Let’s call Zipcar’s demise what it really is: A Marketing Failure

Last week was the first full week back at work for people who relied on Zipcar. New bookings ceased after 31 December, and suddenly a service many of us quietly depended on simply isn’t there.

For me, that moment landed hard. 20 years ago, when I moved back to London, I sold my Ford Escort. It felt like a sensible rebellion against the absurdity of owning two tonnes of metal to travel five miles. Less sensible was how I sold it. In an early experiment with the peer-to-peer economy, I listed it on eBay. It sold for £37, a week after I’d put £40 of petrol in the tank.

I haven’t owned a car since. I’ve survived – and thrived – by embracing bikes, trains and, most importantly, car sharing.

But now Zipcar, the OG and poster child of the sharing economy, is shutting shop in the UK. The headlines blame the usual suspects: insurance costs, car prices and the London Congestion Charge.

Don’t buy it. If this were purely about utility, Zipcar would be untouchable. The cars existed. The app worked. The need was there. But the brand never made the leap from "useful service" to "cultural necessity."

The Commercial Reality: Hockey Sticks vs Flatlines

If you want to understand the failure, you only need to look one place: the growth curve.

Zipcar launched in 2000. It took them 16 years to hit one million members globally. In the UK, despite a 20-year head start, membership peaked at around 500,000. Their growth was linear, grinding, and expensive.

Now compare that "plod" to the brands that actually cracked the cultural code of the ‘new economy’ of sharing, used and peer-to-peer. Vinted grew revenue by 61 per cent in 2023 alone and passed 105 million registered users. Spotify, launched eight years after Zipcar, now has more than 600 million users worldwide. Back Market, founded a full decade later, reached a $5.7bn valuation in just eight years.

These brands didn’t just grow faster. They grew differently.

The difference isn't "tech." It's brand. Zipcar grew linearly because they marketed utility. You join for a car. You leave when you buy one. Vinted and Spotify grew exponentially because they marketed culture. You join for the vibe. You stay for the identity.

Zipcar’s customer trips decreased in 2024 not because it was expensive (I regularly check and all in it’s much cheaper than owning car), but because it ceased to matter.

Create genuine desire for something new

Zipcar has a core, loyal customer base that most brands would die for. There are around half a million people like me now looking for alternatives to how they are going to get around. So why didn’t this convert into growth?

Because Zipcar stopped at marketing to the choir – the urban, sustainability-minded early adopters who were always going to use it – without showing any genuine ambition to shift this country’s car culture or change the behaviour of people who already own a car. Nearly half of Londoners don’t own a car, representing millions of potential users. The market was there, ready to be converted.

Other brands rewrote desirability instead. Spotify didn’t just sell access; it turned music into social currency. Vinted didn’t just sell old clothes; it made second-hand feel current rather than worthy. Back Market made refurbished tech feel rebellious. And brands like Oatly or Lucky Saint, which have successfully shifted mass consumption habits, made people feel like they were on a mission with them.

Zipcar just rented cars. It never became a cultural verb. And despite borrowing rather than buying now being one of the smartest ways to live a more frugal, sustainable life, it never made you feel like the right kind of clever for doing so.

Participate or Perish

This matters because we cannot engineer our way towards a sustainable future. There are 1.6 billion cars on earth. Replacing them all with EVs will only create a traffic jam with better batteries. We need to reduce the fleet, not just decarbonize it.

That requires behaviour change. And behaviour change is a marketing problem.

Zipcar’s failure was tolerating being merely useful, rather than irresistible. Making car sharing feel like the most exciting cultural movement there is - through fresh new cultural ideas, and shared rituals that make sharing feel like status, not sacrifice. They needed the driving equivalent of ‘zebra striping’.

A reminder for all those new economy businesses out there: without marketing, there is no "new economy." Products do not become movements by accident. And as Zipcar pulls its fleet from British streets, we are watching a textbook case study in how a decent solution dies for want of cultural oxygen.

The good news is Zipcar’s retreat won’t kill shared mobility. It simply hands the brief to whoever learns this lesson. The bad news is that this next step won’t happen soon enough for the 500,000 of us who need to run our kids to football from January.

Ben Essen is the chief strategy officer for Iris