Overview of Seoul’s Car-Sharing Services

Earlier this year, we wrote about Seoul Metropolitan Government‘s carsharing service which started two months ago. Actually that wasn’t the first car-sharing service in Korea’s capital and also some more followed soon after it. So this post tries to put up an overview of all the services. Seoul carsharing market is very dynamic and especially the fares change often. This blog post gives a basic impression of the current situation.

 

Nanum-Car

The Seoul City Government provides under the name “Nanum-Car” two car-sharing services: So-Car and Green Car.  The basic fare for So-Car is 3,300 KRW for 30 minutes but there are a lot of discounts (up to 40% currently). There are 492 cars in 292 locations around Seoul.

 

EV Share

The Ministry of Knowledge Economy (changed to Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy) launched this service. At ten locations there are usually between two to four cars ready for members. The basic fare starts at 10,000 KRW and here, the minimum usage is one hour. Between 9pm and 8am, the usage costs 20,000 KRW (on weekends 30,000 KRW).

 

City Car

The newest player is LG, who starts this month. The service costs 6,300 KRW per hour and a monthly subscription of 30,000 KRW has to be paid, too. Here you have to pay for the first full hour and then for every on-going 30 minutes. Between 10pm and 9am the service costs only 10,000 KRW. 120 cars in 40 locations (at first 3) will be available.

 

Green Square

KORAIL is also in the car sharing business. Their cars are usually on parking places of a train stations. I’ve visited the site of KORAIL’s car sharing in January and February, but now the page doesn’t work and says “Under Construction./Preparing.” . So I can’t give detailed information but I’ll update this section later.

 

Similarities

The funny thing is that all of the services use mostly the Kia Ray, which you can see on the picture below. It seems that the Kia Ray is the best electric vehicle on the Korean market at this time. The next point is that all services are located in Seoul’s metropolitan region. Of course, the majority of Korea’s population lives in this big urban agglomeration but others area also need of such a service in other areas. None of the companies provides an English version of their website. The reason is that non-Koreans aren’t able to rent a car through a car-sharing platform. Probably, it’s an insurance issue but I hope that they will expand their service to all residents.

We can expect more development in this area because it’s a real business with a lot of potential. Some companies may disappear and others may come into the car sharing-game. I didn’t embed the dynamic maps of the car distribution because I wanted to keep the current status and probably, it’s going to be interest to compare the changes in a year or two.

 

 

Related Sources and Links: Socar | EV Share | City Car | Korea Times about City Car | Green Square