HiCar Co-op CIC has been set up to support a shared car scheme in Histon & Impington, near Cambridge. We’ve set this up as a volunteer-run cooperative community interest company (what a mouthful!) – basically that means that a bunch of people from the villages jointly ‘own’ the company, which in turn owns a set of cars, which we all use. It’s voluntary and cooperative because we’ve decided that we all want to share the responsibilities of making the club run, and we all give our time for free to do this. And it’s a Community Interest Company (CIC) because we want to be sure that all our hard work is going to benefit the club itself, its members, and the community as a whole, rather than lining the pockets of any shareholders.
Anyone from the villages can become a member of HiCar and if you do, you’ll get access to use our cars, anytime, by the hour. Simply book online or by phone, turn up at your timeslot and unlock with a code, and off you go. We’ve got some pages that explain how this all works in more detail here.
We ask everyone who joins to take a share in the running of the club, and try to rotate these jobs every 6 months or so to avoid it becoming a burden. Anyone can help; most of the jobs are quite straightforward, and we have some more specific needs as well. There’s more information on what help we find useful on our volunteering page.
Community car clubs are not a new idea; there are lots of clubs of the sort around the country, mainly in villages but some in towns too. Unlike the commercial car clubs (like Streetcar, Zipcar), we try to minimise our costs in order to keep our prices as low as possible; that way we reach the most potential members. By using fairly new cars (3-4 years old) we save lots of money on depreciation, through our volunteer model we save lots of money on salaries, and through our cooperative structure we avoid needing to earn large profits to pay shareholders. The net result is low costs; we think that anyone with a 5-6 year old car who doesn’t use it every day and who drives less than 6,000 miles a year could save money with us.
We are starting out small, with one car, and a group of villagers. We plan to buy a second car very soon, and our vision in the next 5 years is to grow to a club with a hundred members and a number of cars situated throughout the village. This may sound ambitious, but shared car clubs are growing very fast in the UK at present; just a few months ago the target of 100,000 car club members across the UK was achieved. We are very lucky in our village to have great local facilities, easy access to Cambridge, and good public transport, and so in a way this is the ideal village for car sharing to start in Cambridgeshire outside of the city centre.
Want to know more? Browse our site, have a look at the cars, and read the FAQ. If your questions are not answered, please ask them at the bottom of that page. If you are interested in joining, or registering your future interest, please do fill out our survey; this is the best way for us to record your interest and, just as important, where the most interest lies in the village – that way we can make sure we put cars near to you. And if you have any other thoughts, questions, ideas, or just want to talk to someone about it, please give me a ring on (01223) 690891.
Chris Brown, February 2010
Supporters
We thank the following organisations for their support or offers to our members:
