Zipcar To Share Ride With Flexcar

Zipcar, the Cambridge-based car sharing service, announced today that it will merge with Flexcar, a Seattle firm whose main owner is Revolution, a Washington, DC, investment company founded by ex-AOL Time Warner Chairman Steve Case. Zipcar is the world’s largest car sharing provider, with 120,000 members in more than 35 cities, according to the company’s press release. Flexcar is roughly half that size, bringing the services’ combined membership to around 180,000. There’s a good writeup in Red Herring, which quotes Jonathan Seelig, a managing director at Boston-based Globespan Capital Partners, one of Zipcar’s main investors, as saying: “This business is better at scale.”

Author: Robert Buderi

Bob is Xconomy's founder and chairman. He is one of the country's foremost journalists covering business and technology. As a noted author and magazine editor, he is a sought-after commentator on innovation and global competitiveness. Before taking his most recent position as a research fellow in MIT's Center for International Studies, Bob served as Editor in Chief of MIT's Technology Review, then a 10-times-a-year publication with a circulation of 315,000. Bob led the magazine to numerous editorial and design awards and oversaw its expansion into three foreign editions, electronic newsletters, and highly successful conferences. As BusinessWeek's technology editor, he shared in the 1992 National Magazine Award for The Quality Imperative. Bob is the author of four books about technology and innovation. Naval Innovation for the 21st Century (2013) is a post-Cold War account of the Office of Naval Research. Guanxi (2006) focuses on Microsoft's Beijing research lab as a metaphor for global competitiveness. Engines of Tomorrow (2000) describes the evolution of corporate research. The Invention That Changed the World (1996) covered a secret lab at MIT during WWII. Bob served on the Council on Competitiveness-sponsored National Innovation Initiative and is an advisor to the Draper Prize Nominating Committee. He has been a regular guest of CNBC's Strategy Session and has spoken about innovation at many venues, including the Business Council, Amazon, eBay, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.