Benoît Robert dreamed of car-sharing long before there was a sharing economy, an app economy — or even smartphones.
In the early ‘90s the Montreal-native envisioned a future where cars were available for short-term use at an affordable price, offering a practical, sustainable and cost-efficient alternative to ownership.
“If you own a car, you are incentivized to use it as much as possible, because that will amortize the cost,” Robert explains. “When you use a car-sharing service, the costs are more visible, it incentivizes people to make the most economic decision, which is often also the optimal decision for the environment.
“After spending six weeks visiting cities in Europe experimenting with car-sharing in the summer of 1993, Robert launched Communauto in Quebec City in 1994, and Montreal the year after.
At the time, the service relied on lockboxes, timesheets and a call-in reservation system.
Today, Communauto manages a fleet of about 7,500 vehicles — including 1,200 in Toronto — available by reservation or on-demand via its app in cities across Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Alberta and France.
The company plans to add 1,000 green ‘C’ branded cars to its fleet in 2025, with 150 bound for Toronto.
In Montreal, there is at least one Communauto member in 15 per cent of households, and about 40 per cent in some neighbourhoods. In Toronto’s downtown core, roughly 8.5 per cent of homes have at least one member.
Communauto runs on a technology platform that allows users to reserve roundtrip vehicles in designated locations up to a month in advance, or pinpoint the nearest available vehicle on a map and unlock it with a tap of their phone.
“We are still growing, which is aligned with our goal to remove as many people (from car ownership) as possible, and we have data to show we are having a measurable impact,” Robert says. “People want to do the right thing, but they don’t want to be lectured. With car-sharing, they are doing it naturally.”
In 2023 Robert was appointed to the Order of Canada for that effort, and the 61 year-old recently announced he will eventually transfer control of the company to a social utility trust that ensures the ongoing pursuit of its mission.
As more Canadians come to rely on Communauto, however, some have expressed frustration with rising prices, cleanliness and car quality issues.
The Star recently spoke with Robert from Communauto’s head office in Montreal about its 31-year journey from a research experiment to a vital civic service, how it manages a fleet of thousands, and how the accidental entrepreneur is safeguarding his company’s future.
Were you always interested in entrepreneurship?
I had no interest in becoming a businessman. Like Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard I became a CEO despite myself.
I did my bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Quebec in Montreal, then spent a year studying in McGill’s faculty of agricultural and environmental sciences, and then did a master’s in land management and regional planning at Laval University in Quebec City.
What made you pursue a car-sharing business?
I liked the outdoors, and I would have liked to be able to rent a car on an hourly basis. It didn’t exist anywhere in North America, but I assumed it must somewhere.
I spent a lot of time at the library looking through microfilm, and found a few pilots in places like Amsterdam, San Francisco and Philadelphia that either failed or never launched. This topic interested me more than watershed protection, so I made it the subject of my master’s thesis.
During my summer internship someone put a car magazine from France on my desk and pointed me to an article titled “How the Berliners Learned to Share Their Cars.”
In Berlin they had a service called Stattauto, which means “instead of a car,” and in another German city they had a similar service called Stadtauto, which means “a car for the city.”
That’s what inspired the name Communauto, which in French sounds like the translation for both ‘like a car’ and ‘community car.’
I wrote to those people and learned there were other initiatives like it in Germany and Switzerland. So, I got a small bursary — enough to go to Europe and stay in youth hostels — and met with people from different car-sharing organizations.
It was supposed to be part of a study into the environmental and urban impact of car-sharing, but when I came back, I realized it had already been studied in Europe, but not in North America.
So, this is all just a research project?
That’s how it started.
In my master’s program we had a statistics course, and for a group project I got a team to help me do a market analysis study.
We got permission to use the Department of Transportation’s offices and telephones to call people in Quebec City and ask them whether they would join such a service if it existed, and 20 per cent said yes.
Then I went to different car rental companies to see if they would try it so that I could study it, but nobody was interested, so I launched it myself.
I probably broke a record for longevity in my master’s program. I started the two-year program in 1991, and finished in 2005, because once the company started, I had no time to study.
How did it work before smartphones?
Our members had restricted keys that opened lockboxes with car keys that corresponded to the vehicle they reserved, and a log to sign them out.
Every month we would check the log and charge based on their use.
At that stage people had to call us to make a reservation, and we tracked it all with paper and pencil until April of 2018.
In the beginning people were telling me it would never work in North America because people in Germany respect the rules, and they wouldn’t here.
For the first 20 years we didn’t have any technology controls, and it would have been very easy to abuse the system.
If that happened, it would have failed. I believed there were honest people everywhere, and I was proven right.
How does it work now?
Now, you register online, and once you’re accepted you simply use the app to access vehicles.
We have cars that are available by reservation at a designated time and place, which can be booked up to one month in advance.
Then we have our free-floating ‘flex’ vehicles, where you just click on a car on the map in our app and then you have 30 minutes to start your trip.
If you need to, you can add another 30 minutes. You can then drop it off anywhere in the designated zone, where we are permitted to park for free on city streets.
How much does it cost?
For Flex vehicles, we charge $0.45 per minute, up to a maximum of $15.50 per hour, and $0.30 per kilometre after your first 100 kilometres.
For roundtrips vehicles we charge a maximum of $15.50 per hour. You can also get discounts if you sign up for a monthly plan, which ranges from $5 to $30 a month. Then it ranges from $3.60 to $7.50 per hour.
Fees include gas and maintenance. Basic insurance is offered for $1.25 per trip plus $1 per hour, up to a maximum of $10 per day, but monthly insurance packages are also available with lower deductibles.
How do you ensure cars stay fuelled and maintained?
We ask our members to fill up if there is one quarter or less in the tank using a prepaid card in the glove compartment, and we offer a 20-minute credit for refuelling of Flex rides under one hour.
We have all the data about when cars need to go for maintenance or cleaning, and in Toronto we outsource it to an external company that picks them up and does it for us. In Montreal we now have two garages that do some of that internally.
How do you respond complaints about higher fees and lower quality?
We’re in our 31st year, and people started to complain about how much better the service used to be in year two. I think people always say that.
We take better care of the fleet than we could in the past, but we can’t control what happens between cleanings.
It’s like when you take the bus — sometimes the seat is dirty.
No matter how much we clean it, it will always depend on the person who used it before you.
Our average car is three years old, and in Quebec the average age is 10. We only keep them on the road for six or seven years, and we try not to let them go over 200,000 kilometres.
We know people complain about our costs going up.
Our responsibility is to find the right balance; for some people the service will not be good enough, for some people it will be too expensive, and we need to find the optimal balance where it remains affordable, reliable and available.
Why did you commit to transferring the company to a social utility trust?
I’m 61-years old and need to start thinking about retirement.
My goal was to remove as many cars from the road as possible by offering a service that makes it more affordable and convenient not to own one.
If we sell the company to a car manufacturer, or a car rental company, or a technology platform, they will shut us down so we can’t compete with them.
That’s already happened to some of our competitors. This was our way of ensuring we continue pursuing our social, environmental and economic goals.
