Bosch Enters the Car-Sharing Business with Electric Vans

Bosch is launching a new sharing service for electric vans. Together with toom, a subsidiary of the German retail group Rewe, the company will be testing the car-sharing service at hardware stores.

With more than 330 stores, toom is one of the top providers in the German home-improvement industry. From December, it will only take a few clicks for customers at five selected stores to directly book an electric van on site, and quickly and simply take stone slabs, balcony plants, and paint pots home with them.

“As a company committed to sustainability, we are always eager to constantly improve our contribution to environmental protection. We’re therefore very pleased that we can now offer our customers an eco-friendly way of taking their purchases home,“ says Wolfgang Vogt, toom’s managing director for finance and personnel.

Bosch is already well versed in the sharing services business, as demonstrated by Coup, its rental service for electric scooters. Since its launch in 2016, Coup has constantly expanded, and now has a fleet of 3,500 scooters in Berlin, Paris, and Madrid.

The van-sharing service will initially be offered in Germany, at hardware stores in Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Troisdorf, and Freiburg. At these stores, charge spots are already in place for the small electric vans, which are provided by StreetScooter.

Bosch believes that shared electric vans have scope for application outside the hardware-store sector. If the new sharing service proves popular, Bosch plans to expand it to include other partners, whether these be other toom stores, furniture stores, supermarkets, or electronics stores.