DPA
Alexander Sixt is the head of strategy of the car rental company of the same name and the eldest son of company founder Erich Sixt
With its new, global mobility platform “One”, Germany’s largest car rental company now offers Sixt Car rental, car sharing and travel services in a single app on. Strategy director Alexander Sixt explains why Sixt is returning to the carsharing market after leaving DriveNow, which is changing for the classic car rental client – and why he has so far been avoiding China so far.
manager-magazin.de: Mr. Sixt, they left DriveNow a year ago and have sold back their 50 percent stake in the carsharing service to BMW. Now they merge the classic car rental with short term rentals, so return to the carsharing business. Why?
Alexander Sixt: Carsharing and car rentals are in principle the same thing: Customers rent a car on time and pay money for it. In the end, it does not matter if they park the car in a station, whether it’s physical or digital – or if the car is on the road. The only crucial question is how close the customer is to the offer.
We are now approaching this topic from two angles. On the one hand, the digitization of car rental is about “Sixt rent”. Our customer can now choose his desired vehicle 30 minutes before the pickup. He can then go straight to the rental car with his smartphone, open it via the Sixt app and drive off. This works on normal stations or on digital counters. On the other hand, in future we will be offering vehicles in free-float car sharing, which can then be parked directly on the street and rented via smartphone or via our app.
That works then similar to DriveNow?
Yes, with Sixt Share you can rent vehicles by the minute if you live in the business areas. However, we are expanding the freefloat business towards car rental. Customers no longer need to deliver the vehicles in their own business area, but can also continue their journey. For example, you can return the car to the nearest Sixt station in another city or business district. Now the boundaries are blurring. We want to convey to consumers that Sixt is not just a car rental company – but that we can cover the entire mobility spectrum with us.
For hire cars, customers probably have other requirements for cleanliness. Will they therefore only use part of their total fleet for car sharing in the future – and reserve the larger part for classic rental?
No, we do not see much difference. Except for the cleanliness that is exactly the same product. In the medium term, I assume that we will make the entire fleet car-sharing capable. But now we are going on gradually. But I do not want to communicate the exact number with which we start in car sharing for competitive reasons.
Sixt had hinted at such a step already in the summer. Why did it take longer then?
We only introduce our products when they are really finished. In addition to car rental and car sharing, our new app has a third dimension: you can now order a driver via “Sixt ride”. In 250 cities, Sixt partners now offer travel services via our app. These include such big players as Lyft, but also smaller ones like Cabify or the German taxi industry. We have implemented this in just six months. It was a feat of building this platform to be scalable.
Why do you work with several players in your car service offer?
So far, not a single carrier service provider has prevailed worldwide. In the USA there are Uber and Lyft, in China Didi dominates, in Europe the field is rather fragmented. Whether you’re booking a trip from Munich Airport to the Four Seasons Hotel or from New York’s JFK Airport to Penn Station, our experience is up to you. But we do not want to compete with the car service providers. Our business is to provide customers internationally with cars where they need them. That’s why we’ve got partners on board for the services.
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