500 Renault Zoe to hit the streets of Madrid with Zity car sharing scheme

A fleet of 500 all-electric Renault Zoe will be arriving in Madrid this month with ZITY, the result of a cooperation between Renault and the urban services operator Ferrovial.

This new car-sharing scheme covers a wide area of the Spanish capital, with vehicles provided to customers in the right place at the right time via an efficient smartphone application.

Madrid has the highest rate of daily car-sharing in Europe due to the city’s size, population, traffic problems and air pollution issues.

The local authorities’ commitment to electric vehicles has contributed further to this: at times of intense air pollution, electric vehicle parking is free and they are still permitted access to the city centre at times of high pollution when entry restrictions on internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are at their most drastic.

Another landmark will be reached in June 2018, when Madrid’s “Hyper-centre” will be permanently out of bounds to ICE vehicles.

These circumstances led to Renault and Ferrovial signing an agreement in August to launch a new car-sharing scheme called ZITY.

The ZOEs in the scheme benefit from RIDECELL technology with a GSM smartphone connection completed by a Bluetooth link.

That means the ZOE can be contacted even in places where connectivity is poor, such as underground car parks, and the time taken for the vehicles to respond to smartphone instructions sent by customers is reduced. RIDECELL also lets customers lock and unlock the cars using their smartphones.

With the new R90 motor and Z.E.40 battery, ZOE’s range is 250 miles (NEDC) – Renault estimates that in real-world driving conditions that this equates to around 186 miles in summer and 124 miles in cold winter conditions.