Sixt banks on mobile charging service Chargery

The car rental company Sixt acquires a share in Chargery. The Berlin-based start-up runs a mobile charging service for electric cars using bicycles. Sixt is the latest member of a growing circle of supporters that include Daimler, DriveNow and VW Commercial Vehicles.

In the case of Sixt, they want to use Chargery’s service to charge their own fleet of electric vehicles. The start-up’s mobile charging unit is positioned on a bicycle trailer. They claim their power bank uses energy from renewables only and enables a full charge with 3.7 kW in 4.5 hours. Time, they offer to use for car cleaning services as well. The latter could be particularly interesting for shared fleets.

Sixt stated that they made a low investment and say the service will help to extend the range of their electric vehicles for rental clients. For now this only applies in Berlin. Yet Chargery counts other high level clients on its list such as Daimler, Skoda and the BMW car sharing service DriveNow.

Also Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles invested 50,000 euros in Chargery as part of the ‘Innovation Challenge’ and they are planning a pilot together. The joint project targets decentralised charging on construction sides. Owners of the VW e-Crafter for example, could thus leave their electric van over night rather than return to the depot or a charging station elsewhere to charge.

Back to Sixt. The rental car company has been an early adopter of electric mobility and runs a number of electric vehicles such as the BMW i3 as well as the BMW i8 and other hybrid cars. They also made an early deal with Tesla for leasing the Model S in Germany. Prior to that, Sixt had been a longstanding partner in BMW’s DriveNow service. With the merger of DriveNow and Daimler’s Car2Go however, BMW bought back all shares from Sixt for 209 million euros reportedly.

sixt.com, chargery.de (both in German)