BMW car-sharing program quits San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO -- DriveNow, the car-sharing program owned by BMW that allows drivers to rent electric cars by the minute, is pulling out of San Francisco, the only U.S. city in which it operates, the company said Monday.

Because of problems with “parking permit regulations,” DriveNow said in a post on its website, the company plans to suspend service in San Francisco on Nov. 2 and focus instead on other U.S. cities.

“We fully expect to return once the city reforms its parking policies to allow for one-way car sharing,” DriveNow said. “We will continue to work with the city of San Francisco toward achieving that goal.”

For years, DriveNow had struggled to persuade San Francisco’s government to offer “superpermits” that would allow users of the service to park anywhere in the city. Such permits are key to DriveNow’s business model, which allows drivers to find a car and drive it to their destination, at which point they leave it on the street.

San Francisco’s reluctance to offer such permits is a major reason Car2Go, the rival service owned by Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler AG, hasn’t opened in San Francisco. DriveNow has compensated for the lack of permits by mapping the city in search of neighborhoods without parking restrictions, as Automotive News reported in January.

Car2Go, which has U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas, operates in more than a dozen of the largest metropolitan areas in North America, including Los Angeles, New York and Toronto.

“We are focusing our efforts on new cities,” DriveNow USA CEO Richard Steinberg wrote Monday, “where our transportation solution can flourish.”