Exclusive: GoGet electric carshare review and their future EV plans

GoGet is an Australian collaborative consumption success story which has provided car share as a service for over 2 decades since it was founded in 2003.

How is it evolving as the world switches to electric cars?

GoGet electric Hyundai Kona and Kia Niro EV

Cars as a service rather than an owned asset

Collaborative consumption reinvents the concept of sharing using networked technologies to enable the use of physical assets and services without having to buy the asset or infrastructure to run the services yourself.

Using a carshare service like GoGet requires totally rethinking how you use a car.

As this 21st century progresses many items that used to be a capital expenditure (capex) requiring large cash outlays have become available as a service so the cost shifts to operational expenditure (opex).

So instead of being an asset you own or lease long term that you can use anytime which sits in your driveway, car driving becomes more like a utility that has a monthly membership fee and gets charged out in units of time used eg a gym that charges by the visit.

How does GoGet work?

GoGet is the largest and oldest car share player in Australia.

The company claims to be more convenient than car rental, cheaper than car ownership if you drive less than 13,000km per year and reduces inner city street parking congestion compared to if each member owned their own car.

I have been a GoGet member for over a decade. I don't use it often but it is handy e.g. I rented a GoGet van recently to help a family member move furniture out of their apartment to sell back to IKEA.

GoGet allows members to book online or via an app for as short a period as an hour and up to several days or weeks if required for a holiday.

Once a GoGet member has booked a specific car, they go to wherever it’s located (usually in a special reserved parking spot), tap their RFID membership card over the windshield sensor to authenticate themselves, drive away and return the car parked in the same spot. They don't carry the car key around, it is permanently inside the car.

What car share members avoid is time and money consuming requirements such as cleaning the car, taking it for mechanical check ups and paying expensive operating costs like new tires, insurance, servicing and registration.

Each month GoGet members get an itemised usage account, much like a water or electricity bill.

For 99% of the GoGet fleet member hassles are reduced to making sure that the petrol tank is at least a quarter full before they return it paid for using the fuel card in the car, but that changes if they book a fully electric GoGet.

Review: Booking and Driving a Goget Electric Car

The vast majority of GoGet vehicles are petrol powered and parked along inner city streets in dedicated parking pods but because of the need for reliable charging infrastructure GoGet first steps in offering electric cars involve parking them in corporate car parks or apartment blocks such as Nightingale Village project (Brunswick, Melbourne).

In these dedicated areas GoGet can install EV chargers just for their cars to ensure that they get recharged fully for the next driver.

My recent booking was for Natalie the Kona. Each GoGet car has its own name. This Hyundai Kona is located in Sydney CBD - Darling Park Tower 3 C3 so I had to catch a train there, wander through Darling Park, enter the carpark and get in the car. If I worked in the Sydney CBD the car pickup would have been much easier and faster.

I noticed there was a Chargefox card inside the car if you need to top-up the car during your hire period. This charging is free, you pay for a GoGet car by the time loaned, km driven and insurance excess level chosen.

Compared to new 2024 model EVs the fully electric Kona and Niro EVs in the GoGet fleet are not the most technologically advanced or spacious inside, since both cars are based on petrol designs retrofitted as EVs.

However this 2022 Kona and it's cousin Niro EV are efficient cars as I expected them to be from my previous driving tests.

The stats in the Kona said that electricity usage across the last 7000km averaged 13kWh/100km which is very good for a shared car. I averaged 11.7kWh/100km across 186.4km of driving during my loan period of 4 days.

The cost of a 4 day GoGet electric car loan, depends on your GoGet monthly plan level, distance driven and choice of insurance excess.

GoGet Business, Seniors and Student members get better pricing than personal members. Some big employers give their staff free GoGet membership as a perk e.g. UNSW.

Near the end of my loan period a GoGet app notification reminded me to return the car and plug it in so it could charge up for the next member who books it.

In an unexpected twist I wasn't able to do that because my Kona picked up a screw in a back tyre and had to be taken away by GoGet fleet crew to get that fixed.

That's a good example of where a car owner would have had to get the tyre repaired or replaced at their own cost but as a GoGet member I didn't have to pay for that myself .

What is the GoGet long term plan regarding EVs?

Kate Humphreys, Head of Member & Brand at GoGet told me that cost of living pressures for Australians means affordability of car share is more important then ever.

"We see that the market for EVs is getting there and we will be testing out less expensive EV models as they come through. The key point is that they are priced in such a way that our members can afford them".

Humphreys explained that at the moment in Australian inner city suburbs where GoGet operates:

members want EVs but won’t necessarily pay more for EVs - surveys show this
infrastructure for public charging bays isn't widely available (unlike Europe)
car rental is different than car share as these customers typically drive for longer trips and rental companies have their own centralised charging
the purchase price of EVs is a big factor - EVs tend to be $10k to $20k more expensive than equivalent petrol models
we are concerned about EV resale value (keeps holding costs high versus petrol equivalent)

About the author

Neerav Bhatt

Neerav Bhatt has been a technology journalist and photographer for over 20 years appearing in online, print, radio and TV media. His current focus is on helping Australians switch to electric vehicles as well as making their home fully electric, sustainable and climate resilient.