Gig Car Share is ending its all-electric car-sharing service in Sacramento at the end of next month because not enough people were using it.
The last day to use the service in Sacramento will be Feb. 28. In a message to subscribers, Gig said it was canceling its Sacramento service because of “insufficient demand and high operational costs.”
A spokesman declined to comment about the decision to leave Sacramento beyond what Gig Car Share told subscribers.
The service will continue in other cities, including San Francisco, parts of the East Bay and the Seattle market.
Gig deployed 260 Chevy Bolt electric cars in the Sacramento market in April 2019. At the time, it was the nation’s largest all-electric fleet.
The Bolts stood out because they featured big Gig logos and because they had sporty roof-mounted bike racks.
Gig Car Share was launched in 2017 out of A3 Ventures in Berkeley. A3 is the technology and innovation lab of the American Automobile Association Northern California, Nevada & Utah, which sponsored the Gig Cars in Sacramento.
The idea of Gig was to provide clean and convenient transportation to people in urban areas, without the hassles of car ownership or parking.
Users find and then unlock the car using a mobile app. They can drive anywhere they want to, but they must return the car to its home zone, which in Sacramento was mostly the grid of Downtown, Midtown and East Sacramento when the service started. It was later expanded to include parts of the Land Park, Curtis Park, Oak Park and Tahoe Park neighborhoods.
For the Sacramento region, the service allowed people Downtown to make trips out to suburbs and outlying cities and back. But it didn’t work the other way around.
