Sadly due to a falling number of users combined with increased costs, we had to close our car club in 2022. For our final year, we tried out the Karshare scheme for our one remaining vehicle (electric van). This is an excellent scheme which removes the need for a small organisation like ours to own and run the car themselves. Karshare allows you to rent out your own private vehicle so others can use it. Unfortunately, the rental costs proved too high for our users who tend to only want to hire for 1-2 hours.
Since February 2010, Talybont Energy has sponsored a community car share project. For the first 2.5 years, the scheme had two cars – a 100% electric Mega City car called ‘Bluebell’ and a Skoda Octavia which runs exclusively on recycled vegetable oil. The latter is called “Mr Chips” (for obvious reasons). Sadly, after a pioneering and varied life, electric Bluebell died a death in the latter part of 2012. As a replacement, Talybont Energy purchased an electric Renault Maxi Crew Kangoo van for the scheme which can be configured as a van or as a 5 seater car (with side windows). The Kangoo has a range of around 70-80 miles. It is named “Heulwen” (Welsh for sunshine) as it’s charged using the solar generated electricity at Henderson hall.
The car share scheme currently has 12 member households who book the vehicles online and collect them from the community hall where they are parked. The Kangoo van has its own Type 2 charger. There is a log book in each car and users are invoiced for usage once a month. The scheme includes a bunded tank where the biodiesel (manufactured from recycled vegetable oil) is kept. We would like to find a cost and labour effective way to make the van available for occasional hire by a wider section of the community (both households and businesses). At the time of writing (January 2016), Mr Chips has done 82,500 zero carbon replacement miles (travelling all over the UK), Bluebell (in her short life) did 7,500 miles (mainly in and out of Brecon). Heulwen-the-van has done 13,900. Including saved journeys through lift sharing, this equates to ~55 tonnes CO2 saved in the lifetime of the project.
A report of the 2 vehicles’ usage in 2015 is here.
Please get in contact with us if you would like to join the scheme.
Talybont-on-Usk Energy 