hours a day or two. By switching to Mobility, the company pays only for actual usage. For many firms, particularly those with variable transportation needs — consulting companies, social services, government agencies — the cost savings can be substantial, often 20–30% or more compared to fleet ownership.
Mobility developed dedicated business products: fleet management tools, consolidated billing, usage analytics, and dedicated vehicles at corporate locations. These products create switching costs and recurring revenue relationships that individual consumer memberships do not. A company that has restructured its transportation logistics around Mobility is unlikely to switch back to fleet ownership on a whim.
This B2B pivot is strategically important because it diversifies Mobility's revenue base away from pure consumer carsharing, which is inherently vulnerable to competition from ride-hailing, improved public transit, and — eventually — autonomous vehicles. Business customers tend to be stickier, less price-sensitive on a per-trip basis, and more responsive to the total-cost-of-ownership argument that is Mobility's core economic proposition.
The One-Country Strategy
Perhaps the most striking feature of Mobility's strategy is its refusal to expand beyond Switzerland. In an industry where every competitor defined success as geographic expansion — more cities, more countries, more continents — Mobility stayed home. This was not timidity. It was a deliberate strategic choice rooted in the cooperative's understanding of what makes carsharing work.
Carsharing is a high-fixed-cost, low-margin business that depends on local density, local partnerships, and local trust. Mobility's success in Switzerland was inseparable from its relationships with SBB, with cantonal governments, with municipal parking authorities, and with the peculiarities of Swiss geography and culture — the density of the rail network, the compactness of cities, the environmental consciousness of the population, the high cost of car ownership. None of these conditions could be assumed to exist in Germany, France, or Italy, let alone in the United States or China.
Every carsharing company that expanded internationally discovered that the unit economics that worked in one city did not automatically transfer to another. Car2go's model worked in Stuttgart but lost money in Austin. Autolib' was designed for Paris and could not be replicated in Lyon. The local factors — parking costs, public transit quality, insurance regulations, cultural attitudes toward car ownership — vary so dramatically that international expansion amounts to launching a new business in each market, with all the associated costs and risks.
Mobility's decision to stay in Switzerland allowed it to achieve a depth of penetration that no internationally-expanding competitor matched in any single market. Instead of spreading thin across a continent, it saturated one country. The result is a service that is genuinely embedded in the national transportation fabric — not a nice-to-have urban amenity, but a structural component of how Switzerland moves.
Mobility Carsharing demonstrates how a business model built on shared access rather than individual ownership can create lasting value when aligned with the right market conditions and institutional partnerships.
What the Cooperative Teaches the Platform Economy
The technology industry spent the 2010s developing a particular theology of markets: network effects create winner-take-all dynamics, venture capital finances the initial land grab, and once the platform achieves sufficient scale, the economics tip from loss to profit. This theology produced Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, WeWork, and a hundred other companies that raised billions, grew furiously, and — in many cases — still have not demonstrated that their unit economics work at prices customers will sustainably pay.
Mobility represents the anti-theology. It did not pursue winner-take-all dynamics. It did not raise venture capital. It did not blitzscale. It built a transportation network that works — that covers its costs, serves its members, and has been operating continuously for nearly four decades. It did this by designing the business model around sustainability rather than growth, by choosing a capital structure that aligned with long-term service quality rather than short-term financial returns, and by embedding itself so deeply into the Swiss public transit infrastructure that it became, functionally, a public utility.
The cooperative model is not universally applicable. Not every market has Switzerland's rail density, environmental culture, or tolerance for collective ownership structures. But the principles underneath — align incentives with users, prioritize unit economics over growth metrics, build for density rather than breadth, partner with complements rather than competing with them — are transferable to any market and any industry.
In
The Business Model Navigator: 55 Models That Will Revolutionise Your Business, Oliver Gassmann and his co-authors at the University of St. Gallen use Mobility as an exemplary case of the "Flat Rate" and "Pay Per Use" business model patterns — hybrid models that combine subscription elements with variable pricing to align cost with actual consumption. The book catalogs fifty-five recurrent business model patterns, drawn from the insight that roughly 90% of all business model innovations are, in fact, recombinations of existing patterns. Mobility's genius was in combining several of these patterns — pay-per-use pricing, cooperative ownership, partnership-based distribution, and complementary product bundling with SBB — into a system that was greater than the sum of its parts.
The Red Car at the Train Station
There is a particular quality to encountering a Mobility vehicle at a Swiss train station that captures something words about business models cannot. The car is always there. It is almost always clean. The booking system works. The key is in the lockbox or the app unlocks the door. You drive it, you return it, you walk away. There is no surge pricing, no driver cancellation, no waitlist. There is just a car, where you need it, when you need it, at a price you agreed to in advance.
This reliability is not exciting. It does not make headlines. It will never generate the breathless coverage that greeted Uber's launch in San Francisco or car2go's deployment of electric Smart cars in Amsterdam. But reliability, compounded over thirty-seven years across fifteen hundred stations in a country of nine million people, is its own kind of radical achievement. It is the accumulated result of tens of thousands of micro-decisions — where to place a station, which vehicle to assign, how to price the evening hours, when to replace a car that's logging too many maintenance calls — made by an organization whose only mandate is to make the system work for the people who use it.
On a winter evening in the village of Stans — where one of the two original cooperatives was born in 1987 — a red Mobility car sits in its designated space at the local train station, fully charged, waiting for its next member. The snow is falling. The train from Lucerne has just arrived. Someone walks toward the car, phone in hand, and opens the door.
