Nickel Ride ride-sharing cars. Photo courtesy of Nickel Ride.

Green Energy Times Staff

It has been five years since Green Energy Times’ daily blog posted its first mention of Tony Seba. The reference was to a CleanTechnica review of Seba’s book, Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation (http://bit.ly/CT-disruption). In it, he argued that the transition to clean energy would be not only disruptive, but so sudden it would be over by the year 2030.

It now seems that Seba’s forecasts are starting to come true.

In May, CleanTechnica ran another article, “Nickel Ride Finds EVs Are So Affordable … They Can Give Rides For Free”[sic] (http://bit.ly/CT-nickel-ride). Nickel Ride is a car-sharing service that can be called with a cell-phone application in any of several Florida cities.

Experienced in running the business for some time, the folks at Nickel Ride started using electric vehicles (EVs) in their service. What they found was the EVs are so inexpensive to run, that they can give their customers free rides and still make money. So that is what they are doing.

Paying for the EVs, employee driver time, charging, insurance, maintenance, registration, etc., Nickel Ride found that all costs could be covered, with room for a profit, by income from advertising.

Welcome to the future.