Pay as You Go cars come to Belfast
July 13th, 2008 | Published in Belfast
Whizzgo has launched a green car-sharing scheme in Belfast. Basically you sign up for a £50 a year fee, and then you can go online and book a car for the hour, couple of hours, a day, a weekend etc. This quite intrigued me as I don’t have a car. I’ve avoided getting one because I live close to town anyway, and also they do pollute! But I do sometimes miss having one - particularly when I need to go food shopping and so on.
So I had a good look at Whizzgo’s rates to see if I could make it add up to being worthwhile for me. The fact that one of their cars in Belfast is parked right outside my house makes it doubly tempting.
It’s £50 a year, and then £5.15 an hour every time you book it, or £37 a day. That includes fuel, and up to 30 miles of travel. I did a quick calculation of how much it would cost me in a year just to use it on supermarket shopping trips.
£50 + (12 journeys * 2 hours * £5.15) = £173.60
Now at the moment I walk up to Sainsbury’s (about a 45 minute walk) which isn’t bad exercise, and get a taxi back which costs about £7.00. So taxis for a year shopping come to £84. That means Whizzgo probably isn’t worth it for me, so I’m not going to bother at the moment. It would probably be different if I had family over here I had to go and visit, but I don’t.
You can find out more about Whizzgo in Belfast here.
