[11] Bmwcon On Weekly Gossip | [+] MANTIS TILLER

Daimler, parent company of Mercedes-Benz, is the closest thing that BMW has to an arch-nemesis — so it's not a huge surprise to see that Daimler's Car2Go car sharing service has lobbed some remarks today at ReachNow, a similar service from BMW that just launched in Seattle.

Here's Car2Go's full statement:

As the sharing economy goes mainstream, we expect followers to see what we saw when we launched here in 2012. Seattle is a great city for carsharing, and we've cultivated a 75,000 strong membership here. One-way carsharing is a complex business to operate, and any new competitor will have a significant learning curve to contend with. Having said that, we believe the more mass transit, carsharing and ridesharing options people have to get around, the better because services like car2go alleviate traffic and parking congestion and improves quality of life.

So the theme of "BMW won't find this to be a very easy business to get into" is wrapped in the larger, friendly message of "car sharing is a good thing."

Though Car2Go and ReachNow are very similar — they allow members to take cars one-way inside of a set perimeter and charge by the minute — the details are a little different. Car2Go exclusively uses Smart's tiny two-seaters, while BMW has a selection of more upscale models that includes the BMW 328xi, i3, and the Mini Cooper in both two- and four-door variants. ReachNow presently charges the same amount as Car2Go, 41 cents per minute, but will eventually go up to 49 cents per minute; that's counterbalanced, though, by the fact that it charges less (30 cents per minute) when the vehicle is parked.