Across the globe, car sharing operators are under pressure: fraud, rising costs, and operational complexity are forcing tough decisions. This issue is about what separates the ones still standing and the sharpest operators are quietly doing differently on access, migration, and fraud.
In this issue
The F-words in car sharing: what fraud, freefall and friction are costing the industry
How three very different operators solved the same access problem
When “hardware-free” isn't actually cheaper (the €50/vehicle/month conversation)
Telematics migration myths and what a smooth switch looks like
The F words in car sharing
Around the world, car sharing markets have seen a series of widespread and serious problems: identity fraud, staged collision scams, insurance premiums jumping 30-40%, and damage costs with no clean path to recovery. The economics stopped working before anyone could stop it.
Fraud. Freefall. Friction.
What came out of the workshops was less a set of solutions and more a set of hard-won lessons:
Behavioral scoring can cut damage costs in half by identifying the small group of drivers responsible for most incidents
Re-verifying customer identities at unpredictable intervals is catching fraud that initial registration checks miss
How your staff opens a conversation about unreported damage determines whether you recover the cost or spend months in dispute
The full conversation, including what the sharpest operators are doing differently and what the industry's fraud crisis is costing the ecosystem, is in our LinkedIn newsletter.
Read the full fraud breakdown on LinkedIn and learn what behavioural scoring does to reduce costs.
How 3 different mobility operations solved the same problem
30 vehicles. 18,000 employees. One hard ceiling on utilization. King County, teilAuto, and Flinkster look nothing alike on the surface. One is a public sector motor pool, one is a car sharing network, and one is woven into the national rail system. But all three were held back by the same problem: access.
King County
Staffed garages, physical key boxes, and centralized fleet desks meant that vehicle access was tied to office hours, creating a hard ceiling on utilization, no matter how well the team managed the fleet. With just 30 vehicles serving over 800 of the county's 18,000 employees, that ceiling mattered.
Digitalization removed it. Access became available anytime, across five locations. Vehicles were repositioned faster, utilization improved dramatically, and staff capacity was freed for higher-value work. The results were hard to argue with: 95% user satisfaction. What started as a motor pool modernization became a national model for public sector fleet efficiency
Operating Germany's 5th-largest car sharing network means legacy access systems are not just inconvenient; they're a constraint on where and how the network can grow.
teilAuto's journey has included multiple system transitions and large-scale installation projects, each time moving toward more advanced digital solutions. Each upgrade focused on making access simpler for members while keeping disruption to staff minimal. The result: a foundation for smarter, more scalable operations.
Read teilAuto's success story to learn how they managed large-scale transitions without service interruption:
Flinkster
Flinkster connects 30+ partners and hundreds of vehicles into one platform. Without the right infrastructure, that scale quickly becomes a coordination challenge.
Focused on train stations, Flinkster operates nearly 300 of its own vehicles and provides access to 500 more through partners. Managing this decentralized network across 80+ locations requires a fully digital, staff-free system; anything else would undermine its promise of fast, seamless travel right after arrival.
Read Flinkster's success story to see how telematics supports both public users and Deutsche Bahn employees in their daily travel.
When hardware-free isn't actually cheaper
One expert quoted us €50 per vehicle per month just for OEM command functionality and data access. That's when 'hardware-free' stopped sounding cheap.
The pitch is compelling. Skip the workshop installation, connect directly through the OEM's API, and vehicles are ready for sharing in minutes. Cleaner architecture, fewer logistics, no additional hardware costs.
But operators who've worked closely with OEM APIs know the economics are more complicated. Removing hardware doesn't remove cost. It often just moves it.
For operators running mixed fleets at scale, OEM pricing can exceed dedicated hardware solutions. Then there's the reliability layer: in one example, vehicle lock confirmations arrived asynchronously, creating delays between a customer locking the car and the operator verifying the vehicle state. Debugging those gaps takes time, and time is not free.
"OEM APIs cannot fully replace dedicated car sharing telematics; they still lack a lot of the basics. In car sharing, uninterrupted connectivity is a must."
— Valdrin Shala, Product Manager, INVERS
OEM API integration will play a significant role in the future of mobility. For some vehicle types, such as Tesla, the economics and reliability already work. But for mixed fleets, the full picture is more complicated than the hardware-free framing implies.
The technology isn't the challenge. The real complexity lies in the operational and commercial realities behind it.
Telematics migration myths debunked
After 30 years and hundreds of migrations, the pattern is consistent: the disruption operators fear rarely materializes the way they expect.
"The most common misconception is that a migration is a single event. Experienced teams break it into smaller pieces."
— Marie Heuzeroth, Product Manager Infleeting, INVERS
Most operators know when their telematics stack is holding them back. The problems are rarely catastrophic: occasional downtime, unreliable commands, limited integrations, manual workarounds, and a growing number of support tickets. But in shared mobility, small issues quietly compound.
Operators fear technology migrations because of the disruptions that come with change: installation timelines, potential downtime, retraining teams, and interruptions to daily operations. The irony is that staying with the wrong system often creates more disruption in the long run.
Download your copy of our Why Telematics Migration Isn't As Hard As You Think guide to learn more about real operator timelines, zero-downtime strategies and what a smooth switch looks like.
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