Volkswagen launches WeShare, an on-demand rental car service with only electric cars, initially in Berlin, says it will expand to Prague and Hamburg in 2020
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Context & Ripple Effects
WeShare is the first live deployment of the WE on-demand mobility brand Volkswagen sketched out a year earlier, which promised car sharing before adding scooters and other transport modes from 2020. It slots into a longer arc that began with VW spinning up Moia as a standalone mobility company in 2016 to build self-driving on-demand transport tech.
The launch also lands in a German market where rivals are testing ownership alternatives: Mercedes-Benz has been running its peer-to-peer Croove rental trial in Munich since late 2016, making WeShare's all-electric fleet a brand-differentiated answer rather than a me-too.
First-order effects
- Berlin residents gain an on-demand rental option where every vehicle is electric, giving VW direct operational experience running a shared fleet instead of just selling cars.
- VW now has a physical footprint in three named cities on its roadmap — Berlin immediately, Prague and Hamburg in 2020 — turning the WE announcement into measurable deployments.
Second-order effects
- Hamburg becomes a contested testbed: Vay's later plan to serve the same city with remotely operated rental cars shows the free-floating rental niche attracting multiple operators with different labor models.
- Mercedes-Benz's Croove experiment faces a factory-backed competitor whose fleet strategy — uniform electric vehicles owned by one company — contrasts with Croove's owner-supplied, any-brand inventory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, automakers evolve from manufacturers into fleet operators, a path VW itself extended decades later with the ID. BUZZ robotaxi plan with Uber — shared autonomous fleets as the end state of the same on-demand logic.
- City-by-city mobility launches push regulation toward per-service permitting of shared fleets, since each operator needs local approval to run vehicles it owns but customers drive.
The trend: Carmakers are converting themselves from vehicle sellers into city-scale mobility operators, with each shared-fleet launch a stepping stone toward autonomous robotaxi services.